Ben Rivers

Ben Rivers  in conversation with Jordan Baseman.
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This interview between Ben Rivers and Jordan Baseman, filmmakers who both whose work often focuses on personal narratives, it was first published in the A Foundation newspaper in 2009. 

Image: © Ben Rivers

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Jordan Baseman: 
Can you please describe your films for me, and perhaps why you make them?

Ben Rivers:
When I start shooting they are closely related to documentary, but they are not about facts. I’m not just documenting I am of course recording actual people in their living settings, but I always think of that as a starting point. It’s a catalyst for what the film is going to be, which is worked out while being made and even more so while being edited. By the time I’m at the editing stage I’m not thinking of the work as much as documentary, it’s become more fictionalised. I am doing so much construction, particularly with sound, I am transforming it, somewhere between dream and fiction. 

JB:
When I’ve looked at your work, some of it seems very portrait driven, would you use that word to describe it?

BR:
I would, I’ve talked about all of the films of people as portraits, but somehow I’ve tried to move away from just creating portraiture, I do hope that an element is still there in the finished film, but at some point it moves away from being a portrait directly and becomes more about something else I’ve seen in that space. I want to be truthful to that person and sensitive to their way of life, but at the same time I’ll discuss with them that the film is going to go off at tangents. For example with Ah! Liberty all the adults are left out, so the film become more fictionalised and unlike actually being there, but at the same time, somewhere at the core there’s a portrait of the family.

JB:
Does this something else really start to  come through in the editing process?

BR:
That’s when it starts to make sense. When I’m filming I try and make more than one visit and that’s become increasingly important. So I will film and then go home and look at what I’ve got to get a sense of what the film might become and then return, responding to what I’ve done. The editing is crucial, that’s really where the work is made. The filming is gathering material, so it’s the fun bit, what I enjoy most. I get excited by travel and adventure, the work really starts when I get back home, when what I’ve seen and experienced has been transformed into something else by the camera and will undergo further adaptation.
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Image: © Ben Rivers

​JB:
I totally understand that. Can you please tell me about how you make your films, how you find participants and why you chose those people?

BR:
Generally I’ve found people through friends, the participants tend to be friends of friends and not far removed from my life really.  I spend quite a bit of time in the countryside therefore I get to know people who live out in the sticks and they know people who live even further out in the sticks. As the film work grows I get recommended to people, “you know there’s someone who lives 20 miles down  a dirt track, you should go and visit him.” 

It’s been a really natural progression, the whole thing started by accident really, with This Is My Land, I wasn’t thinking about making portraits at all, I was making things in the studio without people and suddenly I felt I needed to put people back in my work.

JB:
There seems to be a clear shift in your work around 2006.

BR:
Right, yes I was really excited by the idea of filming people again and how  would that change the work? I’d been making films about spaces filled with ghosts of humans for quite a few years so it was half a holiday when I visited Jake Williams, the subject of This Is My Land. I had my camera with me just in case there was a possibility of doing some filming, but as soon as I got there I knew he was a perfect person for me to make a film about. In a way it continued looking at hermetic worlds, these spaces I was looking at, the enclosed house or village, so this person who’d created his own world in an acre in the centre of a forest seemed like a natural move.

JB:
The relationship you have developed with these people seem cultivated and not manufactured. Your relationship with the participants are very clear throughout the films, even though we don’t see you we’re aware of your presence.

BR:
I’m really happy about that, the awareness of the filmmaker I knew was the key right from the start and I wanted to make an audience aware of the film. If we come back to the documentary term, my dislike for it is because of those negative reasons of not wanting to be involved in that supposedly objective view. I want to be seen to be involved, being there and affecting the situation. Building a relationship with those people is really important, talking to them about what I’m doing and discussing what might happen in the film.

Image: © Ben Rivers

JB:
How much footage are you shooting?

​BR:
Not too much , I tend to be quite tight, it’s about a four to one ratio of what’s shot and what makes it into the film. That’s the  other advantage of repeat visits, you spend a lot of time just looking before you shoot. This is one of the reasons I like using film, you’re forced to make some editorial decisions while you’re filming. I don’t like to have too much footage, the editing is hard enough as it is, so if I had a five hours of footage I’d find it really difficult. I like to really consider what I’m filming and one practical side to using film is that it encourages that.

JB:
Because I came from a video background, I’ve made films where I shot over seventy hours of raw footage, you can make five hundred films from seventy hours. I’m learning late in life that it’s not always necessarily the best strategy. A lot of films seem to focus on people who removed themselves from contemporary, urban society to focus on an idea of and this is my word, the romantic hermit. I used to be a hermit when I was a kid, you know, you’d build forts and stuff.

BR:
That’s probably how I started, why I ended up going to visit Jake and not visiting somebody else in a city, it tapped into my own possibly idealistic notion of what it might mean to be a hermit, to live in the middle of a forest in a cabin. I mean these are fantasies I’ve had as a child and as an adult. I think in a way it was seeing how real that was and the possibilities. The more I’ve  met these people, the more I respect I have for what they do.

What I really like about all those people is that it’s not straight forward, yes they’re living without a lot of technology, but Jake’s got a laptop which he powers with an enormous generator, him and Stuart both have diesel guzzling, black-smoke-billowing machines. There’s a lot  of contradictions going on with all of those characters, they are not dogmatic, which is important, I want the romance to be undercut with a sense of unease.

JB:
And I think that comes across in the films you’ve allowed them to express a complex manner, you haven’t simplified what they’re doing or how they’re living.

BR:
Thanks.
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Image: Ben Rivers - A World Rattled Out Of Habit  © Julia Waugh