Latest news with #BenRivers
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Mare's Nest review – an opaque, challenging reflection on the end of the world
English experimentalist Ben Rivers offers up another challenging, intriguing cine-poem, this time on the nature of existence and the end of the world. It is opaque but with flashes of strange brilliance, an adaptation of The Word for Snow, a one-act stage play by Don DeLillo from 2007 that reflected on the climate crisis. A child called Moon (Moon Guo Barker) wanders around a strange world, entirely peopled by other children, except for one eerie monochrome sequence in which Moon sees adult figures in some kind of underground tunnel, frozen in attitudes of dismay similar to the citizenry of Pompeii. In the course of her travels, bookended by clambering out of a crashed car and finally driving happily off, Moon has dreamlike encounters with these children who speak with the tongues of adult prophets. She also exchanges pungent and often memorable micro-insights or haikus or aperçus about the nature of humanity in this postapocalyptic world. 'The word for snow will be the snow,' says one, evidently foreseeing a time when language itself will be scorched away by some cosmic fatality. The scenario is not entirely unlike the super-rich Wall Street trader cruising affectlessly around the Manhattan streets in his stretch limo in DeLillo's novella Cosmopolis, exchanging gnomic dialogue with the people in his life; this was filmed by David Cronenberg with Robert Pattinson in the lead role. Moon meets three weird child sisters, like something from Shakespeare, and then a child scholar whose words are interpreted by a child translator; she is met by various other infant devils or angels or lost souls. There is also a scene in which a Minotaur figure roams a maze, filmed in the (rather amazing) Lithica labyrinth in Menorca, Spain, a colossal stone land artwork. At one stage, Rivers's camera locates a gravestone with a single handprint, as if humanity has found a primitive, wordless way of commemorating its own demise. The film is like a slo-mo Lord of the Flies (but without the violence) in a style not far from Pasolini's ancient Greek dramas, and its uncanny quality creeps up on you. This applies even (or especially) to the dialogue put in the mouths of the children, which although occasionally stilted, has its own unearthly, somnambulist ring, as if an alien intelligence is ventriloquising its views through these innocents. Is all this a 'mare's nest', in the sense of it being a complicated situation in which an illusory or misleading significance is to be found? Perhaps. In any event, Rivers has an ancient-mariner confidence in his stern, enigmatic address to the audience. Mare's Nest screened at the Locarno film festival
The Guardian
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Bogancloch review – the further adventures of a Scottish hermit in Ben River's beguiling essay
Film-maker Ben Rivers, one of the doyens of Britain's small but stubborn-as-bindweed experimental film scene, catches up with Scottish recluse Jake Williams, the subject of his 2011 film Two Years at Sea and, before that, his 2006 short This Is My Land. All three films never deign to tell viewers much at all about Williams, who spends great chunks of the film doing almost nothing, like sleeping by a tree, taking a bath, or just pottering about at his home, Bogancloch in Aberdeenshire. However, there are oblique hints in plain sight if you look closely. In the bric-a-brac of Williams' digs and the closeup shots Rivers inserts of some of Williams' scratched and smudged photographs of places around the world he's once visited, one of which shows the subject as a young man with a resplendent head of red hair. These days, his scalpline has much receded and both head hair and luxurious beard have turned white as a goblin, which at least makes him of a piece with the silvery black and white 16mm film stock Rivers shoots the film on. When he cuts away to those rumpled photographs, everything suddenly goes into colour. If that stab of pigment doesn't shake you up, wait until Rivers breaks out the drone for a spectacular final shot. Not quite a documentary and not quite a work of fiction either, this is a contemplative curio that gets across that Williams himself leads a liminal life on the edge of society but not entirely separate from it. We see him meeting hikers in the wood and enjoying a visit from a choir around a campfire who sing a spectacular folk song in Scots dialect that's about an argument between life and death. He even teaches some schoolkids about the solar system with an assist from a giant umbrella, although they all clear off as fleet as foxes when the bell rings. But Jake seems like a happy soul for all his solitude, happy to sing a song to himself and have a friendly conversation with his talkative cat, with whom in one early scene he shares a roadkill feast. It looks like a pretty mellow, content sort of life from where I'm standing, and not much different than that of your average self-employed home-based worker, but with more snow and silence. Bogancloch is in UK cinemas from 30 May.
