Worlds: Selected Works by Ben Rivers (2003-2022): Ghosts in the Machine (Review)

Released on Blu-ray by Second Run this week, Worlds: Selected Works by Ben Rivers is a collection of short films – some twenty-four of varying length across two discs – by the internationally renowned British artist and filmmaker, whose experimental work often focuses on subjects that have separated themselves from society.

Prior to viewing this release I’d only ever seen one film by Rivers – 2011’s Two Years ar Sea – almost exactly a decade ago. The eighty minute film, shot on 16mm black and white, followed an ageing, bearded hermit going about his daily existence in the wilds of Scotland. That hermit, Jake Williams, features again on a couple of occasions here – most notably in the 2006 short This is My Land, which serves as a forerunner to the later feature. With that half-remembered experience, I went into Worlds: Selected Works by Ben Rivers expecting something attuned to the land and people, and keen to present them in the most experimental and enigmatic form possible. I was not disappointed.

Rivers is an ethnographic filmmaker, but that doesn’t necessarily mean his films feature protagonists front and centre. People are often absent from his work, though, like ghosts in the machine, their indelible fingerprints or footsteps leave their mark. Rivers chooses to shoot his subjects in a way that wilfully makes the audience consider our relationship with the environment around us. A good example of that absenteeism of people can be found in the curious 2004 short We the People, which is inspired by Aldous Huxley’s 1952 novel The Devils of Loudun.

Based on the witch-hunting mass hysteria that gripped the small French town of Loudun in the 17th Century that went on to inspire Ken Russell’s 1971 opus The Devils, Rivers takes his 16mm camera to a model village in Winchester, overlaying various snippets of audio from movie soundtracks to suggest an unseen victim being chased by a similarly invisible lynch mob. The sound of dogged pursuit alone unnerves the audience, as the previously innocuous exhibit – fun for all the family – is lent a sinister edge. This is followed up a year later in 2005’s House, a film about ghosts – one of several made by Rivers. Initially he spent some time looking for a house to film in but, when none matched the image that he had in his head he set about making a model to shoot in instead. After six months of work, the five minute film was completed with Rivers training his camera through a series of empty rooms, each haunted by the spectral presence of lives past.

Occasionally, Rivers captures the precise moment in which mankind’s mark is left on the environment. In 2011’s Sack Barrow, he takes his 16mm camera to a family-run metal plating factory in London a month before it closed down for good. He isn’t really interested in the technical processes of the factory or the exact realities of the tasks its workforce are responsible for, preferring instead to suggest an alchemy beyond his comprehension. As the factory winds down the workers become like ghostly apparitions, and one of them, singing ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes‘ captures the eerie transitory nature completely. This disinterest in the process he’s capturing can keep an audience at arm’s length, as it’s a somewhat aloof and dispassionate, outsider appreciation of the action, and it’s further evident in This is My Land – which follows Williams as he goes about his business without explanation or commentary.

It could be argued that Rivers’ intention is to mythologise the activities of his subjects, presenting them in a way that can compare with the varying opinions and theories future archaeologists may put forward when uncovering the marks they have left upon the earth. In some instances this mythology is purposefully fabricated, like in 2008’s Ah, Liberty! where Rivers captured and on hand processed in black and white cinemascope, the Pocock family – specifically the children – whom he coached to perform unknowable rituals before various pieces and scraps of discarded and abandoned technology.

It’s a purposefully fictional enterprise, a series of events that pose questions that Rivers isn’t interested in answering. The Coming Race from two years earlier depicts a mass of people traversing a rocky mountain. Is it a mass trespass? A religious pilgrimage? Again, Rivers doesn’t want to consider the reason or motivation, but the foggy black and white footage of the procession, wrapped up against the elements, becomes an ominous spectacle thanks to the asynchronous sound effects he overlays across the film – a distant rumbling that implies nothing good will come of this trek.

What is incredibly apparent in Rivers’ work is an appreciation of nineteenth century literature and twentieth century cinema. The Coming Race, for example, takes its name from an 1870 novel by E. G. E. Bulwer-Lytton, while 2008’s Origins of the Species is self explanatory, deriving from a visit to film a man known only as S. in the Scottish Highlands who, it’s said, has spent all his life reading the works of Darwin. Knowing that Darwin spent his final years considering the world from his outpost in Kent, Rivers leaps at the chance to draw a comparison with his subject doing the very same in the Highlands.

2008’s The Shape of Things has suggestions of H. G. Wells, but Rivers’ portrayal of some of the earliest depictions of man from around the world is associated to another literary figure in the form of William Bronk, and his poem At Tikal. Cinematic influences pervade in the title choice of 2003’s Old Dark House, which references James Whale’s 1932 film and sees Rivers’ Bolex camera capturing the interior of a long-abandoned, fire-damaged house he has broken into – the dancing torch beams feeling like the probing examinations of an alien race.

Also from 2003, The Hyrcynium Wood is another hand-processed gothic film featuring comedian Joanna Neary (of Ideal fame), and an asynchronous score pilfered from various Hammer horror movies. 2009’s I Know Where I’m Going not only cribs the title of Powell and Pressburger’s 1945 film, it also inspires the road trip to the film’s location (the Isle of Mull), that Rivers undertakes, and the stopover in Leicester to film Jan Zalasiewicz – a geoscientist who posits the notion of a future Earth, long-since abandoned and left for archaeologists to consider. It’s a theme that, as I’ve said, chimes with Rivers’ preoccupations as a filmmaker, and footage of the interior of his car covered in snow (thanks to the decision to leave the windows open overnight), implies an existence now devoid of humanity.

Worlds: Selected Works by Ben Rivers was released on Blu-ray on Monday 27th November by Second Run. At twenty-four films running to 415 minutes across two discs it’s fair to say that the release is generous enough without extras, but it also comes with a thirty-two page booklet featuring new writing from Erika Balsom, and notes on each of the films by Rivers himself.

Mark’s Archive – Ben Rivers Selected Works