Ben Rivers - Two Years At Sea (2012), A Spell To Ward Off the Darkness (2013)

Utopije danas žive u filmovima.

www.benrivers.com/land.html
www.benrivers.com
www.katemacgarry.com

A Spell To Ward Off the Darkness:

The first feature-film collaboration between celebrated artist-filmmakers Ben Rivers (Two Years at Sea) and Ben Russell (Let Each One Go Where He May) follows a nameless protagonist (played by musician Robert AA Lowe) as he explores three very different existential options: as a member of a commune on a small Estonian island; living alone in the breathtaking wilds of northern Finland; and fronting a neo-pagan black metal band in Norway.

The close collaboration between internationally celebrated artist-filmmakers Ben Rivers (Two Years at Sea) and Ben Russell (Let Each One Go Where He May) has yielded an intriguing ethno-trance aesthetic that finds its stunning summa in their much anticipated co-directed feature A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness. An immersive, at times mesmerizing experience, Spell follows a nameless protagonist — played with Bressonian restraint by musician Robert A.A. Lowe, of Lichens and Om fame — as he explores three markedly different existential options: as a member of a fifteen-person commune on a small Estonian island; living alone in the breathtaking wilds of northern Finland; and as a singer-guitarist for a neopagan black metal band in Norway.
Shot on Super 16mm by Rivers, Russell and Chris Fawcett (the Steadicam operator for Let Each One), Spell is awash in atmosphere, bathed successively in natural, incandescent sunshine, the blues of a perpetual magic hour, and the stroboscopic concert lighting of a dingy bar. Liberated from conventional narrative causality, Robert's trajectory charts a continuous drift (superbly conveyed by a floating camera) that signals a radical investigation of the self, an enigmatic effort to "ward off the darkness" that is engulfing our increasingly secularized world. Is this a search for fulfillment, mutual understanding, a gesture to quell boredom and unremitting solitude, an affront to utopianism, or simply a natural progression through life?
Choreographing the movements of their non-actors, Rivers and Russell explore a participatory ethnography with both their real-life characters and us, the viewers, drawing deeply from the elemental in order to shake us from our viewing habits. Bound by the structures that inevitably dictate our lives, it's easy to forget that the world is vast and ripe with possibilities, and that we should probably attempt a few alternate modes of existence before we leave this Earth behind. - ANDRÉA PICARD

A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness opens with a lake at night, the camera panning the calm waters and landscape in a circle, too slow to make us dizzy but enough movement to make us feel afloat. We hear a choir of voices chanting over the dark waters, but only the camera is moving. And then stillness, the texture of solitude. We are beyond interaction at this point, inside a space created where we as viewers have disappeared, as if the lake has found its way into us and we no longer think. A place outside the tragicomedy of discourse, of selves.
Filmmakers Ben Russell and Ben Rivers make an interesting decision to bookend the film with this opening scene and the final twenty-something-minute-long black metal concert, as if to say these two types of surrendering — one to nature and its bellowing within us, and the other, an immersion in thrashing sound and screaming — experience a loss of self. At first we dissolve in scenery, and at last we dissolve in sound. Neither is hung up on anything other than tone, and this breathes a rare life into the film, making it seem alive. Both Russell and Rivers have explored the ways in which experimental filmmaking and living in an isolated state can impact art, identity, and politics, and A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness is reflective of these inquiries and experiences.
The film’s middle section depicts a communal living situation in which families cook together, take naps, play with children, go to the beach, build houses. These routine activities take on an intentionality that is in contrast to the vacancy in which the other scenes thrive. As a woman breastfeeds her baby on the beach, she discusses the influence and societal effect of community and autonomous zones with her housemate. There’s a feel for constructed improvisation here, as their dialogue is loose and inquisitive, yet pertinent to the overall questions: What makes a shared experience, how can we locate the social effect of the Self, and why is it important to us? Why seek others? Are we here to distract each other from dying, or is it more of a reminder? Two men have a conversation about past communal living, and one of the men tells a story of when everyone in a sauna ended up with fingers in each other’s assholes. Sexual pleasure seems irrelevant at this point, and perhaps it’s really a condition of what “intentional community” might mean, or not mean. Nothing.
Musician/artist Robert A.A. Lowe (of Lichens and Om) carries the remainder of the film, as we watch him embark on a solo journey through lush moss and ice and thickets swarming with insects to an empty cabin, where he sits reading, his long fingernails patiently turning each page. He takes his time. There’s a sense of mystique to his wanderings; we have no idea what or why he is doing what he is doing, or where he is going, but something else is lurking. Much of the last half of the film, in the midst of attempting to parse its own impact, veers off into a flood of images and journeying through landscapes that are both transcendental and terrifying in their hugeness. Lowe is very much alone, and he makes Emerson and Thoreau seem crowded. But even loneliness is a machine, a manipulation of presence that is controlled and aware of itself to the point of being a construct, a falsity. Nothing is true. Lowe watches his cabin burn to the ground. The camera so close to his face we can make out the gloss of tears in his eyes, but none fall. He is at the edge of something and what comes next is a bending of time, a splintering of instances between instances into a swallowing up. A twenty-something-minute-long black metal show.

Lowe stands at the microphone and screams. Everyone in the band paints their faces white. The music comes into us as if we are factories sucking something from the sound and passing it back out, through our eyeballs and earholes into the space of the room in which we are watching the band play, although we are not in that room, but still. The drums and the silver splicing of the guitars and the screaming upon screaming gets in our blood and obliterates. Each riff builds in a kind of pyramidal stacking that houses us within. This scene is where the film makes itself apparent as more than a sum of affective ideas or dialogue, as it is in these final moments that A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness consumes. As the music ends, we watch Lowe walk off into the night. There is little else but the back of his head. And air. Maybe some light. The grip of the moment is strong, and whatever we’ve been absorbed by does not let go. No sense in warding off the darkness, because it’s already come and gone, a puff of smoke. What’s left is for us to disappear, and it is only with this disappearance of Self that utopia can be found. - Lorian Long

Two Years At Sea (2012)

