The lure of the Scottish wilderness was too much to resist as Ben Rivers returns there for his latest feature.
In his 2011 film Two Years at Sea, artist/filmmaker Ben Rivers decamped to Scottish wilds with his hand-cranked 16mm camera and hung out with a bearded loner named Jake Williams. The film did little more than capture the everyday minutiae of a man who had chosen to partition himself from urban society and the company of others, yet the resulting film played more like a pastoral post-apocalyptic riff on something like The Omega Man. It’s over a decade later and we’re back in the woods with Jake, still eking out a happy existence in his tumbledown shack and drinking in the pleasures of the rugged and serene landscape.
The key difference with this new film, Bogancloch, is that there is more interaction with other people, with Jake now presented as someone slowly reintegrating with a primitive form of society – but strictly on his own terms. There’s a sequence where he’s shown with a group of intrigued highschoolers as he demonstrates the working of the cosmos with use of a wilting pub parasol and some old bits of string. Later on, he’s seen leading a nighttime sing-along of thematically fecund Scottish folk music. There’s something enlivening and hopeful in Jake’s world this time, where he sees potential and companionship in other people, even if for very short and sweet bursts.
The material is elevated by Rivers’ typically-fastidious formal approach, where high contrast black-and-white film is processed in a way to leave glitches and blemishes in the frame, like the film itself is a relic that’s been dug up from underneath a trees tump. Indeed, all of Rivers’ films contain some element of this “found” quality to them, and in this instance you’re made to feel as if Jake himself would have concocted this thing from old ends of film reels discovered in a ditch. The film and landscape are as one, with the visual degradation echoed in the moss, rust and grime we see on the screen.
With so little context given about Jake’s situation and how he came to be out there alone, the film allows you instead to impose your own backstories and psychological justifications. There’s one sequence in which he starts rifling through a box of old music tapes and giving a couple of them a listen; the crackling music sounds like it’s from Asia somewhere, maybe India. You begin to wonder if Jake had been there and kept these tapes. Or maybe he was once married to an Indian woman way back when and we’re suddenly party to his own little trip down memory lane. It’s refreshing that Rivers and Williams have an understanding that, just because the camera is pointing at you, it doesn’t mean you need to narrate your actions and speak to the audience down the lens.
And yet, there are elements of performance in the film, where scenes have been pre-agreed and set up for show. In the climactic shot of Two Years at Sea, Jake is seen floating slowly across a lake. In this film, he warms up the water in an old tin bath and just marinates there, this time the camera itself floating away like a bubble caught on the breeze, leaving us with another vision of blissful contentment.
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