It profoundly affected me as Two Years At Sea gives the audience plenty to do and as with lots of Rivers other works blends reality and fiction to create a dreamlike hybrid of a film. It is a style of film when not much happens but it does this beautifully and a kind of which there are not many around. The film breathes and lives and frees itself from the shackles of narrative and exposition trading them for mood and atmosphere.
The film follows Jake Williams a recluse living of grid in the wilds of a pine forrest in Aberdeenshire. Nothing is explained in the film and we never find out who we're watching, where he is, why he lives like this, whether it's real or not. Even the title is a mystery although it refers to the two years Williams spent working at at sea Rivers says.
In the film we see the wiry, bearded Williams going about his lone existence: making coffee, having a shower, reading a book. Except nothing about this man's life is ordinary. A great guardian article on the film describes his house as "a cross between a bric-a-brac shop and a municipal dump, every corner filled with old books and records, tools, farm machinery, skis, oil lamps, woodpiles. And around his smallholding are decaying caravans filled with even more junk." This describes it perfectly but all of this junk adds texture and potential never quite knowing what the inventive Williams can make out of it. Rivers' film presents Williams' life as a fantasy of perfect solitude, of complete freedom in a land of do-as-you-please, with nothing to do and all the time in the world. Alternatively, he could be the last man on earth.
There is something of the bizarre too that makes it at once bewildering but enchanting and some of the images stay with you. The morning rituals ands the weird shower in the corner of the kitchen. The caravans floating up into the air revealed to be it being winched up into trees to form a quirky tree house. The "boat" made from plastic drums and wood being carried over a huge distance to build it. Williams life seems to be whim and fanciful at times.
Visually the film has a really rich style. Shot on old 16mm cameras in monochrome the blacks are often very black and the whites really white. The film stock is sometimes of such high speed that it looks like there is a permanent snow storm. every image seems to be constructed every movement, frame and action within it help to build the world that Williams inhabits. Williams too
I love the style and the content and of creating this weird hybrid of fact and fiction. It links back to my recurring themes of representation, character, narrative and the ecstatic truth. It is a style I would like to experiment with and possibly build my own version of.
Jinhee Choi reiterates this in his essay The Ethics of Contemplation in her book Cine-Ethics: Ethical Dimensions of Film Theory, and add how this effects the spectatorship. She states "Rivers projects Jake as one of the most content human beings on earth, with his secluded bucolic life filled with objects and past memories. Jake who is reading by his desk or falling asleep by the fire, resembles the look of a contented philosopher. The slow rhythm of the film expands the subjects of the contemplation to include the spectator; one not only observes and contemplates Jakes "simple life" but also reflects on his or her own life and perhaps the desire to escape from it".
Rivers states he is often drawn to people like Williams, eccentrics and outcasts who have created their own realities far from civilisation. "They're all fiercely individual," Rivers says of his subjects. "I'm interested in worlds people have created – very specific, hermetic worlds that haven't needed to conform to perceptions of the way we should live."
This is perhaps we all feel sometimes and this sentiment is backed up by Kristin Thomas who on a blog post entitled Ponds and performers: Two experimental Documentaries, notes "As with any film about someone who has a simpler life, we are lured to contemplate our own occasional fantasies of giving up societies complex challenges and joys and living somewhere isolated and peaceful". I certainly felt like this about the film it is slow, it is bewildering but it is a pure sort of escapism too.
However although Two Years At Sea is a work of fiction although it feels real. The Jake we see in the film is "an exaggeration," Rivers explains as the real Williams has friends, computers and does not live full time in solitude. He directed Jake like an actor. As I mentioned earlier there are touches of surrealism, too. In what you could call the film's big special-effects sequence, one of Jake's caravans magically levitates up in the air while he takes a nap inside. When he wakes up and opens the door, he is up a tree. "Even if its a re-enactment of things he would ordinarily do, you're still fictionalising someone to an extent," Rivers says, citing the fact that documentary greats like Robert Flaherty and Humphrey Jennings also staged events. Flaherty's Nanook of the North is actually pretty close to "mockumentaries" like Spinal Tap, he says.
Rivers is aware of the others working in this field and that there is an ever increasing place for this type of film within cinema today. In an interview with Jason Wood for his book, Last Words; Considering Contemporary Cinema he mentions "Perhaps its a little quietness and reflection in terms of insanity. Of course some folk found it slow, but I think when audiences were open to go on the trip, to immerse themselves in this world, then it could offer something different to the usual experience which is beholden to plot and exposition. My film does not stand alone either; there are other examples of contemporary filmmakers offering worlds that encourage more imagination on the part of the viewer so that its not just about asking for a narrative but asking for the audience to partake in completing the film".
Since Rivers started making Two Years At Sea, a new term has found purchase in film circles: "slow cinema" – meaning the type of contemplative, observational movie where image (and soundtrack) takes precedence over conventional narrative. The same gurdian article quoted earlier brackets into this category international auteurs such as Béla Tarr and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, possibly with Tarkovsky and Antonioni the movement's spiritual forefathers. Theres is work I will seek out although I have seem some Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The term fits Rivers' work well. At times the film almost slows to the stillness of a photograph. They are cinemagraphs of staic images with a tiny amount of motion in a static image. From trees moving against the sky, to socks blowing on a washing line, or a cloud drifting across a woodland landscape.
TWO YEARS AT SEA - TRAILER from Ben Rivers on Vimeo.
I usually like more going on in my cinema not in terms of action but character and narrative. However i found Two Years at Sea beguiling for all of the reasons mentioned here. I am not 100% sure it is a way I would want to work but there is plenty to take from it. the visuals, pacing, mise-en-scene and sense of the bizarre to name but a few. The visual style and cinematography is excellent. Whilst not wanting to run out and create slow cinema such as this I can see a voice over working excellently with timilar imagery in my own work. When I always find myself going too OTT in terms of the content of my own work Two Years at Sea is a great reminder that sometimes less is more.
WHAT I WILL TAKE FROM TWO YEARS AT SEA
- The quality of some of the images. Style over substance never but often achingly beautiful cinematography that provides style to support the substance.
- Following on from above the cinematography, pacing and visual richness of this with a voice over would suit my own style well.
- The "blending" of fiction and fact. He operates often in a parallel universe at once here but outside of the mainstream. These are seamlessly woven together to show an abstract alternative version of reality that at the same provides a mirror or flip-side to contrast with reality.
- The fascination with loose character and narrative. Often characters at the fringes of society and he shines a light into the "walled city" worlds and environments and created societies they operate in.
- The creation of myth from reality and the magical qualities he develops in his work.
- The less formal structure and slowness of the film. Make the audience work a little and fill in some of the blanks emotionally and intellectually.
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