Two Years at Sea (88min, 16mm anamorphic , b/w, blown-up to 35mm, 2011)

A man called Jake lives in the middle of the forest. He goes for walks in whatever the weather, and takes naps in the misty fields and woods. He builds a raft to spend time sitting in a loch. Drives a beat-up jeep to pick up wood supplies. He is seen in all seasons, surviving frugally, passing the time with strange projects, living the radical dream he had as a younger man, a dream he spent two years working at sea to realise.
Commissioned by FLAMIN Productions through Film London Artists' Moving Image Network with funding from Arts Council England

Using old 16mm cameras, artist Ben Rivers creates work from stories of real people, often those who have disconnected from the normal world and taken themselves into wilderness territories. TWO YEARS AT SEA won a prize at the Venice Film Festival, and was Time Out's number one pick of the London Film Festival. The title refers to the work Jake did in order to finance his chosen state of existence. The film extends Ben's relationship with Jake, a man first encountered in his short film THIS IS MY LAND. He lives alone in a ramshackle house, in the middle of the forest. It's full of stuff that might come in useful someday. Jake has a tremendous sense of purpose as he works around the house and surrounding forest and moorland. Rivers' witty and gracefully-constructed film creates an intimate connection with an individual who might otherwise be hard to get to know if we met him face-to-face

I Know Where I'm Going (2009)

Slow Action (2011, 45 min, 16mm anamorphic, col + b/w, 2010)

Slow Action is a post-apocalyptic science fiction film that brings together a series of four 16mm works which exist somewhere between documentary, ethnographic study and fiction.
Continuing his exploration of curious and extraordinary environments, Slow Action applies the idea of island biogeography - the study of how species and eco-systems evolve differently when isolated and surrounded by unsuitable habitat - to a conception of the Earth in a few hundred years; the sea level rising to absurd heights, creating hyperbolic utopias that appear as possible future mini-societies.
Slow Action is filmed at different sites across the globe: Lanzarote - a beautiful strange island known for its beach resorts yet one of the driest places on the planet, full of dead volcanoes and strange architecture; Gunkanjima - an island off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan, a deserted city built on a rock, once home to thousands of families mining its rich coal reserves; Tuvalu - one of the smallest countries in the world, with tiny strips of land barely above sea level in the middle of the Pacific; and Somerset - an as yet to be discovered island and its various clades.
This series of constructed realities explores the environments of self-contained lands and the search for information to enable the reconstruction of soon to be lost worlds.
The film’s soundtrack - narratives by writer Mark von Schlegell - detail each of the four islands’ evolutions according to their geographical, geological, climatic and botanical conditions.
Slow Action, inspired by novels such as Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, Bacon’s The New Atlantis, Herbert Read’s The Green Child and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, embodies the spirit of exploration, experiment and active research that has come to characterise Rivers’ practice.
Commissioned by Picture This and Animate Projects in association with Matt’s Gallery, London.

 

Origin Of The Species

16mm, 16min, col, 2008“Some things didn’t really matter, you know, some mutations didn’t matter all that much…they were neither beneficial to survival nor detrimental to survival…but if they just hung on, there’d come a time when…that was the thing that saved the day.”
Charting the beginnings of the time, through the descent of man, on to an uncertain future - all shot throughout the seasons in the garden of S, who lives in the wilderness and builds contraptions.

The Hyrcynium Wood 

 

The Creation As We Saw It (2012, 14 min, 16mm, UK/VANUATU)  

Three mythical stories from the Republic of Vanuatu, an island nation located in the South Pacific Ocean, concerning the origin of humans, why pigs walk on all fours, and why a volcano sits where it does.

Phantoms of a Libertine (2012, 10 min, 16mm, UK)  

Glamorous destinations are hand-scrawled in ink beside black and white photographs: Acapulco, Haifa, Marseille, New York. Fragments of fading figures are taped to the yellowing pages of the album. This was a life documented and remembered, but the man who made the album departed a year ago. Now his flat sits silent and heavy, crammed with animistic artefacts, books, collages of broken stone figures, collected and created over decades spent travelling the world for Time & Life Magazine. The photo albums are fragile and threaten to fall apart, the talismans are removed from their intended rituals, the dust is more dominant, more all-consuming, than the sense of a living present. Since the departure of its occupant, the flat has become a museum, rather than a mausoleum, a shrine to what has past.

link ----> Kate MacGarry Gallery - Apr/May 2012


Sack Barrow
16mm, 21min, col, 2011

Sack Barrow explores a small family run factory in the outskirts of London. It was set up in 1931 to provide work for limbless and disabled ex-servicemen until the factory finally went into liquidation this year. The film observes the environment and daily routines of the final month of the six workers. Years of miniature chemical and mineral processes transform the space into another world. Towards the end an extract of The Green Child by Herbert Read describes the descent into a watery cave world.
Part funded by The Changing Room, Stirling and The Hayward Gallery, London

May Tomorrow Shine The Brightest Of All Your Many Days As It Will Be Your Last (UK, 13 min, 16mm, b/w)

made in collaboration with Paul Harnden.

Somewhere in the backwoods at the turn of i'm not sure which century, a crack unit of female Japanese soldiers track a group of lost, ancient desperadoes. They dig holes, they read, their leader channels the ghost of Italian sound poets (as yet unborn..?), all the while moving onward...but who is searching for who and why? Hand-processed with a soundtrack cobbled together from dictaphone recordings, old 78s, hiss and scratches and whines.

