This article appeared in the February 28, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Bogancloch (Ben Rivers, 2024)

I remember seeing This Is My Land (2006), my introduction to the work of Ben Rivers, and being knocked out to find that such a modest film could so completely summon another world. Ramshackle yet perfectly attuned to its subject, the short employs an array of techniques (field recording, collage, lyrical Bolex cinematography) in its portrait of Jake Williams, a generously bearded dreamer living back-to-the-land in the Scottish Highlands. Rivers would venture far afield in his subsequent meditations on self-sufficiency—his now-expansive filmography constitutes a veritable archipelago of elsewheres—but for me, the rough magic of this early work crystallizes his designs on cinema itself as another of these autonomous zones, where other worlds and ways of knowing are brought into being. 

Five years after This Is My Land, Rivers returned to the same locale for his first feature, Two Years at Sea (2011). Compared to its predecessor, it is a film with a wider frame—literally, in its use of an anamorphic lens to picture Jake’s sprawling property, and more figuratively in the move toward narrative. Not that the film tells a story—it was seen at the time as being paradigmatic of “slow cinema”—but it extrapolates from Jake’s world a mythic and occasionally fantastic realm (a trailer is briefly seen levitating). The lone wolf is itself a familiar narrative conceit, of course. It only takes a moment’s reflection to realize that Jake is obviously hospitable to Rivers and his camera, and that the figure on screen—less a character than a locus of reverie—is as much a matter of performance as framing. 

This slippage between film and subject also happens at the level of the image, which, having been hand-processed, foregrounds the volatility of photographic emulsion. (In shots of fog and snow, it can be hard to tell where weather ends and film grain begins.) Beyond exemplifying Rivers’s interest in the handmade, the feverish tactility of his images can result in wonderfully trippy moments where our sense of what it is that we’re watching is subject to change. This is especially true of one of Two Years at Sea’s very long takes, which shows Jake setting out on a lake on an improvised raft. He drifts in space, the shot in time; both are drawn toward a perfect stillness that represents a Zen-like union of form and content. It’s only fitting that these films, about people who seem to live outside time, are themselves so attuned to the flow, at once liquid and obdurate, of moment-to-moment experience. 

Now, many moments later, comes Bogancloch, less a sequel than the continuance of an enormous, time-bound poem. More than a few things have happened in the intervening 13 years—not least, a renewed push for Scottish independence—though no time at all seems to have passed in the life of Jake’s house. Certain compositions (for instance, a still life of glass bottles on a windowsill) are nearly identical to shots from the earlier works. In perhaps the film’s single most exquisite sequence, steam fills the house while Jake listens to a warbly cassette of classical Indian music, such that the building appears to be breathing, dragon-like. 

Its human denizen, however, is visibly aged. When we finally get a good look at Jake, he’s listening to another tape (the sonic texture of the cassettes or vinyl records being played over loudspeakers is a key aesthetic ingredient in all three of the Jake films). Like the mysterious, faded color photographs interspersed throughout the film, the music surfaces something of Jake’s past lives. Rivers has made other films entirely composed from these kinds of biographical shards (see especially 2012’s Phantoms of a Libertine, his oblique study of an anonymous, departed subject). In Bogancloch, however, these elements have the more pointed effect of puncturing the sense of timelessness that hangs over Jake’s existence, just as techniques of narrative montage rupture the film’s more ethnographic sequences. 

This kind of double movement is conventionally understood in terms of documentary and fiction, but I wonder if the more salient duality for this film isn’t that of observation and dream. Interesting things happen when Jake falls asleep, which is often. In one long take, he leans against a massive tree for a rest during a walk. Nibbling on biscuits, he sings Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies” to himself. He looks up at the sky, the wind swirls on the soundtrack, and, eventually, we realize that his eyes are closed. The distant framing of the static composition makes it hard to tell when exactly he dozed off, such that the film travels from jovial song to deathly quiet without us knowing quite how we got there. 

It’s left to us to decide whether the shot that follows represents a dream: several silhouettes—two, three, four, finally five—walk in the far distance of the woods. This visitation initially seems a non sequitur, but the mysterious band returns in a later scene, in which the figures, gathered around a fire, sing a call-and-response about the eternal rivalry between life and death (the performance is arranged by Alasdair Roberts, a Scottish musician who, like Rivers, is interested in reinventing traditional forms). Jake sits among them, listening before joining in on the side of life. Along with an earlier sequence (also following a snooze) in which he visits a classroom to teach about the phases of the moon, the song is, in its quiet way, a shocking break from Jake’s solitude. 

As if registering the rupture, Bogancloch momentarily switches over to color after the song. It’s startling, after observing Jake’s dwelling in black and white for so long, to realize that the roof of his house is in fact painted several different colors. The color sequence lasts precisely three shots, no longer than a gust of wind, but it leaves in its wake a widened sense of possibility. In the film’s final shots, gravity itself gives way. We watch as Jake prepares an outdoor bath on a bright winter day, lighting a small fire beneath the tub. He lowers himself into the water, singing himself another song and scrubbing his scalp. Then, for the first time in a film otherwise characterized by static compositions, the camera moves, pulled skyward by some invisible force, as if splitting the difference between Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (1986) and Charles and Ray Eames’s Powers of Ten (1977). 

As Jake becomes vanishingly small in the receding frame, absorbed in the surrounding landscape while the camera roll expires, I find myself thinking that, seen from the above, his bath could be mistaken for the open grave of the campfire song (“An open grave is where things will grow/You’ll not keep my seed from falling in”). Crucially, though, the soundtrack holds fast to Jake’s splashing even as the camera takes to the heavens, preserving a measure of physical proximity. It is, for me, an especially beautiful illustration of the insight that documentary realism needn’t preclude wild flights of fancy. To the contrary, Bogancloch takes Jake’s homelife as the stage for a work of imagination evoking the philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s notion of “intimate immensity.”

In the end, the backtracking aerial shot, with its godlike perspective, transcends not only Jake’s place in the frame but also Rivers’s position behind the camera. The death of the author? Perhaps; nevertheless, I can’t help but imagine Rivers back on the ground with his friend, ready to spin another yarn. “Collaboration” is too weak a word for the kind of relationship that yields such surprises.

Max Goldberg is an archivist and writer based in the Boston area.