Ben Rivers (b. 1972) emerged in the early 2000s as one of several young experimental filmmakers invigorated by ethnographic technique, but his short films immediately stood out for their curious imaginative leaps, redolent of both science fiction and lyric poetry; their wayward forms of portraiture; their interest in, and practice of, the handmade; and their often-feverish materiality. Twenty years later, Rivers’ now expansive filmography constitutes a veritable archipelago of elsewheres, as likely to be found in a factory on the outskirts of London as on the islands of Vanatu. His ambition seems to stem directly from the documentary encounter, such that his subjects frequently overspill the bounds of a single work: Jake Williams, subject of several films in this series, features in shorts (This Is My Land, More Than Just a Dram), features (Two Years at Sea, Bogancloch), and even wine promotions; The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (2015) was both a film and a book; Now, at Last! (2018) a film and installation (perhaps unsurprisingly for an artist so attentive to the dimensions of dwelling, Rivers is unusually adept at translating his film practice to the gallery space). A recent publication attributed to Rivers, playfully titled Collected Stories (Fireflies Press), comprises text by nineteen other authors—the latest in a long line of surrealist collaborations. 

Rivers’ films may be slow, but they never sit still. There is always some sly surprise in the film’s form coming to awareness of itself, taking after a sovereign subject. We sense that Rivers makes work to find out what it means, no matter where the films fall on the documentary-fiction continuum (though observation and dream may be the more operative duality). He is finally one of our signal cineastes not so much because of his taste for hand-processed emulsion or films maudits but rather because his work holds out hope that the cinema itself may be one of those autonomous zones that so attract him, in which solitudes are joined, time collects, and other worlds and ways of knowing are brought into being. – Max Goldberg

The HFA welcomes longtime friend and frequent guest Ben Rivers to the cinema to discuss his latest film Bogancloch and to introduce his addition to the program, Peter Watkins’ shimmering television bio-pic Edvard Munch (1974).