His work ranges from themes about exploring unknown wilderness territories to candid and intimate portrayals of real-life subjects. It often involves following and filming people who have in some way separated themselves from society, the raw film footage provides Rivers with a starting point for creating oblique narratives imagining alternative existences in marginal worlds. His subjects are often people who have in some way separated themselves from society, the raw film footage provides Rivers with a starting point for creating oblique narratives imagining alternative existences in marginal worlds.
He states "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."
Rivers uses old hand wound Bolex cameras and hand develops the 16 mm film, which shows the evidence of the elements it has been exposed to – the materiality of this medium forming part of the narrative. Like many of those who he follows for his work he is as self reliant as he can be shooting, processing and editing his films himself to stay in artistic and technical control of his work. His narratives are loose as he comments "Too much exposition is the kind of thing that makes me bored with Hollywood movies," he says. "I like films that leave a lot to the audience."
The following quotes are excerpts from an interview for his film The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers, for the BFI he offered some insight into his working methods and preoccupations with particular reference to this film.
"Some years ago, I started thinking about joining the small and relatively unsung genre of behind-the-scenes films. This may have come about through reflection on my own practice as a filmmaker, questioning the urge to create worlds, and the obsessiveness that can cause you to disregard other aspects of life. Filmmaking consumes my time, and my whole life revolves around thinking about them, travelling to make them, editing for months in dark rooms, working on soundtracks, and then travelling to show them. It makes sense to me that, at some point, I would want to directly make a film about this obsessive construction."
"For my film The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers, I wanted to move among different realms of reality – storytelling, songs, observation of a film being made, fiction – so that, in the end, the viewer is uncertain about where the fiction begins and ends. There were a number of films that I thought about while developing the project that were either observational documentaries about films being made or fictional recreations of a film set. What ties them all together is that they each show the darker side of filmmaking and its repercussions. I’m interested in the question of why filmmakers want to expose the dark side of filmmaking. There is something perversely compelling about seeing someone who is a mirror version of yourself being taken down a road of obsession and disaster, finding what at the end?"
THE SKY TREMBLES AND THE EARTH IS AFRAID AND THE TWO EYES ARE NOT BROTHERS - TRAILER from Ben Rivers on Vimeo.
A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness is another from the Rivers canon of loners living outside of society. It follows an unnamed character through three seemingly disparate moments in his life. With little explanation, we join him alongside a 15-person collective in isolation in the majestic wilderness of a small island off Northern Finland, and also during a concert as the singer and guitarist of a black metal band in Norway. Marked by loneliness, ecstatic beauty and an optimism of the darkest sort, A Spell is a for the existence of utopia in the present. A Spell also lies somewhere between fiction and non-fiction, it is at once a document of experience and an experience itself, an inquiry into transcendence that sees the cinema as a site for transformation.
A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS (TRAILER) from Ben Rivers on Vimeo.
Terror 2007 is a real step away from much of Rivers traditional themes and styles relying on archive or found footage as Rivers describes it. It constructs a forced narrative from a huge variety of sub-genres from the horror genre using them to provide a critique of the terror that these bring to audiences. At the same time he is exploiting their shock value and exposes the structuralism, smoke and mirrors and tropes that haunt the genre. The film is Rivers self proclaimed "love letter to the genre"
Noel Lawrence from Provocateur pictures sums it up thus “This masterfully edited compilation documentary analyzes the morphology of the horror film. Stringing together the most common tropes and scenes of slashers, zombie flicks, slumber party massacres, etc. into a single meta-horror opus, Rivers not so much deconstructs the genre as provides a tribute that reveals its limitations but also its visceral power."
Terror! from Ben Rivers on Vimeo.
WHAT I WILL TAKE FORWARD FROM BEN RIVERS WORK.
- The quality of some of the images. Style over substance never but often achingly beautiful cinematography that provides style to support the substance
- 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 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 fact that he is by and large a one man band which affords him the luxury of creating the work he wants to.
- The fact he is not bogged down too much in technology. Wind up 16mm Bolex forTwo Years at Sea.
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