In the last 10 or 15 years, the micro-universe that we call the experimental film world has made a decisive shift toward a form of filmmaking that establishes observable, photographic facts as their aesthetic bedrock. As has often been the case with various strains of experimental media, we have no truly apposite label for this certain tendency. (This critic once rather clunkily called it a “non-rhetorical cinema of fact.”) Now, one might be more inclined toward something like “poetic nonfiction,” which has the advantage of descriptively dovetailing with the “creative nonfiction” movement in literature. Scott MacDonald has taken to simply calling these films “avant-docs.” Labels always occlude as much as they illuminate, alas.
More so than perhaps any artist outside the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, Ben Rivers exemplifies this experimental approach to nonfiction filmmaking. His films have consistently taken some social or geographical fact (a landscape, a workplace, a person, an animal) and built outward from there. Rivers’ films insist that we cannot ever really understand something outside of a context. But he also makes sure that the context does not provide some prefabricated interpretation of the object under consideration. Rather, the subject and its context are mutually defining, like a figure in a landscape. He does not deal in concepts. He provokes mysteries.
Rivers’ latest film, Bogancloch, is his third film (and second feature) focused on the life of Jake Williams, the defiantly off-the-grid Scotsman whose collection of odds and ends and jury-rigged devices for living were featured in 2011’s Two Years at Sea. Rivers and Williams have become friends over the years, and so the filmmaker has taken this opportunity to make a sequel of sorts to Two Years, checking in on Williams, examining what has changed in his life, and what has remained the same.
Why return to Jake Williams? I interviewed Rivers, and he mentioned an appreciation of the 7 Up films, and having been partly inspired by that kind of longitudinal endeavor. But make no mistake: Williams is such a fascinating and charismatic individual that no real justification is needed for turning the camera on him once again. Bogancloch is named for the location of Williams’ large compound in the woods, and the first thing that strikes any viewer who’s seen Two Years at Sea is that the old man seems no worse for wear. Yes, he is a bit balder, maybe moving a tad more slowly, but he is still remarkably active and engaged in all manner of physical effort. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it seems this kind of life is good for you.
Even if 12 years haven’t provoked obvious changes in Jake, Bogancloch is very different from Two Years in terms of Rivers’ points of focus. Like the first Williams film, 2006’s short This is My Land, Two Years spends a lot of time visually articulating Williams’ daily practices, his solitude, and the various ways in which the man not only survives but thrives in the elements. His is a life in tune with the seasons, where a day’s work is dictated by the requirements of the natural forces that surround him. Bogancloch, by contrast, is about Jake’s engagements with other people.
In other words, he lives alone, but he is not a hermit. Rivers shows a group of hikers who happen upon Williams’ land and spend some time in his company. The film’s centerpiece features Jake and the young men and women sitting around a campfire, singing a folk song called “The Battle Between Life and Death.” While its theme is applicable to all, of course, it takes on particular meaning with respect to Williams, who is indeed growing older but has no intention of going gentle. Bogancloch gives the immediate impression that it is possible to live outside of culture and history, making one’s own private path. But the closer we look, we learn that this is an illusion. Jake’s existence, timed to the rhythms of the forest, actually makes him more acutely aware of his place in the cosmic order.
Published as part of Locarno Film Festival 2024 — Dispatch 1.
