Artists in front of and behind the camera
Ben Rivers’s documentary is a portrait of a life lived in isolation, while a web series focuses on artists living in New York City
By Iain Millar | From issue 228, October 2011
Published online 19 Oct 11 (Features)
Artist Ben Rivers’s film “Two Years at Sea” was screened at the Venice Film Festival last month, where it won the Fipresci award for the best film in the orizzonti (experimental) section, and goes on show at the London Film Festival this month.
Rivers uses a handheld, wind-up, 16mm film camera, often using film stock past its sell by date (which he processes himself) to contemplate life at the margins, focusing on people and environments away from everyday civilisation, such as the disabled ex-servicemen in a soon to close factory in “Sack Barrow” (which won the Baloise Art Prize at this year’s Art Basel fair) and the faux anthropology of the “Slow Action” tetralogy, which purports to document post apocalyptic societies. For “Two Years at Sea”, he revisited the subject of his earlier short, “This is My Land”, 2006, which reflects on the life of Jake Williams, who lives in isolation in woodland in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Rivers said that he wanted to find a subject who chose such a lifestyle as a positive act, as opposed to someone who follows a hermetic existence as a reaction against the world.
The title, “Two Years at Sea” refers to what Williams did to begin his self-sufficient life: he spent two years as a sailor before striking out to live in self-imposed isolation.
Rivers’s aesthetic is ambiguous: “Two Years at Sea” can be seen as an exercise in formalist cinema, both via the limitations imposed by use of his wind-up camera and in his processing techniques, as well as in restrained use of editing and framing, or sometimes holding a scene so that movement within the frame is almost imperceptible. It is also a documentary: what we see is the life of another, undertaking recognisable tasks and following courses of action in narrative time.
