Ben Rivers

A portrait of an old school house on the tidal island of Eilean Seòna within Scotland's Inner Hebrides, accompanied by the Wallace Stevens poem 'The House Was Quiet.

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Ben Rivers' films study the otherworldly, looking for places and stories outside the daily conventions of reality. Look Then Below was filmed in a Somerset transformed into a coloured, mist-enveloped island in an oily ocean with a cave basking in a subterranean glow. Time seems to stand still there. After Slow Action and Urth, this is the final part of a trilogy developed with American SF author Mark von Schlegell.

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Explores the landscape and stories within the community of Krabi, Southern Thailand. A major tourist destination in Thailand, the filmmakers want to capture the town in this specific moment where the pre-historic, the more recent past and the contemporary world collide, sometimes uneasily.

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Filmed in various places over the globe, Ghost Strata explores the differing scales of impact that humanity’s presence has on the earth in the past, present and into the future. Found sound and text create a meditation on time, memory, leftovers and extinction.

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A film of a sloth, using three-colour separation to show sloth time.

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Rivers and Suwichakornpong’s first collaboration, commissioned by the 2018 Thai Biennale.

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Slow Action, Ben Rivers’ first exhibition at Matt’s Gallery, 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. 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.

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In this short film of Cowan Court, which was completed by 6a architects in late 2016, Rivers has turned his camera onto the interactions between architecture and landscape within which the students of Churchill College, University of Cambridge live and work.

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Shot in a creaky, wooden-floored Parisian recording studio at an inaugural three-day “forum of ideas” focusing on the manifold possibilities of “Resistance”, the film initially appears to be a structuralist document of a philosophical discussion in-the-round.

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For Dreaming the Dark: hands that see, eyes that touch, Ana Vaz invited artists and filmmakers whose work trust cinema’s capacity to transform relationships between the body and the camera to propose works that will engage with both perception and embodiment. Could cinema be an art of embodiment? By what rituals and actions could vision become tactile?

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The last woman on Earth: Filmed inside Biosphere 2 in Arizona, Urth forms a cinematic meditation on ambitious experiments, constructed environments and visions of the future. The film considers what an endeavor such as Biosphere 2 might mean today and in the near future, in terms of humankind’s relationship with the natural world.

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A delirious sci-fi riff on the Arabian Nights' 'Tale of the Hunchback', that submerges us in a technological dystopia reigned by Dalaya.com, a mega-corporation that forces its employees to 'relax' at company-run medieval reenactments.

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It is always hard like this, not having a world, to imagine one, to go to the far edge apart and imagine, to wall whether in or out, to build a kind of cage for the sake of feeling the bars around us, to give shape to a world. And oh, it is always a world and not the world. – William Bronk

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This new work is developed from footage collected during a trip to the remote and beautiful sub-tropical island of Vanuatu in the South Pacific. In March 2015, after Rivers’ visit, Vanuatu was devastated by Cyclone Pam, laying waste large parts of the islands. Rivers’ 16mm lm material has become a record of a place that has irrevocably changed. Filmed on 16mm and then digitised, island imagery of active volcanoes, underwater WW2 debris, children playing, and wrecked boats transform into intangible digital recollections of the island. Images of the eroded land merge with eroding lm and deteriorate until they are no longer recognisable.

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A portrait of the painter Rose Wylie at work in her studio at home in Kent. Shots from her house and studio, including details of encrusted paint pots, brushes, paintings, drawings and magazine clippings demonstrate Wylie’s divergent reference material which ranges from historical figures and celebrity culture to the everyday objects around her.

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“A meditation on the illusion of filmmaking, shot behind the scenes on a film being made on the otherworldly beaches of Sidi Ifni, Morocco. The film depicts strange activities, with no commentary or dialogue; it appears as a fragment of film, dug up in a distant future—a hazy, black-and-white hallucinogenic world.”—Ben Rivers

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Shooting against the staggering beauty of the Moroccan landscape, from the rugged terrain of the Atlas Mountains to the stark and surreal emptiness of the desert, with its encroaching sands and abandoned film sets, a director abandons his own film set and descends into a hallucinatory, perilous adventure of cruelty, madness and malevolence. A Paul Bowles story combined with observational footage forms a multi-layered excavation into the illusion of cinema itself.

