“It’s a blessing that Ben Rivers wanted to revisit this man’s life, and his fluid filmmaking style remains hauntingly captivating.”
It has been 13 years since Ben Rivers’ debut film Two years at sea Premiere in Venice. It was his second collaboration with Jake Williams after the short film This is my country. Both films are about the life of a man with a very cinematic face who lives alone near a forest in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. They were hybrid projects that mixed fictional elements created for the film with Williams’ own habits and daily routines. Rivers now returns to his farmhouse called Bogancloch. But the key here is really the “13 years,” as the main theme in both feature film projects, Two years at sea and his latest, Boganclochwas time itself.
The film opens with an actual return to Bogancloch. We’re not yet sure from where. Williams’ trailer is attached to the back of his car, and we understand that he still sleeps in it. But the car is much newer, a more current model. That means he’s been earning or making a good living in all the intervening years. This aspect of Williams’ life is not something the plots of either film have previously dealt with. Romanticization is a fair criticism of the films, and the economics of a solitary life doesn’t fit that tone. But still, the title Two years at sea referring to the time he literally spent at sea to afford this isolation. What does he do now, 13 years older, with his whiter hair, his wrinkled skin, his weaker body?
The structure is similar to the previous film, as is its grainy 16mm look. Still photographs from Williams’ own past separate the chapters. And this time they all seem to be from an Arab country. Did Jake work in Dubai for a while? He pulls out some old tapes we’ve never seen before. All in Arabic. Williams listens to them, hums some of the tunes. At this late age, when life is no longer as easy and flexible as it once was, he must be yearning for the strong and active days of youth.
But time cannot be turned back, we are powerless against time. Therefore, life and death, the world and our existence belong to them. As the song at the center of the film clearly expresses it: “Life says the world is mine…“Bogancloch has many similar elements in filmmaking as Two years at seabut Rivers also does a lot of things differently. Other people enter our world. Hikers walking through the woods singing songs around the campfire when Williams joins them. We know that in real life, Williams was always open and even welcoming to other people joining him. His life is not so isolated. This time we see him interacting with other people, we hear his voice. Singing, but also teaching. Yes, that’s how he earns his freedom, I guess. He teaches science to kids, and in the one lesson scene, he talks about the planets. But mostly about how the planets move and how the positions of the sun, moon and earth define what we call days, nights, months, years. And all of this leads to the same theme that it’s always been about…
Time. It is no coincidence that both films are set in four seasons, because in both cases the structure makes the viewer feel like it is two or three days at most. But the changes in climate, the snow-covered nature or the effects of summer make you aware of how time stretches out here in this rural area. And the point is, we are so small; tiny dots, not just in the vastness of the earth or the universe, but basically in time. Aging and death: we are helpless against them. Jake Williams and Ben Rivers think about this using the language of film. And offer peace somewhere in it.
Some of the new routes, such as a short scene in color after the campfire, seem unearned and only inserted to make non-repetitive stylistic choices. Personally, I don’t think Bogancloch is as sophisticated as Two years at sea. But to see Jake Williams again and see him at this time in his life is also a once in a lifetime experience. It’s a blessing that Ben Rivers wanted to revisit this man’s life and his fluid filmmaking style is still hauntingly captivating.
A line of dialogue from Alice Rohrwacher’s The Chimera came back to my mind while watching Boganclochwhen Italia asks about the abandoned train station: “Does it belong to everyone or does it belong to no one?“And that, I think, is the question.
