Bogancloch
$15 Special Event Tickets
UK, 2024, DCP, color and b&w, 89 min.
DCP source: Filmmaker
Less a sequel than a further sequence of a serial poem, Bogancloch sets down in the same Scottish woods as This Is My Land and Two Years at Sea. Hardly a moment has passed in the life of the house—which in its rambling horizontality seems to demand Rivers’ widescreen frame—but its human denizen is visibly older and increasingly given to song. As in the previous films, Jake’s routines lend themselves to Bergsonian reveries on the elusive character of steam and the ricocheting sonics of old cassette tapes played over a loudspeaker. These continuities suggest one long arc, the disruptions another: a late sequence of a group of singers around a fire, staging a call and response between life and death, simultaneously draws Jake’s character into social reality as it grazes more ancient rites. A closing camera movement suggests that Jake’s world is beyond earthly reckoning and makes for a heavenly finish to this inexplicably uplifting film.