A World Rattled Of Habit (10min, 16mm, col/b+w, 2008)

A day trip to Suffolk, to see my friend Ben and his dad Oleg…
“So, that’s why my outlook and things very different than normal people, because I was not in a normal propaganda one area only, I was exposed all of a sudden to all opposites, you see and then you get clear mind.” Oleg Meschko

Ben Rivers

by Coleen Fitzgibbon

Still from This Is My Land, 2006, 16 mm film, 14 minutes

British artist and filmmaker Ben Rivers has made a series of dark, utopian films in which the protagonists, often male, have come to terms with their severance from society. Rivers’s feature-length film Two Years at Sea (2011), which was just released on DVD by Cinema Guild, was the culmination of his focus on the individual alone in the wilderness. For Rivers, utopia can exist as a personal state of mind or as collective thought. He takes from J. G. Ballard the belief that optimism can be born out of crisis and that the past can aid the future. Rivers often lives with the people he’s filming and scripts their actions, creating the illusion of documentation.
Ben Rivers’s work evolved from focusing on the lone individual to filming small insular communities cut off from larger societies, as in Slow Action (2010) and, most recently, the feature film A Spell To Ward Off the Darkness (2013), which was made in collaboration with US filmmaker Ben Russell. At a lecture hosted by New York MoMA PS1 this past summer, Rivers commented that “utopia in the present is cinema” where filmmakers “engineer circumstances” to construct their own model environments. For A Spell To Ward Off the Darkness, Rivers and Russell created a temporary commune where they lived with and filmed individuals gathered from various actual communes in Scandinavia.
Rivers has filmed on islands off the coasts of Africa, Japan, the South Pacific, and Scandinavia but finds the landscape of his own British Isles “comforting.” His interest in utopia, a concept first coined by Sir Thomas More, evokes a long history in England—from the time of the Enlightenment to British communes in the ’60s and ’70s. Ben Rivers may intuitively understand that small communities should retain their identities in the larger society so that the individual voice is still considered in collective thought.
       —Coleen Fitzgibbon

Coleen Fitzgibbon The first film I saw of yours was Two Years at Sea at Anthology Film Archives last October, which my daughter brought me to see. It had just shown at the New York Film Festival and the New York Times quoted you saying that you made films not as end products but as a way to learn about the people you were filming—and how this affected your life.

Ben Rivers My filmmaking is in part a selfish practice of trying to have some good adventures while meeting good people. I always make films about people I like.

CF An earlier film, This Is My Land (2006), with Jake Williams, was expanded upon in Two Years at Sea as a fictional narrative.

BR This Is My Land was a more fragmented, observational document. I was watching Jake in his daily activities and filming what I thought was necessary and then piecing it together like a collage. But with the second film, Two Years at Sea, I wanted to be much more controlled because the film was meant to be feature length, so I had to think about the structure. Jake and I collaborated to make an exaggerated portrait of somebody very much like him, but not him. He is really noisy and chatty—he likes to talk, he likes visitors, and obviously there is none of that in the film, so it’s a fiction.

CF In Two Years at Sea, Jake never talks or sees anyone; he’s always alone and working in the woods.

BR I thought about scenarios which could involve other people coming to visit and then decided that it was a greater challenge to just have him not talking—so that it’s more a relationship between him, the space, and the landscape—and whether I could pull that off for an hour and half.

CF It was incredibly luminescent and compelling. I read that you hand-developed the film, which gave it a shimmering black-and-white quality impossible to get any other way. In the film, Jake is a wild character who has left civilization and gone into retreat.

BR Right, people do have these sorts of fantasies; that is how I ended up going to meet Jake in the first place. I was wondering about this idea of living in nature, something that I’ve thought about since I was a child. I was reading loads of literature based on this idea—especially Knut Hamsun, the Norwegian writer whose characters take themselves into nature, but it’s not bucolic or easy; they’re struggling with it. Hamsun wrote from the late 19th century into the 20th (and influenced writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, and Franz Kafka), but the stories in the 1890s are the ones that had a big effect on me, especially Pan, which is about a man who goes to live in a hut in the woods. I was obsessed with this book and wanted to find somebody living like that in the 21st century. Jake Williams was the first person I tracked down. I then made a series of films about people living in the wilderness.

CF —Or men living in isolated rural settings who appear to be hoarders of cast-off objects. You spend weeks, often months, with the people you are filming. How do you concentrate in the midst of disorder and debris?

BR I look for this; it’s one of the things that usually causes a spark for me when I’m trying to find people—that someone should choose to live amongst the rubble and ruin of past technology is endlessly fascinating to me. The fact that this forms part of the landscape, and can be transformed into something new for the person hoarding it, also points to my continued interest in thinking sculpturally about space. Objects tell another story about the past that shapes part of the person’s psyche. In terms of my concentration, I think I would find it much harder to work somewhere that was clean and free of any kind of debris, somewhere bucolic, it wouldn’t fit my sensibility. I like roughness and dirt.

CF Are some of the people reluctant to be filmed?

BR If there were any sign of reluctance I wouldn’t make films with them. I’m only interested if it’s a collaboration. So there is usually a pre-filming period where I get to know people and make sure they are comfortable with me and my camera, and I make it clear that the films I make are not meant to be factual representations.

CF There is a clear trajectory in your work. Besides This Is My Land, there’s Astika (2006), which is about a man on an island in Denmark being forced out of his home. Then there is A World Rattled of Habit (2008), where Oleg and Ben Meschko, father and son, live close together—Ben in a rural trailer and Oleg in a house overrun with hoarded objects. Origin of the Species (2008) begins with a bubbling galaxy while an elderly inventor named S, who lives in a Scottish wilderness, muses over Darwinian theory. Ah, Liberty! (2008) shows an isolated farmhouse with kids at play in tribal masks, which could be a precursor to Slow Action (2010), a film about four remote islands. I Know Where I’m Going (2009) has a red-bearded man who says he is “just clinging on,” and finally, Two Years at Sea follows a protagonist (Jake Williams) living alone in his forest cabin with music from far-off places.

BR Each person or family takes the film off into another direction because they are distinct people. But I wanted to go back to Jake when I was thinking about making a feature film.

CF I heard he said, “Yes, go ahead and make me a star.” (laughter)

BR When I called to ask him to make another film, I thought he was going to say no, but it was quite the opposite.

CF The music was incredible in Two Years at Sea, with Jake playing a one-stringed instrument and his records. What was the title of the bawdy record that he plays in the film?

BR “The Sexton and the Carpenter” plays all the way through, even though it has quite a few jumps in it. Dave Goulder, who sang the song, gave us his blessing to use it. The Indian music, Jake had bought when he was traveling to India working for a shipping company. That’s where the title comes from: working two years at sea in order to save money to fulfill his dream of buying a house in the woods. Like the photographs that punctuate the film, the music and the title are clues to Jake’s past, but they are deliberately ambiguous.

