Ben Rivers

Part thriller, part documentary, part skin flick, Grief Encounter defies categorization. Our heroine is Eloise, a glamorous huntress who attends funerals to seduce mourners. Grief Encounter flips the traditional patriarchal power dynamic set out for men and women; Eloise is a kind of modern-day Don Giovanni; a charming sadomasochist turned on by male vulnerability. This is a film about sex but it is also about a woman who refuses to conform.

Made for Somewhere From Here to Heaven, exhibition at Askuna Zentroa, Bilbao.

A collaboration between filmmaker Ben Rivers and sculptor Céline Condorelli, with contributions by writer and artist Jay Bernard, After Work blurs boundaries between labour and leisure using nimble essayistic encounters that are as suggestive as they are concrete.

A silent parable that might just as well play out on an industrial estate outside the city as on another planet altogether. A master of 16 mm film, Ben Rivers draws us into a dismal landscape, whose mood suggests toxic devastation, yet ultimately there will be signs of life. Six minutes which, despite a limited palette of colours, generate very strong impressions.

"La Montagne Invisible" is an installation conceived as a journey into the infinite : an immersive multi-channel AV installation that transforms the material of a Finnish wanderer's secular pilgrimage towards a utopian summit into an infinite video labyrinth of beginnings, endings and disjunctive in-betweens.

short film by Ben Rivers

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Filmed in various places over the globe, Ghost Strata explores the differing scales of impact that humanity’s presence has on the earth in the past, present and into the future. Found sound and text create a meditation on time, memory, leftovers and extinction.

Filmed in various places over the globe, Ghost Strata explores the differing scales of impact that humanity’s presence has on the earth in the past, present and into the future. Found sound and text create a meditation on time, memory, leftovers and extinction.

Filmed in various places over the globe, Ghost Strata explores the differing scales of impact that humanity’s presence has on the earth in the past, present and into the future. Found sound and text create a meditation on time, memory, leftovers and extinction.

Based on Gertrude Stein’s eponymously named screenplay, written in 1929 as European fascism was building momentum. Beatrice Gibson’s adaptation, set almost a century later in contemporary Paris, deploys Stein’s script as a talismanic guide through a contemporary moment of comparable social and political unrest. An original soundtrack, written especially for the film by British composer Laurence Crane, responds to the repetition, duplication and duality at play in Stein’s script. Both a fictional thriller and an act of collective representation, Deux Soeurs proposes empathy and friendship as means to reckon with an increasingly turbulent present.

A film of a sloth, using three-colour separation to show sloth time.

Reframing our current political moment in intimate terms, Gibson’s urgent snapshot of worldwide social calamities doubles as a document of practical resistance. In Gibson’s hands, the music of Pauline Oliveros and the words of poets CA Conrad and Eileen Myles imbue images of street riots, the Grenfell Fire, and the mass refugee migration with complexity and grace.

In this short film of Cowan Court, which was completed by 6a architects in late 2016, Rivers has turned his camera onto the interactions between architecture and landscape within which the students of Churchill College, University of Cambridge live and work.

In this short film of Cowan Court, which was completed by 6a architects in late 2016, Rivers has turned his camera onto the interactions between architecture and landscape within which the students of Churchill College, University of Cambridge live and work.

In this short film of Cowan Court, which was completed by 6a architects in late 2016, Rivers has turned his camera onto the interactions between architecture and landscape within which the students of Churchill College, University of Cambridge live and work.

In this short film of Cowan Court, which was completed by 6a architects in late 2016, Rivers has turned his camera onto the interactions between architecture and landscape within which the students of Churchill College, University of Cambridge live and work.

Shot in a creaky, wooden-floored Parisian recording studio at an inaugural three-day “forum of ideas” focusing on the manifold possibilities of “Resistance”, the film initially appears to be a structuralist document of a philosophical discussion in-the-round.

