{"id":15195,"date":"2022-09-19T20:00:23","date_gmt":"2022-09-20T00:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=15195"},"modified":"2022-09-18T14:31:47","modified_gmt":"2022-09-18T18:31:47","slug":"good-luck-2017-ben-russell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/15195","title":{"rendered":"Good Luck (2017, Ben Russell)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A grand opening shot, pulling back from a mountain view to reveal the drone music as diegetic, walking with a marching band from overlooking ruins to a street that dead-ends into a canyon.  The drummer steps forward and says he used to live here, and his entire neighborhood is now in the pit.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;re in a Serbian mining company &#8211; typical-Ben follow-cam through their workplace and into the crowded high-speed de-elevator to an underground mining city.  Long takes of long drills into rock walls intercut with b\/w miner screen tests, and interviews about their hopes and dreams (answer: not much of either).<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image21\/goodluck1.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image21\/goodluck2.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>Admittedly a really good transition between the halves, joined by a graphic and the sound of a metal detector, a different kind of drone for a different kind of mining.  From 20 guys working in the dark underground, we move to Suriname and 3 guys working on the surface in daylight.  Wavery handheld late-night conversations with the men and their women, worries about killings at another site, more hopes and dreams, more screen tests.  At least it ends with a song (no <a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/15194\">dance party<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image21\/goodluck3.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image21\/goodluck4.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>Presumably the champions of this whole endurance test were Mai 68 Proletariat Cinema people who love anything involving miners.  This doesn&#8217;t apply to the Cinema Scope Gang, who champion things for inscrutable reasons&#8230; <a href=\"https:\/\/cinema-scope.com\/cinema-scope-online\/good-luck-ben-russell-francegermany-wavelengths\/\">Phil Coldiron&#8217;s analysis<\/a> of Russell&#8217;s exploded ethnography is convincing, when I can follow it:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Like Frampton, Russell has elaborated a conception of film that approaches a particular limit or model: thought itself, with its infinite capacity for expansion. And like Frampton, this project has necessitated a sustained engagement with both the material of film and with that grand technology whose shadow film continues to toil in, namely language.<br \/>\n&#8230;<br \/>\nRussell captures the rhythms by which the plan of capital is expressed and enforced. In working on the level of the workers&#8217; experience, he mirrors the image that the factory is always already producing of itself and offers it for reflection.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A grand opening shot, pulling back from a mountain view to reveal the drone music as diegetic, walking with a marching band from overlooking ruins to a street that dead-ends into a canyon. The drummer steps forward and says he used to live here, and his entire neighborhood is now in the pit. We&#8217;re in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1032,93,1755,3050,1031],"class_list":["post-15195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-ben-russell","tag-documentary","tag-mining","tag-serbia","tag-suriname"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15195"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15217,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15195\/revisions\/15217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}