CF The filmmaker Peter Hutton was a merchant seaman who shipped out to sea for seven years.

BR I like his work.

CF Was Slow Action made before you shot Two Years at Sea, or during that same period?

BR They kind of overlapped. I was finishing Slow Action when I started Two Years at Sea in 2009. The way I often work is to film, two or three weeks, come home, develop the film, and then go and film somewhere else. I prefer not doing one thing at a time, because I like the way projects feed into each other. One reason why Two Years at Sea is wordless was because Slow Action was going to be text-heavy.

CF I read that you worked with a writer, Mark von Schlegell, on Slow Action.

BR I had developed the film as an idea and was trying to come up with stories for the narrations, so I was copying bits from Victorian books—explorers traveling to find lost civilizations and utopias. It was going to be a sort of stolen language but I wasn’t happy with my literary skills. I came across a science fiction story by Mark von Schlegell called Venusia and asked if he’d be interested in working with me—I wanted him to write four accounts of four different island utopias. I never told him where I was going because I deliberately didn’t want him to illustrate too directly. It was a process of emails from me—giving him some ingredients, clues and books, and we went back and forth with reading lists quite a lot. He sent me back texts that I could change and edit so they fit with my images.

CF So you were filming on the different islands while he was writing at home; how did you like that process?

BR It was great; I’d like to do it again. Mark said he was nervous about it because there were more unknown factors on his side. He was happy with the result and said it was a nice experience because he felt free.

CF Do you travel with someone else, such as a soundman, while you film? I understand that you do the camera work.

BR During Two Years at Sea I had a sound woman, Chu-Li Shewring, who came with me each time I went to film Jake. So it was a two-person crew. For Slow Action it was just me because I didn’t need live sound. I had a pretty clear idea from the beginning that I wanted to use source sounds with the images I shot on location. Usually I record sounds myself, because I like how non-sync sound forces you to experiment with sound/image relationships in the editing.

CF In your films the theme of isolated individuals seems to expand to include remote cultures, such as The Coming Race (2006), based on an 1871 novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, where a new utopian society pilgrimages up and down a mountain for unknown reasons. Slow Action portrays four mythical future island cultures created after the seas rise, and Sack Barrow (2011) is an English factory’s final month, where aging workers play 1950s music, giving the sensation of an industrial island’s demise. The Creation As We Saw It (2012) seeks out inhabitants on an island in the Republic of Vanuatu, interspersed with funny stories about the beginnings of humans, fire, pigs, and a tragic tale of a volcano’s birth. Many of your films have been shot in Scotland, but for the filming of Slow Action you traveled to several faraway islands.

BR Well, Lanzarote was the first. It’s one of the Canary Islands and one of the driest places on the planet, a volcanic landscape of twisted and gnarly rocks that developed over hundreds of years.

I was trying to find a landscape that looked like another planet.

CF I saw your Slow Action exhibition and interview on the Picture This website. In your exhibitions the film is usually shown on a cluster of screens that have four different images. Were they from the same film, and did you think of the film as an installation while shooting?

BR I had two versions of the film in mind right from the start: one was a single channel where the narration fit deliberately to a particular island, and for this there are screening times so people can watch it from beginning to end. The other version was four channels where you see the four islands at the same time, one on each screen, but you only hear one narration at a time, and you don’t know which island it refers to. The authority of the narration becomes even more questionable, which is one of the thoughts behind the film—an unreliable encyclopedia of utopias of the future. The other islands were Gunkanjima in Japan, and Tuvalu, which is in the middle of the Pacific. The last one, where there are more close-up figures, is Somerset which is not an island at all; it’s a part of the west country of England where I come from.

CF Somerset in Slow Action could be a future fast forward from the factory in Sack Barrow. In many of your interviews you discuss your interest in mythical, future utopian societies. Utopia, written by Sir Thomas More in 1516, described a fictional island society in the Atlantic Ocean that was both “no place” and “best place.” More’s England was profoundly incapable of achieving social perfection. Somerset then is your utopian island?

BR You could say that. Somerset feels closest to my idea of utopia—which is a place that acknowledges that utopia is a place of flux, that in order for it to work it needs to be able to embrace its own impossibility while simultaneously embracing the need to keep trying. Slow Action refers to myths of the future, so since I was already fabricating the islands by composition and narration, it made sense for the last one, Somerset, to be completely fabricated. The filming becomes less distanced and at the end, even the narration, which up to that point has been authoritative third-person suddenly becomes first-person.

CF Slow Action was disturbing—with its scenes of palm trees swaying above industrial debris and deteriorating concrete island fortresses, a reminder of wastes to come. Its narration is subtly critical of modern colonial systems and Western civilization. It reminded me of a short film I made about the island of Manhattma called LES (1976) that employs similar narrative pseudo-fact. Your other island utopia, The Creation As We Saw It, looks like a 1920s film in the tradition of Tabu by F.W. Murnau and Robert J. Flaherty. It combines silent-film narration titles of a volcano myth intercut with close-ups of native people, shot on the island of Tanna (Vanuatu), but with a 21st-century critique. Seeing your films, I am also reminded of Werner Herzog’s Fata Morgana, Luis Buñuel’s Land Without Bread, Lisa Reihana’s In Pursuit of Venus, and even a little of The Gods Must Be Crazy, in your use of documentary-like fiction.

BR I’m a big fan of all those films, because I think they question the documentary image. I’m kind of resistant to a documentary label because when you say “documentary,” people have an idea that you are trying to represent the world and provide information. I have no interest in doing that.

CF As soon as you turn on the camera, people act differently than if the camera wasn’t there, and you seem to incorporate this factor into your films.

BR If you’re Fredrick Wiseman and you’re filming in the same location for months, maybe people forget about you.

CF Wiseman’s Titicut Follies was shot in the ‘70s in a Massachusetts mental asylum, and his subjects were often off in their unconscious and only peripherally aware of his presence.