For Dreaming the Dark: hands that see, eyes that touch, Ana Vaz invited artists and filmmakers whose work trust cinema’s capacity to transform relationships between the body and the camera to propose works that will engage with both perception and embodiment. Could cinema be an art of embodiment? By what rituals and actions could vision become tactile?

Rivers and Suwichakornpong’s first collaboration, commissioned by the 2018 Thai Biennale.

The last woman on Earth: Filmed inside Biosphere 2 in Arizona, Urth forms a cinematic meditation on ambitious experiments, constructed environments and visions of the future. The film considers what an endeavor such as Biosphere 2 might mean today and in the near future, in terms of humankind’s relationship with the natural world.

A delirious sci-fi riff on the Arabian Nights' 'Tale of the Hunchback', that submerges us in a technological dystopia reigned by Dalaya.com, a mega-corporation that forces its employees to 'relax' at company-run medieval reenactments.

A delirious sci-fi riff on the Arabian Nights' 'Tale of the Hunchback', that submerges us in a technological dystopia reigned by Dalaya.com, a mega-corporation that forces its employees to 'relax' at company-run medieval reenactments.

It is always hard like this, not having a world, to imagine one, to go to the far edge apart and imagine, to wall whether in or out, to build a kind of cage for the sake of feeling the bars around us, to give shape to a world. And oh, it is always a world and not the world. – William Bronk

Set in a deserted, silent at, laden with mementoes and artefacts belonging to a now departed inhabitant. The film pieces together an elusive biography of a traveller to far flung destinations. There is a heavy stillness in the deserted space, the inhabitants faded memories are retraced by Rivers, but remain inescapably unresolved; narratives flicker and then disperse in succession; the immateriality of life is reflected in the material left behind.

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.

A portrait of the painter Rose Wylie at work in her studio at home in Kent. The film reflects on the meeting of the two artists and the mingling of their creative processes. The films sound is a collage of recordings taken from around Rose’s home and fragments from films that she has watched. Shots from her house and studio, including details of encrusted paint pots, brushes, paintings, drawings and magazine clippings demonstrate Wylie’s divergent reference material which ranges from historical figures and celebrity culture to the everyday objects around her.

“A meditation on the illusion of filmmaking, shot behind the scenes on a film being made on the otherworldly beaches of Sidi Ifni, Morocco. The film depicts strange activities, with no commentary or dialogue; it appears as a fragment of film, dug up in a distant future—a hazy, black-and-white hallucinogenic world.”—Ben Rivers

“A meditation on the illusion of filmmaking, shot behind the scenes on a film being made on the otherworldly beaches of Sidi Ifni, Morocco. The film depicts strange activities, with no commentary or dialogue; it appears as a fragment of film, dug up in a distant future—a hazy, black-and-white hallucinogenic world.”—Ben Rivers

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.

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.

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.

Eden Kötting draws bright images on transparent glass, while talking with her dad about the world and the people who run it.

A collection of films from an eclectic array of contributors commissioned to raise funds for the Bristol independent cinema The Cube.

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.

A man at three disparate moments in his life: as a member of a fifteen-person collective on a small Estonian island, alone in the wilderness of Northern Finland and as the singer of a neo-pagan black metal band in Norway. Three moments for a radical proposition for the creation of utopia in the present.

A man at three disparate moments in his life: as a member of a fifteen-person collective on a small Estonian island, alone in the wilderness of Northern Finland and as the singer of a neo-pagan black metal band in Norway. Three moments for a radical proposition for the creation of utopia in the present.

A man at three disparate moments in his life: as a member of a fifteen-person collective on a small Estonian island, alone in the wilderness of Northern Finland and as the singer of a neo-pagan black metal band in Norway. Three moments for a radical proposition for the creation of utopia in the present.

A man at three disparate moments in his life: as a member of a fifteen-person collective on a small Estonian island, alone in the wilderness of Northern Finland and as the singer of a neo-pagan black metal band in Norway. Three moments for a radical proposition for the creation of utopia in the present.

