Ben Rivers
1972 (52 года)Ah, Liberty!
Ben Rivers
A family's place in the wilderness, outside of time; free-range animals and children, junk and nature, all within the most sublime landscape. The work aims at an idea of freedom, which is reflected in the hand-processed Scope format, but is undercut with a sense of foreboding. There's no particular story; beginning, middle or end, just fragments of lives lived, rituals performed.
Ah, Liberty!
There Is a Happy Land Further Awaay
Ben Rivers
This new work is developed from footage collected during a trip to the remote and beautiful sub-tropical island of Vanuatu in the South Pacific. In March 2015, after Rivers’ visit, Vanuatu was devastated by Cyclone Pam, laying waste large parts of the islands. River’s 16mm lm material has become a record of a place that has irrevocably changed. Filmed on 16mm and then digitised, island imagery of active volcanoes, underwater WW2 debris, children playing, and wrecked boats transform into intangible digital recollections of the island. Images of the eroded land merge with eroding lm and deteriorate until they are no longer recognisable.
There Is a Happy Land Further Awaay
Look Then Below
Ben Rivers
Therese Henningsen
Ben Rivers' films study the otherworldly, looking for places and stories outside the daily conventions of reality. Look Then Below was filmed in a Somerset transformed into a coloured, mist-enveloped island in an oily ocean with a cave basking in a subterranean glow. Time seems to stand still there. After Slow Action and Urth, this is the final part of a trilogy developed with American SF author Mark von Schlegell.
Look Then Below
Slow Action
Ben Rivers
Slow Action, Ben Rivers’ first exhibition at Matt’s Gallery, is a post-apocalyptic science fiction film that brings together a series of four 16mm works which exist somewhere between documentary, ethnographic study and fiction. Continuing his exploration of curious and extraordinary environments, Slow Action applies the idea of island biogeography - the study of how species and eco-systems evolve differently when isolated and surrounded by unsuitable habitat - to a conception of the Earth in a few hundred years; the sea level rising to absurd heights, creating hyperbolic utopias that appear as possible future mini-societies. This series of constructed realities explores the environments of self-contained lands and the search for information to enable the reconstruction of soon to be lost worlds.
Slow Action
This Is My Land
Ben Rivers
A hand-processed portrait of Jake Williams – who lives alone within miles of forest in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Jake always has many jobs on at any one time, rarely throws anything away, is an expert mandolin player, and has compost heaps going back many years. He has a different sense of time to most people in the 21st Century, which is explicitly expressed in his idea for creating hedges by putting up bird feeders.
This Is My Land
Sack Barrow
Ben Rivers
The march of time claims another casualty. Sack Barrow documents (and laments) the out-dated, but functioning, technology of a family-owned electroplating factory in the weeks around its closure — its old ways now unsustainable in the modern world.
Sack Barrow
Things
Ben Rivers
Things is a lyrical analysis of the objects we gather around us, split into sections loosely based on the seasons. Rivers’ films are, typically, intimate portrayals of solitary beings or isolated communities. In Things however, he turns his attention to the unexplored objects, thoughts and memories from inside his own home. The film is a collision of individual fragments of video and sound, which together complete an abstract, humorous and intimate picture. In the Summer section for example, we witness a squirrel attacking a coconut model of another squirrel. In its attention to small moments, the film is a rumination of the things we gather around us.
Things
The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers
Ben Rivers
Oliver Laxe
Shooting against the staggering beauty of the Moroccan landscape, from the rugged terrain of the Atlas Mountains to the stark and surreal emptiness of the desert, with its encroaching sands and abandoned film sets, a director abandons his own film set and descends into a hallucinatory, perilous adventure of cruelty, madness and malevolence. A Paul Bowles story combined with observational footage forms a multi-layered excavation into the illusion of cinema itself.
The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers
Krabi, 2562
Anocha Suwichakornpong, Ben Rivers
Siraphan Wattanajinda, Arak Amornsupasiri
Explores the landscape and stories within the community of Krabi, Southern Thailand. A major tourist destination in Thailand, the filmmakers want to capture the town in this specific moment where the pre-historic, the more recent past and the contemporary world collide, sometimes uneasily.
Krabi, 2562