BR I prefer the Jean Rouch approach, which is more collaborative with the people that you’ve asked to be in the film.

CF Yeah, when people are filmed surreptitiously, their faces reflect a flatness that comes from resentment or suspicion. But if you ask, they often respond with more energy and there is non-verbal dialogue. I used to film street people in Times Square.

BR I couldn’t be a street photographer.

CF You have made a number of gallery installations, like a recent one in Dublin at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, where you built shacks or cabins, inside which you showed your films on 16mm loops. You seem to show your films in galleries and museums as well as in film venues.

BR That’s right. I’m represented by Kate MacGarry gallery here in London. Film and gallery venues have equal weight for me. I think that films can exist in those two different ways because they change sculpturally depending on the space. Also, work is read differently because of the ideas and preconceptions viewers bring with them to the different spaces. The first cabin I made was for a piece called Sørdal (2008), which was a tribute to those early writings of Knut Hamsun.

CF I read that you once described your films as post-apocalyptic. They show people in retreat living in Arcadian landscapes filled with industrial garbage and unidentifiable junk, which is fairly terrifying. I suppose it’s the freedom to live without social constraints that creates joy?

BR It’s all about freedom, an idea I come back to quite often in my films: what the idea of freedom means. There is a sort of hope in the films I’m making, from looking at possible ways of being, further down the line. I made a film a couple of years ago called Ah, Liberty!

CF Yeah, I saw that. It was great: a strangely picturesque farmhouse set in the mountains, with kids swimming and playing in junk piles with masks—there are rainstorms, old cars, and farm animals.

BR Some people said it seemed post-apocalyptic because the people in the film are living around the ruins of no- longer used machinery, and that this time has come and gone so there is an element of unease and danger—but then there is also joy and hope.

CF Your protagonists have the ability not only to survive, but to meditate on aloneness constructively. That said, your films have a touch of the dark side. We The People (2004) is a beautiful black- and-white film without people, but with the sound of footsteps fleeing an angry crowd. It takes a while to realize the houses are miniature.

BR It’s a very beautiful miniature village in the south of England. I found this village and was told it wasn’t a good time to film because they had just taken out all the windows and doors to restore them—but it was perfect for me. (laughter)

CF How did you come to filmmaking, were you in art school?

BR I went to art school in Falmouth, in Cornwall. I went to do painting but changed to sculpture, and made 3D work and started running a film club. In my final year, I made a Super 8 film and realized that film was my medium—film in particular, not video—because of its physical nature. I like holding things, and with a moving film image you can have a tangible relationship. When you show film it can be a sculptural object as well.

CF It still has better resolution than video.

BR I’m not interested in resolution. I quite like rough-looking video. I quite like the look of Skype. There are other things in film for me—like the obstacles, the fact that you can’t watch film straight away, that there is more room for accidents to happen. Chance things can take the film off into a direction I wasn’t expecting, which is one reason I like hand-processing. You can never completely control it. There are many factors that change the film by the way it’s processed.

CF Terror (2006) and Alice (2009) seem to be your only videos. Have you made other “horror” films?

BR Terror is like the black sheep of the family. I’ve not made a video yet, apart from those found-footage films Terror and Alice.

CF They look pretty crisp for video.

BR Yeah, they were shot on 35mm originally, because everything is taken from found horror movies, but I edited them and show them on video. What I shoot is always film.

CF I went to see Tacita Dean’s show at the Marian Goodman Gallery recently and she had a book called Film from the Tate London show that she organized. You were in the book.

BR The book is about film and the danger of it disappearing. She invited several people who are involved with film to be in the book.

CF Your text in this book talked about the delay between filming and viewing the footage, and how that was important. You included a film still of the American filmmaker Ben Russell. Were you already collaborating by then?

BR Yes, we were, and I felt he had good reason to be in there as well as myself.

CF You’ve filmed in the British Isles, the Canary Islands, on islands in Polynesia, and in Japan, and then you went to Finland with Ben Russell to shoot A Spell To Ward Off the Darkness.

BR Actually that film is shot in Finland, a small island off Estonia, and Norway. The Estonia part is a very real attempt at a present day utopia, collective living.

CF Let’s talk about A Spell To Ward Off the Darkness. You co-directed/co-produced it with Ben Russell. You both shot and edited the film together for about two years.

BR We did everything together.

CF I saw your trailer for it and it looked great. Will you be showing this film in New York soon?

BR We hope so, we’re really happy with it. It took a while to do. There is an installation version and a feature-film version, so we just have to figure out who shows what, when—the premiere will be at the Locarno Film Festival. We edited the film down to 94 minutes, which is now final.

CF You and Russell also collaborated in the movie with the musician Robert A.A. Lowe. Is he the musician that plays in the black metal band?

BR Right, he is the central character. Some of my other films are investigations into a kind of utopia but they are one person’s utopia—to other people, they could be a complete nightmare. A Spell To Ward Off the Darkness is based around one person being seen in three very different kinds of places. In the first, he’s living in a small commune, and the collective doesn’t have a hierarchy or one dominant ideology or religion; they just want to live together.

CF Was it an actual commune or fictional?

BR It’s both actual and fictional, in the same way that Jake is actual and fictional in Two Years at Sea. This is what Ben and I both do, we mix actual situations with things we need, in order to make the film that we want. It’s about setting up the right conditions to make not a representation, but something that exists on the screen in and of itself. We lived with the people for almost a month so we could find the material we needed.

CF How was that?

BR It was great and transformative. The people had their own reasons for living together as a collective, but all of them were positive. The idea was that it would be a positive experience, because it’s much easier to be cynical now about collective living and the hippie dream gone wrong.

CF Though in Europe there are still a number of collectives that are basically squats, as in Germany and Holland, and don’t you still have squats in London?

BR It’s harder now because the laws have changed; the squats don’t last as long.

I think in Amsterdam there are some, but we wanted the collective to be rural. We were very happy with the way it turned out, because everybody got along really well and it was an amazing experience for us as well. We would set up the environment and the people, and then film what would happen in that situation.

CF It’s sort of a Jean Rouch approach.