A man at three disparate moments in his life: as a member of a fifteen-person collective on a small Estonian island, alone in the wilderness of Northern Finland and as the singer of a neo-pagan black metal band in Norway. Three moments for a radical proposition for the creation of utopia in the present.

On the island of Tanna, a part of Vanuatu, an archipelago in Melanesia, strange rites are enacted and time passes slowly while the inhabitants await the return of the mysterious John.

On the island of Tanna, a part of Vanuatu, an archipelago in Melanesia, strange rites are enacted and time passes slowly while the inhabitants await the return of the mysterious John.

On the island of Tanna, a part of Vanuatu, an archipelago in Melanesia, strange rites are enacted and time passes slowly while the inhabitants await the return of the mysterious John.

I First Saw the Light channels the vestige of Joseph Carey Merrick’s surviving output. Better known as The Elephant Man, he produced a little noticed two-page autobiography, sold to those attending a freak show in which he was displayed, opposite the royal London hospital in London's Whitechapel High Street. There is one surviving copy of the pamphlet. Its text is coupled with starkly filmed sequences of a model church he also constructed, now hermetically sealed within a glass and ebony container, together forming the basis for this poignant, silent film. A reminder of Merrick’s profound humanity in the face of extreme adversity, it also serves as an auto-biographical footnote and reminder of David Lynch’s eponymous feature film on Merrick, in which the model is a central motif and metaphor for his psychological and emotional fluctuations.

Jake Williams performs the song 'More Than Just A Dram' while making tea on an open fire.

Three mythical stories from the Republic of Vanuatu, an island nation located in the South Pacific Ocean, concerning the origin of humans, why pigs walk on all fours, and why a volcano sits where it does.

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.

Experimental film following a bearded Scottish hermit as he goes about his outcast life.

Experimental film following a bearded Scottish hermit as he goes about his outcast life.

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.

May Tomorrow Shine the Brightest of All Your Many Days As It Will Be Your Last (2009, co-directed with Paul Harnden) shakily shows cloaked figures moving through woods, followed by soldiers, and seeking quiet places to read, seemingly in escape from some kind of disaster. A metallic ring obscures words spoken offscreen; wind blows through shimmering trees. It’s only occasionally that we see faces beneath their cloaks—a solemn old man, a blankly gazing old woman.

The third in the series of experimental "horror" features, this collection features the shorts The Psychotic Odyssey of Richard Chase (1999) by Cary Burtt, J.X. Williams' Satan Claus (1975), Jason Bognacki's Loma Lynda: The Red Door (2008), Terror! (2007) by Ben Rivers, Mike Kuchar's Born of the Wind (1961), and a collaboration from Guy Maddin and Marie Losier called Manuelle Labor (2007). While not featured in the program, an extra includes the short It Gets Worse (2008) by Clifton Childree.

A fragmented road trip through Britain on the peripheries. Down empty roads, off in the wilderness, a few lone stragglers.

A tribute to Alice, the survivor of Friday 13th, edited from a VHS tape.

Charting the beginnings of the time, through the descent of man, on to an uncertain future - all shot throughout the seasons in the garden of S, who lives in the wilderness and builds contraptions.

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.

A film by Ben Rivers

“This masterfully edited compilation documentary analyzes the morphology of the horror film. Stringing together the most common tropes and scenes of slashers, zombie flicks, slumber party massacres, etc. into a single meta-horror opus, Rivers not so much deconstructs the genre as provides a tribute that reveals its limitations but also its visceral power. It’s films like this that explain why I do film programs like ‘Experiments in Terror’” – Noel Lawrence, Provocateur Pictures.

A film by 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.

A portrait of Astika, who lives on an island in Denmark. He has lived in a run down farm house for 15 years and his project has been to let the land around him grow unchecked, but now he has been forced to move out by people who prefer more pristine neighbours.

A film by Ben Rivers

In an impressionistic rush that combines patina-marked images of shoes made by hand with the attributes of a genre film, Rivers returns to a favorite topic: objects as the bearers of their history. Shots of the cobbler at work highlight the handcrafting process, yet entirely without indicating the need for perfection. In general, purposefulness and the absence of fantasy are unlike Rivers. Ambiguity is thus waiting in the wings, in this case references to genre movies, exemplified in part by image distortion reminiscent of an old horror movie.

