Bogancloch

There is no point to Bogancloch, the new feature documentary by English experimental filmmaker Ben Rivers. Neither in the philosophical sense that no film inherently needs to exist nor in the derogatory sense that watching Rivers’ film, which premiered in competition at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, would be a waste of one’s time. No, Bogancloch is “pointless” in that it resists the conventional documentary urge to amount to something, anything concrete – a take-home message, an instructive thesis statement, or even just an emotional arc or shred of discernible character development. It is, even by the standards of a purely observational portrait, strikingly anti-utilitarian.

Of course, that apparent pointlessness is exactly “the point” of the film, such as there is one. A sequel of sorts to Rivers’ 2011 feature debut Two Years at Sea, Bogancloch catches up with the earlier film’s protagonist, bearded Scottish eccentric Jake Williams, who lives a hermit’s life in the Aberdeenshire Highlands’ vast Clashindarroch Forest. Over the course of the film’s runtime, Rivers sketches the calm, meditative rhythms of Williams’ everyday life, devoting long, often static shots to showing him enjoying a cup of tea in a forest clearing, tinkering in his workshop, preparing food, feeding his cat, dozing off leaning against a tree, or taking a bath in his outdoor bathtub while singing the jaunty 1930s tune “Singin’ in the Bathtub.”

Shot on predominantly black-and-white 16-millimetre film stock in various stages of degeneration and accompanied by a steady soundscape of rustling leaves and twittering birds, Bogancloch is ultimately a film about the ephemerality of human existence and experience – and the art of coming to terms with that fact and appreciating the beauty that lies in the apparent “pointlessness” of life. The key scene in which Williams, Scottish singer-songwriter Alasdair Roberts, and a group of hikers sit around a campfire and sing a folk song about an unresolved argument between life and death over which is the stronger force suggests as much.

Nevertheless, for all the film’s artful slow-cinema trappings, its approach to this potentially morose subject matter manages to remain refreshingly light-hearted throughout, thanks in no small part to Rivers’ deliberate disinterest in bending his (admittedly somewhat romanticised) vision of Jake Williams into a discernible narrative shape. Bogancloch is, for lack of a better word, relaxing, in that it essentially invites its audience to let go of its culturally instilled desire for purpose for a little while. Just as the hidden agendas of life and death remain inscrutable, so do many of Williams’ everyday routines: where is he going when he’s hiking through Clashindarroch Forest? What compels him to sleep in his camper van sometimes instead of his sizeable house/workshop/greenhouse? What is the significance of the songs he plays on his battered cassette player? Neither Rivers nor Williams himself answer these questions because, by the logic of the film, the answers don’t matter: Williams’ life is not about going anywhere specific, it’s about taking satisfaction in the act of doing something, and of being at peace with the knowledge that, in the grand scheme of things, none of it will ever lead anywhere.

Indeed, even when the film deigns to shed light on one of the mysteries that its radically observational mode unveils, the reveal withholds outright catharsis. Take the conclusion of the scenes of Williams collecting, cutting, shaping, and assembling different materials: when Rivers eventually cuts to a school and shows Williams presenting the fruits of his artistic labour – a large parasol that’s been worked into a model of the solar system – to a group of unenthusiastic children, one might baulk at the simplicity of this mixture of ready-made artwork and astronomic pedagogy. Yet the important thing, the film appears to argue, is not the muted reception but the care and joy that went into making the model in the first place: process takes precedence over results.

In a more aggressively narrative documentary, these thematic currents might have risked congealing into stern bohemian didacticism. In contrast, however, Rivers’ readiness to align his editing patterns with the soothing pace and provocative open-endedness of Williams’ life means that his film succeeds in sketching a more encompassing and substantial portrait of its documentary subject. There may be no authoritative point to either the film or Williams’ hermitism, no grand statements of philosophical instruction, environmental mindfulness, or artistic practice, but there is a lot of emotional nourishment to be gained from settling into its defiant uneventfulness for 90 minutes or so. Down to its marvel of a closing shot – a long bird’s-eye view of Williams’ house and forest surroundings that ultimately transitions into a picture of distant galaxies – Bogancloch movingly pays homage to the solace and joy that can be found in the fact that the cosmos is vast, uncaring, and beautiful.