BR Yeah, Rouch was totally a model for that part of the film, as was Milestones (1975) by Robert Kramer and John Douglas.

The second part of A Spell To Ward Off the Darkness is more simple and quiet, you see Robert living in solitude in the north of Finland. But there is a sense of unease in his solitude; he doesn’t seem totally comfortable there. So again it’s a confrontation with the sublime, the landscape. It’s alluring but, in the true sense of the sublime, it’s also frightening. The north of Finland has this incredibly ominous atmosphere about it. It’s very beautiful, but at the same time something’s not quite right. In the last part of the film, Robert’s playing in a black metal band and that’s one of the reasons why we chose him; he’s got good presence, he looks great, and he’s a performer. Ben had showed me a YouTube clip of him performing and I felt he was right for the film. When he performs he gets into a trance-like zone and that was important.

CF Is the black-metal band his or did you find a band for him to play with?

BR They’re all accomplished musicians who play in different kinds of bands; only two of them play in black-metal bands.

CF Oh, so you created a band.

BR Yeah, they were all brought together as a fictional band, but close to what they do.

CF What’s Robert A.A. Lowe’s real life music like; is it black metal?

BR No, his own music is solo and it’s more drone-like, and he uses vocal and electronic loops; it’s totally different than black metal.

CF I looked at the trailer; it’s beautifully shot. What format did you and Ben Russell shoot on?

BR Super 16. We basically shared everything from the ideas, the shooting and editing, as well as cooking and carrying everything. (laughter)

CF I saw one of Russell’s films in the 2009 Toronto Film Festival. The one in Suriname with the two brothers, Let Each One Go Where He May (2009). So how did you collaborate on the editing for A Spell To Ward Off the Darkness?

BR Ben has been living in Paris so I would just go over there. He’s usually at the editing controls because he’s faster with Final Cut Pro. Basically I’d sit beside him or walk beside him—he prefers to sit down and I like to walk around and drink lots of tea. We just did it all together. For me it was the first time I had collaborated like that. I’ve worked with people before; I’ve made a couple of films with my friend Paul Harnden who’s a clothes designer, but that was a slightly different dynamic as he’s not a filmmaker by trade. With Ben and I there’s a potential for disaster because we’re two filmmakers who are totally clear about what we do. But the collaboration was really smooth, and I think the reason for that was that we both wanted to push each other to do something we wouldn’t normally do, so the end result is not something we would have made by ourselves.

CF I would say the similarity is in your mutual interest in filming less-traveled, far away places, and working with indigenous people.

BR Formally our films are quite different. But both of us have a desire to make cinema that is not a representation of the world, but that comes from actual people and places—and is then transformed through cinema into something that isn’t the world, it’s new. - bombsite.com/

Friday Inspiration: Two Years At Sea by Ben Rivers

‘Two Years At Sea’ is London-based experimental filmmaker Ben Rivers’ debut feature film, which follows Jake Williams, a hermit living in a caravan in the Outer Hebrides. This work is a follow-on from Rivers’ short piece ‘This Is My Land’ (2006) and follows his ‘actor’ Jake through his daily routine in a manner which is part documentary, part fictional. We watch him make his morning coffee, clear up the drive, mark a well-thumbed and unnamed book, look at postcards. By being given so little, we are free to interpret his back story – for example, we see photos of a woman, some older people, a young bearded man farming (presumably Jake at a young age?). With maybe three words spoken in the whole film, Rivers gives us the sparsest of back stories, but a rich set of images and ideas to play around with.

Filmed on 16mm Bolex cameras which he mostly develops in the kitchen sink, and then blown up to 35mm, ‘Two Years At Sea’ is a beautiful, fragile often grainy piece pockmarked with white outs and scratches. This is “slow cinema” of the highest kind, what Sukhdev Sandhu in The Guardian describes as films which:

“opt for ambient noises or field recordings rather than bombastic sound design, embrace subdued visual schemes that require the viewer’s eye to do more work, and evoke a sense of mystery that springs from the landscapes and local customs they depict more than it does from generic convention”.

Jake’s happiness and inner peace is brought to life naturalistically by the director, punctured only by the ocassional and briefest of surrealist moments – like him realising his caravan has floated up into the trees. In the final scene, Jake stokes and stares at a cracking fire. As the screen gets darker, the embers lower and his eyes gradually close into sleep, we the audience are privy to one of the most charming and unassuming endings on film. As if challenging us to fall asleep with him, Rivers leaves us with a black screen with only the sound of film spooling through the film projector. Everything faded into blackness, and with no crescendo, no dramatic music, quite literally a black screen until the final credits, the film faded into nothingness. Poignant.
I recently watched Ben Rivers’ curated evening of screenings at the LUX/ ICA Biennial of Moving Images, an event I couldn’t recommend more highly. As well as getting to watch his short film ‘Origin of The Species’ (2008), again another 16mm but this time in colour, and which was so reminiscent of Margaret Tait’s short films – in everything from the colours to the imagery of the island to the voiceover), I checked out his curated screening, called ‘Friends With Benefits’, which was not named after the Justin Timberlake film, but inspired by the idea of group collaborations with friends. It was a beautiful collection of films, my highlight of which were Ron Rice’s ‘Senseless’ (1962), a 28 minute film chock-a-block with amazing music and imagery, and George Kuchar’s hilarious ‘We, The Normal’ (1988).
Check out BEN RIVERS MAKES FILMS here.

BEN RIVERS   

www.thislongcentury.com/?p=3411&c=85

Interview with Ben Rivers

Alice Hattrick

Ben Rivers is an artist who makes films. Two Years at Sea, his first feature-length film, was released to cinemas in early May. It’s about a man called Jake who lives alone in the Scottish Highlands.

The last time I watched a film by Rivers, the 16mm projector was installed in the seats of the lecture theatre. The audience was collected around this machine that was guiding film through its insides and spewing it out again, throwing up the image, loudly.

