In late 2022, when Ben Rivers arrived in the Highlands of Scotland to start filming Jake Williams, the subject of his new film Bogancloch (premiering in the international competition in Locarno), he felt twinges of self-doubt.
“I just was thinking why am I here doing this again,” Rivers reflects. “Isn’t this absurd? His life hasn’t really changed.”
Williams, a modern-day hermit living in the forests, had also been at the centre of Rivers’ 2011 film, Two Years At Sea. The director questioned whether he could offer anything new. For the first two days, he didn’t film.
“Jake was asking me when we were going to start and I said ‘I am just thinking, just getting in the mood,’” says Rivers of his delay. “{But] I started seeing new details and thinking about what big major changes the world had been through. It was interesting that his life somehow remained quite untouched and intact. That turned it around for me – and then I was fine!”
Rivers had actually contemplated making a second film about Jake almost as soon as he finished the first. He knew that Jake had enjoyed the process.
“It was maybe a joke at first, him saying when are we going to make the next one and I said, ‘oh, let’s do it in about ten years’ time.’”
Bogancloch was made over a period of around a year. Rivers went up to Scotland five times during that period, staying for 10 days on each visit.
The filming technique was largely the same as the first-time round. The director doesn’t hurry. He shoots in black and white, using his old Bolex and a super 16mm Aaton.
In the film, he is on the lookout for different types of weather and for telling little details from Jake’s world, for instance a cat eating out of a pail or Jake walking in the yard as snow falls around him.
“I am fascinated by the elements. I do like watching them. Often times with those type of things, I am just trusting my gut. I turn the camera on, I am looking through the viewfinder and I just film for as long as it feels right.”
There is no contextualisation or voice-over but Rivers does show colour photographs that Jake took earlier in his life when he was working as a merchant seaman on ships going to the Middle East and India. On his trips to far flung places, Jake would buy audiotapes. His collection includes Persian and Indian music. The soundtrack on Bogancloch includes everything from jazz to campfire singalongs and even a bit of the poetry of Seamus Heaney.
“I avoid any explanation of Jake’s life or background but there is history in there with the photos and the music. You know this is a man with a past. Somehow, that poem also speaks to a past.”
Rivers edits on the computer – so he doesn’t avoid digital technology altogether – but he relishes working on film.
“I take all the footage home and process most of it in the sink…it’s a really pleasurable thing, part of the process that I really like, coming home and not just sending it [the film] to the lab [but] actually being involved with it, seeing it hanging up.”
Director and subject have a very strong rapport. “I think he [Jake] does trust me because of Two Years At Seaand an earlier short, This Is My Land, in 2006. He is very used to me there with the camera and he knows that I am going to show him the film before I release it to the world. He is confident he is not going to come across in a way he is unhappy with.”
There are moments when Jake falls fast asleep and Rivers continues to film him as he snoozes happily away. “He doesn’t mind those moments. He feels safe I guess.”
One of the most memorable set-pieces comes when Jake has a hot bath outdoors during heavy snowfall. This was one of the scenes that was “choreographed and set up.”
“He was in the bath for about two hours as I was getting all these different shots. He was very happy. He was loving it.”
Like the subjects in many of Rivers’ other films, Jake lives “a very physical life.” He’s a musician and he also used to work as a supply science teacher at a local school. One sequence shows him in the classroom with a group of kids who listen in rapt attention as he explains the inner workings of the sun.
“I wanted to give them presence,” Rivers explains why he shoots the children from a low angle.
This may be a film made in 2022/23 but the grainy black and white imagery makes it feel far older and evokes memories of old silent movies.
“Those films are definitely in my psyche. I love silent cinema, especially people like [Carl Theodor] Dreyer and [FW] Murnau, two of my absolute favourites,”
Bogancloch is an international affair. It has a Chinese sales agent, Rediance (who also represent Krabi, 2562, the 2019 film Rivers directed with Thai director, Anocha Suwichakornpong). The project was supported by Scottish Screen and Medienboard Experimental Fund, Berlin but also has Icelandic support. Its producers are director Rivers, John Archer (Hopscotch/Urth Productions) and Sarah Neely (Urth Productions), with co-pro credits going to Zsuzsanna Kiràly (Flaneur Films) and Hanna Björk Valsdóttir (Akkeri Films).
“It’s low budget but even [with] low budget you need lots of help. It’s not like when I made Two Years At Seawhen I got 30 grand from Film London and I just did it by myself,” Rivers says of the increasing complexities of international production financing. “Luckily, people do know me internationally…I haven’t actually got any money from England in quite a long time. I really do rely on these co-productions and help from abroad.”
Securing support from Screen Scotland was “complicated” because Rivers doesn’t live in Scotland but he made sure that everybody else involved in the production was Scottish-based.
“The film is obviously shot there. Jake is Scottish,” adds the director, who is contemplating a third one in about a decade to complete the trilogy.
Bogancloch is one of several of Rivers’ films to have screened in Locarno. It will receive its UK premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival later in the month. A UK distributor is yet to be announced but Rivers now has Two Years At Sea back in his ownership and is hoping eventually to release the two films as a double bill.
