68. Ben Rivers

Alternate version of a review that appeared in The Wire #340 (June 2012).

Two Years At Sea

Ben Rivers (director)

Soda Films 2011, 80 mins

Contemporary culture dreams of disappearance. Two Years At Sea, Ben Rivers' first full-length film, shows us one version of that dream, reconstituted as waking reverie. Jake Williams, this portrait's subject, lives in remote Aberdonian woodland. He's seen and heard working – wood-cutting, tidying, fixing – in between other pottering activities: reading, walking, cooking, napping. No other character, his cat aside, is seen. The film's title refers to the period of work he undertook to make this isolation possible. The result is not exactly bucolic, but does gift the film a certain quality of unwavering, uncoercive attention. A great deal of its rich, unhurried loveliness proceeds from all of this: a Cageian bringing-out of the buried life in auditory and visual 'silence'.

Rivers is, though, far from the nature-piety into which the Cage cult so often degenerates. His cinema, like that of Patrick Keiller and certain parts of Tarkovsky, makes clear that its attention to natural appearance is possible only through film's mediation. Filming on hand-processed black-and-white 16mm, Rivers lets the medium's accidents and peculiarities – flicker and distortion, intense contrast, light glare, graininess – play. Film is revealed as the dark matter of the visible, just as sound – vividly captured wind and birdsong, the distorted psych-rock tapes and raga tapes Williams plays in his car, 40s crooners blasted over outside loudspeakers – marks out the diffuse and dense contours of his oneiric space. Williams is also a singer and accompanist of folksongs for mandolin and guitar; though we never see him play, we do see him listen - giving ear to the sky and forest - and his listening seems to subtly shape the film.

Rivers hints at the constructedness of the scenario, undercutting the impression of an innocent rural idyll even as he builds it up. Several fantastic sequences – such as that in which Williams hoists a caravan into a tree, has an Keatsian lie-down in a heather-bank, or the final shot's quotation of Richard Bennett's death scene in Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons – emphasise the sense that the forest is a theatre in which to play out his Grizzly Adams role. It's interesting to note the ways in which the film coincides with Rivers' portrait of 'island utopias', Slow Action (2010). In interviews Rivers has drawn analogues between Williams' life and his film-making – solitary, labour-intensive – which rather suggests film as a craft activity, with the latter's twee associations, a deadly combination with Two Years At Sea's rural seclusion. The Lévi-Straussian innocence of his island societies is the result of apocalyptic loss via a future rise in sea-levels, rather than any willed escape into cosy primitivism. A dream is a kind of ruin: the dissolution of concrete life, vanished lifeworlds turned into active absences. Rivers has made, through technological dreamwork, an enchanting, becalmed ruin.