Rivers went to see Jake in 2005, where he shot the observational documentary This is My Land. He returned last year, collaborating with his subject, recording reenactments of his daily routine and staging imaginative events. Jake goes about his business; he washes in a makeshift shower, chops wood to make a fire, and walks through the wilderness. Partway through the film the caravan in which Jake has fallen asleep is hoisted up into a tree. Jake wakes up, opens the door and calmly looks out. We know he’s in on the act.

Rivers makes work for the cinema and the art gallery. For his recent exhibition at Kate MacGarry Gallery in East London, Phantom of a Libertine, he showed a 16mm film composed of fragments from a single traveler’s photograph album. Rivers likes clues; for Phantom of a Libertine, the slide show, as a mode of demonstration and revelation over time, is re-cast as a mode of looking, a mechanical way of perceiving something closely and from a distance, without disclosure. In Two Years at Sea, Rivers gestures towards the narrative of Jake’s life, how he ended up in this place, where he might have travelled to or who he might have met, through objects and pieces of music.

I met Rivers at the ICA on the day Two Years at Sea was released in cinemas nationwide. He spoke about the film and its subject, Jake, the relationship of fiction to documentary film, and the end of the world. 

^QThe White Review — Jake Williams, the subject of your recently released feature film Two Years at Sea, is a very captivating character. What drew you to him? 

^ABen Rivers — Originally I was looking for somebody who lived in a hut in the woods. I was quite specifically looking for that because I was reading this book called Pan by Knut Hamsun, which is about a guy who lives in a hut in the woods with his dog Aesop. He’s really socially inept. He’s overwhelmed by the nature around him, almost to the point of madness. That was the original catalyst, but I didn’t find anyone like the person in that book. I just started asking friends if they knew anyone who lived in the wilderness, and a good friend told me about Jake. I went to visit him in 2005 and made This is My Land. He was very welcoming. It was just chance, really, that drew me to him. I think he’s a very charismatic guy. I really like his face, I think his face has got a lot in it and that’s half the battle in a way.

^QThe White Review — Finding the right face?

^ABen Rivers — It’s the same with Hollywood movies isn’t it?

^QThe White Review — A figure in the landscape has been a concern in your films, such as Origin of the Species (2008) and I Know Where I’m Going (2009). We could also identify a wider cultural fascination with hermitic ways of living. What’s the significance of stories about characters living in the wilderness to your work?

^ABen Rivers — After my first film with Jake I started wondering if there were other people who lived like him, and if so how they might differ. Through a bit of travelling and asking around I found that there are quite a few people who have decided to live somehow away from society, but often for different reasons. The people I met and decided to film became catalysts for films which all went off at different tangents, dependent on what I found in the place and the personality and interests of the people. This is what fascinated me. Significance is difficult to pin down because the motives are so varied. Apparently people go grey earlier these days. People who don’t live in the wilderness are attracted to changing the speed and responsibilities of life. I have always been interested in living off in the woods. I don’t think it was about stress; I like working and being busy. I was thinking about it even when I was young so had little conception of stress beyond the usual embarrassments. It’s a good space for the imagination. 

^QThe White Review — Could you describe the nature of your relationship to Jake?

^ABen Rivers — He let me into his world, let me hang around and stay there for as long as I wanted. I started to film things, so the first film was really fragmentary and based on what I saw. I didn’t ask Jake to do anything, just go about his business, and I filmed what I thought was worth filming. When I got this money from Film London to make a much longer film I was going to make it about somebody else but a little way into the process I decided I wanted to go back to Jake. We’d stayed in touch the whole time and become friends, and I felt like there was more to be done in his world. I hadn’t finished with it. This is My Land is really short; it’s really a fragment. I wanted to work with someone who I knew I would be able to direct. We would come up with ideas together. If it was somebody new it might have been harder to have that kind of relationship. There was a lot of ease with Jake so it was really easy to talk to him about repeating actions, setting up scenes, doing things which he wouldn’t normally do, or he would normally do, or things he would think about doing but would never have got round to doing if I hadn’t been there. That’s how he puts it. He says he probably would have put a caravan in the tree or made a raft, but he means he probably wouldn’t have got round to doing it. 

^QThe White Review — You have intimated that some of the scenes are staged. They could be described as re-enactments of his daily routine and his imaginative life, you ficitonalise his reality and picture his desires. Do you think staging produces a “truer” picture of your subject?

^ABen Rivers — I believe in that implicitly actually, but it’s also not just about him. It’s also about me, it’s about cinema, and it’s about world making and what you want to do with that. ‘Truth’ is a hard word to use. It’s about making something exists for itself; it’s not a representation of something. This is part of the problem with the word documentary and it’s associations, but it’s also what makes it an interesting form; you can play with those things. And they have been played with right from the beginning. I always find it quite amazing that the question comes up all the time when someone using documentary forms shifts gear and fictionalises things. Some audiences and even other documentary filmmakers are shocked, even though Robert Flaherty and Humphrey Jennings did it, and Lumiere did it right from the beginning. Of course Herzog is the master of it. It happens repeatedly. It’s a ground I’m really interested in because it’s not about facts or data. We’re fed so much data, too much knowledge, too much information. I’m not interested in data. Obviously there’s some I want to know, but there’s an insistence that we need to be told everything and in a way that kills the imagination, which is a really important tool for humans. That’s one of the reasons why art is so important. I’m interested in making and watching films that can veer away from information and fact telling, so you’re not being told everything at every turn.

^QThe White Review — You’ve mentioned some filmmakers, British documentary filmmakers of the 1930s and Herzog. It’s a lineage; you can’t separate the fictional from the documentary because one lives inside the other. What’s the significance of the trajectory of actuality, which promised straightforward telling, and documentary film to your work? 

^ABen Rivers — The idea that something could be straightforward was always troublesome to me. This applies to so-called realism too; most documentaries I saw on TV as a younger person put me off entirely. It wasn’t until much later when I saw those films, along with those by Rouch, Marker, Varda, Kramer and many others that the form started to open up to me and become more interesting, partly because it wasn’t about condescending the audience, and also because I began to see this space of, as you say, one living inside the other. It was only in 2005 that I began to make something close to documentary almost by accident. I wasn’t calling it that or thinking in those terms. The significant thing that changed for me was that instead of constructing everything – the space, inhabitants, objects – I was using existing ones. Then the editing became completely free from the actual and at that point it is all about constructing a film that works on its own terms, almost disregarding of the source. Each subsequent film has developed from this process, some films remaining more faithful to the actual place and person, while others veer off wildly in their own way. 

