May Tomorrow Shine The Brightest Of
All Your Many Days As It Will Be Your Last
(UK, 13 min, 16mm, b/w)
by
Ben Rivers and Paul Harnden
« Rivers, a British filmmaker who films frontiersman in ramshackle houses, their few homemade utensils, their voices that sound like decades-old radio broadcasts that have played on repeat ever since, and the frontier itself—clouds, grass, animals—is something like the Terrence Malick of the avant-garde: it's never clear in these scrapbook documentaries whether civilization is just starting or ending against an indifferent, pretty nature, and Rivers, like Malick, willfully dissolves civilization's structured sense of space by a lot of ambient cutting between pretty shots that may not have any spatial relationship to each other and that seem to stand outside of time altogether. For a while, for both Rivers and Malick, it's been a formless form as fascinating as it frustrating. A string of shadowy shots with, quite deliberately, no place, function, or necessity is not necessarily an accurate representation of undifferentiated nature before or after God, but ornamentation without an architecture to ornament. Any shot could be removed with little impact.
But Rivers has started laying the barest traces of scaffolding, and made what's probably his best work. I Know Where I'm Going, another survey of edge of the world Britain, made under a Vauxhall Commission as a road trip from one nowhere place to another, makes use of 16mm cinemascope to set up a firm x-axis from objects (railings, etc.) bridging one side of the screen to the other (he's as much a master of 'scope as Anthony Mann) that he keeps cycling back to in new situations, as if to ensure this firm graphic design of a line going somewhere; then breaks through it into the z-axis with interludes from the car onto the passing road that give the misleadingly forward sense that the film also is going somewhere, when of course it's progressing from one lost outdoorsman to another and seems as lost as they are. Just the vague hint of architecture at the edge of madness, of a few objects set firmly in place across the screen against which the characters move, is enough: the film, matching characters' voice-over to images of them at work on their own, becomes a means of connecting disparate lives into some sort of nomadic collective voice of people still learning how to live their daily lives.
Rivers' Weekend-like May Tomorrow Shine the Brightest of All Your Man Days As It Will Be Your Last, in high-contrast black-and-white, and without the stern frame of cinemascope, plays from the opposite perspective, nature's facetious perspective on humanity, as a portrait again of grass and clouds and, here, a band of revolutionaries studying theory in the meadows and then roaming the hills looking for war. Its last few minutes, as awesome as any segment from the entire festival, find these self-proclaimed missionaries of civilization lost in the woods as humans with books and scythes and swords while the clouds roll on, humans and clouds each ignorant of the other, and the humans having no idea how beautiful and dumb they look as elements of outdoors wildlife. »
-- Johnny Lavant
All Your Many Days As It Will Be Your Last
(UK, 13 min, 16mm, b/w)
by
Ben Rivers and Paul Harnden
Somewhere in the backwoods at the turn of i'm not sure which century, a crack unit of female Japanese soldiers track a group of lost, ancient desperadoes. They dig holes, they read, their leader channels the ghost of Italian sound poets (as yet unborn..?), all the while moving onward...but who is searching for who and why? Hand-processed with a soundtrack cobbled together from dictaphone recordings, old 78s, hiss and scratches and whines.
« Rivers, a British filmmaker who films frontiersman in ramshackle houses, their few homemade utensils, their voices that sound like decades-old radio broadcasts that have played on repeat ever since, and the frontier itself—clouds, grass, animals—is something like the Terrence Malick of the avant-garde: it's never clear in these scrapbook documentaries whether civilization is just starting or ending against an indifferent, pretty nature, and Rivers, like Malick, willfully dissolves civilization's structured sense of space by a lot of ambient cutting between pretty shots that may not have any spatial relationship to each other and that seem to stand outside of time altogether. For a while, for both Rivers and Malick, it's been a formless form as fascinating as it frustrating. A string of shadowy shots with, quite deliberately, no place, function, or necessity is not necessarily an accurate representation of undifferentiated nature before or after God, but ornamentation without an architecture to ornament. Any shot could be removed with little impact.
But Rivers has started laying the barest traces of scaffolding, and made what's probably his best work. I Know Where I'm Going, another survey of edge of the world Britain, made under a Vauxhall Commission as a road trip from one nowhere place to another, makes use of 16mm cinemascope to set up a firm x-axis from objects (railings, etc.) bridging one side of the screen to the other (he's as much a master of 'scope as Anthony Mann) that he keeps cycling back to in new situations, as if to ensure this firm graphic design of a line going somewhere; then breaks through it into the z-axis with interludes from the car onto the passing road that give the misleadingly forward sense that the film also is going somewhere, when of course it's progressing from one lost outdoorsman to another and seems as lost as they are. Just the vague hint of architecture at the edge of madness, of a few objects set firmly in place across the screen against which the characters move, is enough: the film, matching characters' voice-over to images of them at work on their own, becomes a means of connecting disparate lives into some sort of nomadic collective voice of people still learning how to live their daily lives.
Rivers' Weekend-like May Tomorrow Shine the Brightest of All Your Man Days As It Will Be Your Last, in high-contrast black-and-white, and without the stern frame of cinemascope, plays from the opposite perspective, nature's facetious perspective on humanity, as a portrait again of grass and clouds and, here, a band of revolutionaries studying theory in the meadows and then roaming the hills looking for war. Its last few minutes, as awesome as any segment from the entire festival, find these self-proclaimed missionaries of civilization lost in the woods as humans with books and scythes and swords while the clouds roll on, humans and clouds each ignorant of the other, and the humans having no idea how beautiful and dumb they look as elements of outdoors wildlife. »
-- Johnny Lavant
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