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The great Moroccan storyteller Mohammed Mrabet telling two stories to Shakib.

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A collection of films from an eclectic array of contributors commissioned to raise funds for the Bristol independent cinema The Cube.

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Things is a lyrical analysis of the objects we gather around us, split into sections loosely based on the seasons. Rivers’ films are, typically, intimate portrayals of solitary beings or isolated communities. In Things however, he turns his attention to the unexplored objects, thoughts and memories from inside his own home. The film is a collision of individual fragments of video and sound, which together complete an abstract, humorous and intimate picture. In the Summer section for example, we witness a squirrel attacking a coconut model of another squirrel. In its attention to small moments, the film is a rumination of the things we gather around us.

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A man at three disparate moments in his life: as a member of a fifteen-person collective on a small Estonian island, alone in the wilderness of Northern Finland and as the singer of a neo-pagan black metal band in Norway. Three moments for a radical proposition for the creation of utopia in the present.

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It’s been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home – only the millions of last moments... nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments.” Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow A(nother) collaboration between film artists Ben Rivers and Ben Russell, the figures in this installation represent a conceptual prequel to the inquiry present in their feature project *A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness*. Taking its title from the Greek tragedian Aeschulys, *CALL NO MAN HAPPY UNTIL HE IS DEAD* presents a group of viking re-enactors whose vertiginous actions are variably synched to an explosive real-time collage of early black metal recordings. Man and violence, ritual and play, death as the dream of infinity.

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Set in a deserted, silent at, laden with mementoes and artefacts belonging to a now departed inhabitant. The film pieces together an elusive biography of a traveller to far flung destinations. There is a heavy stillness in the deserted space, the inhabitants faded memories are retraced by Rivers, but remain inescapably unresolved; narratives flicker and then disperse in succession; the immateriality of life is reflected in the material left behind.

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Inspired by the themes of Knut Hamsun’s ‘Pan’, Ben Rivers ventures deep into the remote forests of Aberdeenshire to document the routine of Jake Williams - a man seen in all seasons, living reclusively, surviving frugally, and passing the time with strange projects.

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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.

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Jake Williams performs the song 'More Than Just A Dram' while making tea on an open fire.

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The march of time claims another casualty. Sack Barrow documents (and laments) the out-dated, but functioning, technology of a family-owned electroplating factory in the weeks around its closure — its old ways now unsustainable in the modern world.

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May Tomorrow Shine the Brightest of All Your Many Days As It Will Be Your Last (2009, co-directed with Paul Harnden) shakily shows cloaked figures moving through woods, followed by soldiers, and seeking quiet places to read, seemingly in escape from some kind of disaster. A metallic ring obscures words spoken offscreen; wind blows through shimmering trees. It’s only occasionally that we see faces beneath their cloaks—a solemn old man, a blankly gazing old woman.

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The third in the series of experimental "horror" features, this collection features the shorts The Psychotic Odyssey of Richard Chase (1999) by Cary Burtt, J.X. Williams' Satan Claus (1975), Jason Bognacki's Loma Lynda: The Red Door (2008), Terror! (2007) by Ben Rivers, Mike Kuchar's Born of the Wind (1961), and a collaboration from Guy Maddin and Marie Losier called Manuelle Labor (2007). While not featured in the program, an extra includes the short It Gets Worse (2008) by Clifton Childree.

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Explores the landscape and stories within the community of Krabi, Southern Thailand. A major tourist destination in Thailand, the filmmakers want to capture the town in this specific moment where the pre-historic, the more recent past and the contemporary world collide, sometimes uneasily.

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Filmed in various places over the globe, Ghost Strata explores the differing scales of impact that humanity’s presence has on the earth in the past, present and into the future. Found sound and text create a meditation on time, memory, leftovers and extinction.

