Bogancloch

British filmmaker and artist Ben Rivers has been making unclassifiable, abstract and experimental films for over two decades now, starting with his otherworldly shorts (Worlds on Second Run DVD is essential) through to his experimental documentary features such as A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (2013) and Two Years at Sea (2011). The latter starred Aberdeenshire hermit Jake Williams, whom Rivers revisits in Bogancloch, a loose sequel. Somewhat comfortingly, it seems not much has changed in Williams’ isolated world since we last saw him floating on a home-made raft and falling asleep by a fire in 2011 – save for, perhaps, his new car and caravan. 

Rivers crafts the kind of cinema that is the absolute antithesis of today’s hyperactive online culture. He trades in static shots rendered in high-grain/high-contrast black and white 16mm stock, which slowly unfurl over minutes where nothing of great importance occurs, drawing comparisons to contemporaneous practitioners of so-called 'Slow Cinema' such as Lav Diaz (but probably more appropriately James Benning). And like the late, great Jonas Mekas and fellow UK filmmaker Mark Jenkin, Rivers painstakingly hand develops the celluloid in his studio, giving the filmstock a unique and ghostly appearance, with the image often seeming to pulsate in a tactile, unearthly radiance.

In this regard, Rivers creates some of the most impressionistic and downright transcendent images in cinema today. Here, a bird bathing in silhouette takes on a primitive, oneiric divinity; a communal ballad around a campfire, led by Scottish folk singer Alasdair Roberts, steps into the realm of sepulchral last rites.