12/08/2024 - Ben Rivers’ magnificent feature film invites us to observe the daily life of a character outside of time, a modern-day mystic who lives in accordance with nature’s rhythms

British artist and director Ben Rivers is returning to the Locarno Film Festival (where he also presented his last two films), specifically the International Competition, with his latest work Bogancloch [+see also:
interview: Ben Rivers
film profile]. Having previously played the lead in one of the director’s earliest short films, as well as in his feature film debut, Jake Williams - who illuminates each and every frame he appears in - allows himself to be filmed as if an animal which has no fear of human beings because it’s aware of the respect and empathy they feel in its regard. Bogancloch is an intimate and poignant yet wholly unsentimental story about a man who’s fighting to defend his own freedom.

Bogancloch is the name of the forest surrounding Jake Williams’ home, a remote refuge in the depths of the Scottish Highlands. The film follows the life of this hermit, or rather modern mystic, who lives in accordance with nature’s rhythms. The seasons pass with, at times, stupefying nimbleness. Snow covers the roof of the residence like a blanket trying to protect it from the cold. But Williams’ approach to life remains unchanged. What he wants is both incredibly straightforward and, ultimately, complex: he wants to live in symbiosis with nature without ever trying to tame it. The scene where Williams gets the tub outside his house ready for a wholly unexpected winter bath is stupefying in this respect. Regardless of the pungent cold or the effort this bath requires (lighting the fire to heat the water, emptying the tub of snow…), Bogancloch’s hero enters into symbiosis with nature, adapting to rhythms of life of which we couldn’t even conceive. Through his poetic and hyper-realistic approach, Rivers forces the audience to empathise with his protagonist, to share in his everyday acts, to guess what hides beneath his half-closed eyes as he dozes in the shade of a tree which embraces him like a baby in a crib. It’s this shared intimacy, the empathy which oozes from every frame, which transforms Bogancloch into a poignantly intense human saga. Williams’ eventual “undressing”, as if some kind of modern Saint Francis who finally frees himself from all terrestrial pretensions, is particularly symbolic.

The sounds in this film, whether cats miaowing, birds singing, fire crackling or wind blowing through the trees, are amplified and dilated, becoming characters in and of themselves. The final scene, where an unexpected zoom morphing into a vertiginous overhead shot helps us to understand that Rivers is distancing himself more and more from his protagonist without detracting from the intensity of sounds accompanying him, is touching in this respect. The protagonist becomes a micro-dot in the galaxy but nature’s sounds which punctuate his life never leave him.

Bogancloch is an intimate and personal portrait of a man who has decided to remove himself from society to live an alternative and intentionally marginal life, and it’s this existence that Rivers films, with respect becoming outright reverence. With an oblique narrative which is part documentary and part fiction, the director reconstructs Williams’ life from an alternative viewpoint, both internal and external. Through the medium of film, the magical everyday gestures which have been carried out thousands of times by the protagonist, take the form of a mysterious ritual, which we have the honour of observing close-up, as if part of it. This search for authenticity, but also rituality, recalls the mystical potency of Maya Deren’s films, or the cathartic mystery of Julia Margaret Cameron’s characters. Ultimately, Bogancloch is an unforgettable film which might even make us feel a little more human.

Bogancloch is produced by British firms Urth Productions and Hopscotch Films, in co-production with Flaneur Films (Germany) and Akkeri Films (Iceland), and is sold worldwide by China’s Rediance.

(Translated from Italian)