British filmmaker Ben Rivers visited Scotland’s remote highland forest for Boganloch, which screens in the international competition at The Locarno Film Festival, to catch up on hermit Jake Williams twelve years after he last documented the one-time sailor’s life in woodland in his equally sparse, elliptical and mysterious Two Years At Sea (2012). In between he made A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (2013), which was not about Williams but explored similar terrain in its search for a utopian existence in Europe’s far north, far removed from the urban capitalist grind and deeply rooted in music. While Bogancloch is the third feature-length creative documentary for Rivers, he is long-established as an experimental filmmaker with many high-profile shorts to his name (Jake first appeared in his 2006 short This Is My Land), and his passion for the alchemical possibilities of film’s materiality is beautifully on display. Grainy, black-and-white cinematography (switching later to some colour sequences) transports us to a slow, shimmering universe far removed from digital media’s always-online barrage of information updates. The observational doc’s uneventful drift and wilful ellipses may frustrate the patience of some, but the atmospheric immersion Rivers offers into life off the grid in a gathering global crisis should find appeal among his fanbase and those with the patience for a cinema of contemplation over narrative.
Jake’s beard has grown a little whiter since the first instalment, but he still exists unhurried by time. He doesn’t seem to commit himself to much of a routine, as he wanders the forest, tinkers in the yard in his paint-splattered overalls, or lies back in the bathtub he heats over a fire outside. We hear nothing of his backstory, and know little of what preoccupies his thoughts as he sits amid the cobwebs with his cat. Beyond plucking a bird to cook, or tending the greenhouse, his practical day-to-day tasks of self-sufficiency remain largely elusive to the camera. This is being outside frenzied productivity, in a more serene form, as the warmer seasons shift, and snows arrive to coat the landscape. Uncontextualised, coloured inserts of the port of Dubai suggest fading reminiscences of a wider world, probably from Jake’s past life at sea. Lessons on celestial movements he gives a group of schoolchildren, his graffitied caravan parked outside as he spins a sun umbrella to model the solar system, are even more leftfield, and come and go with no clear exposition.
Jakes hums or sings while he does most things, and his collection of battered old cassette tapes gets steady play. Music as Jake’s most meaningful companion offers us a poetic avenue into this oblique portrait. He treks into the rain-lashed woods and, settled against the vast trunk of a mossy tree with mug in hand, sings Irving Berlin’s 1920s show tune “Blue Skies,” a song of hope for the future undercut by melancholy. The most poignant and powerful sequence comes when a choir interrupts his solitude in darkness dimly lit by a crackling campfire, for a harmonised rendition of a medieval-style ballad in which Death and Life both lay claims of ownership over the world. The words of this back-and-forth are taken from “The Flyting o’ Life and Death,” a Scottish poem by Hamish Henderson, a founder of Scotland’s modernism-rejecting folk renaissance. The opposing forces spar over whether healing rains or war and plagues will win dominion over all on Earth, bringing the climate crisis to the fore, and a natural world under threat. There is less of the whimsy here that was in Two Years At Sea, which included magical realist moments of levitation. Our perspective is still ultimately drawn up into the sky, but in a manner that, as our attention is turned toward the lights of the cosmos, emphasises the humble scale of all on our planet, and one human’s life.
Director, Cinematographer, Editor: Ben Rivers
Cast: Jake Williams
Producers: Ben Rivers, Sarah Neely, John Archer
Sound: Becky Thomson, Mark Vernon, Luke Fowler, Ben Rivers
Production companies: Urth Productions (UK), Hopscotch Films (UK), Flaneur Films (Germany), Akkeri Films (Iceland)
Sales: Rediance
Venue: Locarno (Concorso Internazionale)
In English and Old Scots
86 minutes
