Bogancloch: Ben Rivers’ glorious new film continues his fascination with a Scottish forest-dweller

• Reviewed from the 2024 Locarno Film Festival

The silence of seclusion allows for other noises in Bogancloch. In the quiet away from the world and conversation, we hear birdsong, the wind through the pineneedles, the breaking of bracken, the crumple of gravel under the vulcanised rubber of a caravan’s tires. Ben Rivers’s new film is an old film and a new film. It’s old in the sense that it returns the subject of one of his earliest shorts This is My Land (2006), as well as the feature Two Years at Sea (2011): Jake Williams, a man who lives in rich self-sufficiency in the forest in Aberdeenshire. He trundles about in a graffitied caravan before winding back home to a bungalow of dirty windows, cobwebs and smoke, glass jars of various shapes and sizes and a few cats. With his bald pate and long white beard, he looks like a mixture of Tolstoy and Gandalf, or maybe Radagast, given his connection to nature. When he pulls on a woollen hat, he also has an air of Pootle from The Flumps (1977-1988). 

Rivers keeps his distance visually, allowing Williams to blend and even disappear into the landscape, but the audio is always intimately close. When a cat eats chicken bones, they break like tree trunks cracking. Hair and grain cross the screen, giving the film an archaic feel, though in the Instagram age, this kind of handmade authenticity can easily feel like a fetish. The first articulate sounds we hear in the film are songs on a cassette player, followed by Williams himself singing Blue Skies. Other people cross Williams’s path, fell walkers, folk singers: he even goes into a school to explain the Solar System, with the aid of a repurposed pub brolly, to a class of suitably baffled children.  

But the film, and Williams himself, is happiest in solitude. Colour interludes of decaying photographs of foreign climes and exotic locations tell us he is an ex-sailor. Those songs on the cassettes are in a foreign language and hint at exotic romance. At one point, colour breaks into the present, bringing rust and autumn; as well as the surprising yellow of Jake’s overalls. It also teases a potential sequel which Rivers has talked about making in colour. The pleasure of the film is that, if you are willing to spend some time with Jake on his own terms, there is an ease that comes with it. Jake is at home in the world. When he sits down in a forest, it’s like he’s found his favourite chair and the clearing is his living room. He’s soon dozing. Some viewers might be too, but that’s alright. There’s no rush. Where are you in a rush to get to? Just take it easy. Touch some grass.