In an impressionistic rush that combines patina-marked images of shoes made by hand with the attributes of a genre film, Rivers returns to a favorite topic: objects as the bearers of their history. Shots of the cobbler at work highlight the handcrafting process, yet entirely without indicating the need for perfection. In general, purposefulness and the absence of fantasy are unlike Rivers. Ambiguity is thus waiting in the wings, in this case references to genre movies, exemplified in part by image distortion reminiscent of an old horror movie.

In an impressionistic rush that combines patina-marked images of shoes made by hand with the attributes of a genre film, Rivers returns to a favorite topic: objects as the bearers of their history. Shots of the cobbler at work highlight the handcrafting process, yet entirely without indicating the need for perfection. In general, purposefulness and the absence of fantasy are unlike Rivers. Ambiguity is thus waiting in the wings, in this case references to genre movies, exemplified in part by image distortion reminiscent of an old horror movie.

In an impressionistic rush that combines patina-marked images of shoes made by hand with the attributes of a genre film, Rivers returns to a favorite topic: objects as the bearers of their history. Shots of the cobbler at work highlight the handcrafting process, yet entirely without indicating the need for perfection. In general, purposefulness and the absence of fantasy are unlike Rivers. Ambiguity is thus waiting in the wings, in this case references to genre movies, exemplified in part by image distortion reminiscent of an old horror movie.

In an impressionistic rush that combines patina-marked images of shoes made by hand with the attributes of a genre film, Rivers returns to a favorite topic: objects as the bearers of their history. Shots of the cobbler at work highlight the handcrafting process, yet entirely without indicating the need for perfection. In general, purposefulness and the absence of fantasy are unlike Rivers. Ambiguity is thus waiting in the wings, in this case references to genre movies, exemplified in part by image distortion reminiscent of an old horror movie.

A mystery that began as a document of abandoned farms in South East England.

A person is heard fleeing an angry mob – yet the uncannily empty streets show no sign of the chase. A never-ending nightmare. Sound reveals the hidden history in an imagined place.

Rooms in an abandoned, burnt out house revealed by multiple in-camera superimpositions of a single torch-light. This marked the start of my hand-processing of film, which I continue to use.

IN TRANSIT created opportunities for artists and 46 young people with complex needs to collaborate on individual film portraits over an eight year period to 2013. The films describe each young person in a way that is personal, poetic and expansive integrating art into the processes of consultation and person centre planning during transition services. The films played a role in the future lives of the young people involved by revealing their individuality and means of accessing the world. They also informed social care providers, support workers and others involved in planning and providing services about their lives and aspirations.

It’s been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home – only the millions of last moments... nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments.” Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow A(nother) collaboration between film artists Ben Rivers and Ben Russell, the figures in this installation represent a conceptual prequel to the inquiry present in their feature project *A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness*. Taking its title from the Greek tragedian Aeschulys, *CALL NO MAN HAPPY UNTIL HE IS DEAD* presents a group of viking re-enactors whose vertiginous actions are variably synched to an explosive real-time collage of early black metal recordings. Man and violence, ritual and play, death as the dream of infinity.

Bogancloch will continue the ongoing project between the flmmaker and Jake Williams, a man who has lived in the middle of Clashindaroch Forest for the past four decades. The flm will fall somewhere between fction and documentary, showing quotidian aspects of his life, alongside constructed episodes of a more fctional and even dream-like nature, with other characters showing up, such as a singing group of ramblers. It will begin in a classroom, with Jake teaching a cosmic looking science experiment, and end moving out into the cosmos. Along the way there will be fre, snow, rain, roadkill and other unexpected things, flmed on b/w 16mm and 35mm flm, hand-processed. This technical aspect fts with Jake’s environment, being physical, open to accident and chance, and dirt.