^QThe White Review — Watching Two Years at Sea brought to mind The Moon and the Sledgehammer, which is about a family who live in the woods just outside Horsham, West Sussex. It’s an obvious parallel; the films are about people living out hermitic existences, living on the margins. 

^ABen Rivers — I really like The Moon and the Sledgehammer, it’s a really great film. There’s a closer association, especially in terms of form, to This is My Land. There are definite parallels; direct address to the camera and a more observational mode. With Two Years at Sea I wanted to construct more, I wanted it to be more like cinema, move further away from an idea of documentary by shooting in cinemascope and not having any dialogue. I thought about Lisandro Alonso, his film Los Muertos. I really love Pier Paolo Pasolini but it would be hard to see that by watching the film. That’s the thing about influences, they’re accumulative, you don’t know what’s feeding in when you’ve seen and read so much stuff. I’ve had this life long love of Science Fiction, and you could also see that in some way. Two Years at Sea could be like post-apocalyptic movie. I like books and films about the last man on earth, and it could easily be read like that. I quite like that as a reading.

^QThe White Review — I guess that’s what ties Two Years at Sea and the Moon and the Sledgehammer together; these aren’t people living out existences in the past. This could be what we will all be living like.

^ABen Rivers — I didn’t know much about the 2012 end of the world thing, do you know about that? Supposedly the world is going to end, I think at the end of this year. A lot of people take it really seriously. There have been so many end of the worlds in different calendars.

^QThe White Review — Aren’t they running out? Maybe that’s when the world ends, when all the calendars run out?

^ABen Rivers — Maybe that’s it; this is the last one, that’s why people take it really seriously. There was a huge disaster movie about it last year, and mega ads on the sides of busses. You didn’t see it? Anyway, some people who take it real seriously say it’s not the end of the world, obviously. Instead it might be a massive solar storm, which knocks out all the electricity. What would happen if all the electricity disappeared in a flash? You can just imagine the chaos, how many people would die because they’d have no idea how to exist without electricity. So the films could be propositions for what happens a hundred years after an event like that. There’s pessimism but there’s also hope.

^QThe White Review — Jake seems to be living with his past. You film his photographs, which seem to show him as a younger person, and then friends or relatives, from a past lived with other people. He also spends time sorting through all his stuff he’s accumulated. Could you describe some of those decisions?

^ABen Rivers — With a lot of my films over the years I’ve been interested in spaces and objects as a way to build a portrait of a person, an understanding of who they might be without that straightforward telling. So that’s the strategy for Two Years at Sea, to give the audience these clues to a past. There’s still plenty of room to decide who the person in that photograph is, or where an object or a piece of music comes from. So the Indian music in the film is significant to Jake’s life, there’s a reason why it’s there; it’s music he bought when he was working as a merchant seaman and going to markets. I like the idea that you don’t have to know all the answers and it’s fine not to know. You’re still getting a pretty intimate view of someone but it’s a moment in time. The rest of it you can think about because you’re never going to find out everything about a person. Even if I made a really straightforward documentary with loads of talking and everything explained you’re still never going to know the person. I’m much more interested in making something that is not necessarily about that person. I’m interested in working with that person collaboratively to make something new, to make something that exits just for itself.

^QThe White Review — You explore these ideas in the gallery as well as the cinema. At your recent show at Kate MacGarry you showed a film of fragments from a photograph album, and a series of photographs of objects, which seem to belong to a whole but are also kept apart. When a visitor enters the gallery they are often left without answers, “clues” as you put it. The cinemagoer is not necessarily complicit in the same way. What do these sites of encounter offer you as an “artist who makes films”?

^ABen Rivers — You’re right, the cinemagoer is perhaps less prepared for going away with unanswered questions. We’ve all been taught over decades that the cinema will provide plots and the necessary information to know exactly what’s going on. Then of course there’s a whole area of cinema that fought against this passivity on the part of the audience and asked for heightened engagement of the imagination or other vital parts of the brain, which can also be temporarily disengaged when watching plot or action based films, and this is the kind of cinema that has influenced the films I want to make. It’s important to me that I continue to show in both spaces because even when showing exactly the same film, the context can change the interpretation of the film, which can be exciting. Some writers inevitably refer to me as an artist when reviewing Two Years at Sea and maybe that’s helpful for the audience. They have something of a preparatory warning that things might not be completely straightforward, and they can choose whether to go along with that or not.

^QThe White Review — You are currently collaborating with another artist, Ben Russell, rather than a subject. He has also engaged with the remake or re-enactment; Lumiere’s pseudo-actuality film of workers leaving a factory re-located to Dubai for example. Some films in his ‘Trypps’ series refer to Jean Rouch’s ethnographic film of the 1960s, which spawned neologisms such as “ethnofiction” because he directed his subjects to an extent. What’s the nature of your relationship to his work? Could you describe the nature of your collaboration?

^ABen Rivers — Our collaboration comes out of shared interests in the things you mentioned, plus many other things like shared interests in certain kinds of cinema and music. In 2008 we toured the Antipodes with a programme of our films, five by each of us, called We Can Not Exist In This World Alone, that explored ethnographic themes, humans in the 21st Century, experimentation with 16mm film, and construction in cinema. Our films are formally quite different but there were a lot of things that chimed, which we discussed more every time we saw them together at each screening. It became inevitable that we should try to make something together, try and push each other to do something that we wouldn’t had we been working alone, which seems as good a reason as any to collaborate. We also both believe in the idea of productivity, being prolific and trying things out, not working only on one film at a time, which we hope encourages less preciousness. We are making a feature film and installation shot in Finland, Norway and Estonia, called A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness, and a medium length film made in Vanuatu. The practical nature of the collaboration is very simple, we share everything, from the origin of ideas, to camera work through to editing. Nothing is done alone.  - www.thewhitereview.org/