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Based on Gertrude Stein’s eponymously named screenplay, written in 1929 as European fascism was building momentum. Beatrice Gibson’s adaptation, set almost a century later in contemporary Paris, deploys Stein’s script as a talismanic guide through a contemporary moment of comparable social and political unrest. An original soundtrack, written especially for the film by British composer Laurence Crane, responds to the repetition, duplication and duality at play in Stein’s script. Both a fictional thriller and an act of collective representation, Deux Soeurs proposes empathy and friendship as means to reckon with an increasingly turbulent present.

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Slow Action, Ben Rivers’ first exhibition at Matt’s Gallery, 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. 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.

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Reframing our current political moment in intimate terms, Gibson’s urgent snapshot of worldwide social calamities doubles as a document of practical resistance. In Gibson’s hands, the music of Pauline Oliveros and the words of poets CA Conrad and Eileen Myles imbue images of street riots, the Grenfell Fire, and the mass refugee migration with complexity and grace.

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In this short film of Cowan Court, which was completed by 6a architects in late 2016, Rivers has turned his camera onto the interactions between architecture and landscape within which the students of Churchill College, University of Cambridge live and work.

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A delirious sci-fi riff on the Arabian Nights' 'Tale of the Hunchback', that submerges us in a technological dystopia reigned by Dalaya.com, a mega-corporation that forces its employees to 'relax' at company-run medieval reenactments.

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“A meditation on the illusion of filmmaking, shot behind the scenes on a film being made on the otherworldly beaches of Sidi Ifni, Morocco. The film depicts strange activities, with no commentary or dialogue; it appears as a fragment of film, dug up in a distant future—a hazy, black-and-white hallucinogenic world.”—Ben Rivers

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Shooting against the staggering beauty of the Moroccan landscape, from the rugged terrain of the Atlas Mountains to the stark and surreal emptiness of the desert, with its encroaching sands and abandoned film sets, a director abandons his own film set and descends into a hallucinatory, perilous adventure of cruelty, madness and malevolence. A Paul Bowles story combined with observational footage forms a multi-layered excavation into the illusion of cinema itself.

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Eden Kötting draws bright images on transparent glass, while talking with her dad about the world and the people who run it.

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A man at three disparate moments in his life: as a member of a fifteen-person collective on a small Estonian island, alone in the wilderness of Northern Finland and as the singer of a neo-pagan black metal band in Norway. Three moments for a radical proposition for the creation of utopia in the present.

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I First Saw the Light channels the vestige of Joseph Carey Merrick’s surviving output. Better known as The Elephant Man, he produced a little noticed two-page autobiography, sold to those attending a freak show in which he was displayed, opposite the royal London hospital in London's Whitechapel High Street. There is one surviving copy of the pamphlet. Its text is coupled with starkly filmed sequences of a model church he also constructed, now hermetically sealed within a glass and ebony container, together forming the basis for this poignant, silent film. A reminder of Merrick’s profound humanity in the face of extreme adversity, it also serves as an auto-biographical footnote and reminder of David Lynch’s eponymous feature film on Merrick, in which the model is a central motif and metaphor for his psychological and emotional fluctuations.

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Inspired by the themes of Knut Hamsun’s ‘Pan’, Ben Rivers ventures deep into the remote forests of Aberdeenshire to document the routine of Jake Williams - a man seen in all seasons, living reclusively, surviving frugally, and passing the time with strange projects.

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In an impressionistic rush that combines patina-marked images of shoes made by hand with the attributes of a genre film, Rivers returns to a favorite topic: objects as the bearers of their history. Shots of the cobbler at work highlight the handcrafting process, yet entirely without indicating the need for perfection. In general, purposefulness and the absence of fantasy are unlike Rivers. Ambiguity is thus waiting in the wings, in this case references to genre movies, exemplified in part by image distortion reminiscent of an old horror movie.

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"My first film, shot at art school on a crappy Super 8 camera I bought from the market. At the time I was obsessed with Universal Studios horror films, and Dreyer’s Vampyr, and I had just discovered three films by George Kuchar, and Alain Resnais. So it’s a mix of those, sort of. It was shot over many months, as I had to coerce my friends to give me their time, especially the lead, who required many hours of make-up before he killed my friends. It’s a play on Jekyll and Hyde, though how clear this is to the viewer I’m pretty uncertain.” - Ben Rivers

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