Portrait: Ben Rivers
Text: Wiktoria Pelzer, translation: Angharad Gabriel
Ben Rivers makes films.
What sounds succinct on this Brit‘s website makes sense when you delve into the filmmaker’s oeuvre: tracks in the snow, mysterious huts, a deserted yard. Children playing and creatures meandering out of the forest. Ben Rivers’s films open up scope for ideas and dreams. Rivers is a master of the mysterious, the sinister, while also being personal and perceptive. The cat in the snow on 16 mm or the radio in the remote vastness of Scotland. One can detect his personal handwriting all over his films, most of which are black and white – handwriting that may be evocative of early cinema.
He is fascinated by the wilderness, as he describes it – when he films he is „off in the wilderness filming“. One can hardly contact him, no mobile, no internet – he dives deep into his ideas. Later the outside world only receives a short and, when you behold his films, understandable “then (I) got lost in filming”. Ben Rivers says about himself that he had always been a “champion daydreamer” – he carries this feeling into his films. The pictures and dissolves, whether agreeable or oppressive, or even a nightmare, leave plenty of scope for fantasy. Nonetheless, the fairytale-like atmosphere of some of his films doesn’t lose sight of the modern world – both worlds exist side by side, admittedly not without tension.
Rivers sniffs out locations that possess human traces – that in a way function as ghostly places – animate or lifeless. He absorbs the atmosphere and transports it into a film image that pushes the viewer into childlike memories of dream fragments and daydreamy encounters. He started experimenting with film material early on, while still studying at Falmouth’s School of Art. Mostly he worked alone, in collaboration with his 16-mm-Bolex. He is also mostly alone with his material in the editing room. This conscious decision also explains his affinity to people who are isolated and at home outside of our society, in the “wilderness”.
The films are narrations, even if they don’t conform to classic narrational structures, and offer the viewers enough leeway to spin their own stories. Like ever-recurring memories that are only present as collage-like objects. Ben Rivers talks about influences and ideals in an interview; because of his experiences with the Brighton Cinematheque, which he runs together with Michael Sippings, he can’t name any direct influences. He mentions names like George Kuchar and Margaret Tait, John Smith and Man Ray, but fundamentally he feels influenced by what happens round about him.
Ben Rivers’s works are shown regularly at numerous international festivals and galleries and have also been awarded prizes. Rivers received his latest prize in 2008 at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Born 1972 in Somerset, he now works and lives in London.