CINEMANIA

Ben Rivers, Two Years at Sea UK 2011. 88mins

This is a very unusual film in every way. It is a cinematic feature film that has been made with a sensibility and process we are more used to seeing in the gallery based category “artists film.” “Artists films” are not movies. Yet Two Years at Sea is a movie, in the original and best sense.

It's a film that is at first glance appears to be a documentary but it isn't. It's about a hermit who lives at the edge of the world in an eerie, unpopulated place living off the detritus of civilisation. In his isolation he does odd but rather fun things, like putting a caravan on the top of a tree so he can hang out in it and sway with the wind. The hermit seems to be unaware of the camera, as he goes about his self sufficient, taciturn routines.

Yet that's not the truth. Rivers has built a fiction, yet it retains a sense of the mystery of quiet observation. It's not a documentary. The man is a real person, Jake, and he does live in a remote place but it's Scotland which, while rural is still fairly populated. And he is playing a character, a hermit called Jake* who barely speaks and who virtually melts into and merges with the physical world in which he lives. Hints of a past, smudged images in the form of still photos whisper of a previous life but deliver nothing specific. We watch, not sure what to believe but compelled anyway. Actually it's Jake and Rivers who've built this fiction, in a careful collaboration that starts with Rivers' interest in hermits and builds to Jake's co-creation of a character based on him, but not him. Silent, yet articulate in gesture and movement, Jake is an eloquent work of nature.

Rivers runs the camera himself and also hand-processes the 16mm film stock. This is so unusual it's worth talking about. Because most artist film makers actually practice the same kind of system that commercial cinema does, no matter if the final product is revealed in the gallery instead of the cinema: that is, they do not operate the camera. Yet, unlike commercial cinema, they don’t usually credit their DP or editor, but instead claim authorship in a way that mainstream directors can never dare to. An odd state of affairs, if you think about it. Rivers by contrast, is DP, director, lab and editor, a tour de force of skill that, combined with his singular artistic vision, is truly remarkable and delivers something very, very special.

The film gifts the viewer with something very unusual, not only in cinema but in daily life as well: time. The film is about time but not the portentous symbolic quasi religious sense of time that Tarkovsky and his school of film makers practice. River's time is more prosaic, more humble yet all the more compelling for that. He allows us the sheer luxury of focusing on the minutiae, on the details of life. The sequences pull us into the intricacies of the small rituals of life, lived in its fullest material sense. The title hints at the sense of time that the film unfolds: Two Years at Sea is not a literal title, there is not sea and we have no idea if the film takes place over a two year period or not. But there is that same sense of time slipping past, the waves of wind substituting for the waves of the sea. What is sea or land, or seasons or weather? We experience time, yet we don't because it is so imperceptible.

A dark room, a beam of light, and rows of upturned faces bathing in the luminance of shifting, flickering moving images. That is cinema. Rivers, together with his distributor Soda, is reasserting the most important principle in “artists cinema”, that it is – or can be - cinema. That it must be seen in a cinema and appreciated as cinema. We should be very grateful that for 88 minutes at least, Rivers has allowed us to experience a definition of cinema that returns us to its very roots.

Two Years at Sea released by Soda Pictures from 4th May 2012

http://www.benrivers.com/

A review by Jonathan Romney in Screen http://www.screendaily.com/reviews/the-latest/two-years-at-sea/5031864.article

* Rivers first worked with Jake Williams in "This is my Land" a short which I saw in the Bloomberg Space in 2008. I took my class of first-year undergrads to see it, they were captivated and abandoned all the other films in the group show to rewatch "This is my Land" several times.

©G. McIver 2012 all rights reserved

How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire
image from http://www.myvodkaempire.com

Around about 2007 my friend Dan and Hilary invited me over and Dan told me that he'd been rooting around in his mum's attic and found a remarkable document. A memoir written by his grandmother, a White Russian from Ukraine who fled the revolution and landed up in Belfast. Dan was mooting trying to make some kind of film about it. It seemed like an enough interesting story, but to be honest, not especially original. I already knew several people who had White Russian grannies and landed up in Paris, New York, Montreal and various other places. Sadly the history of the 20th is one of human displacement. Everyone has a granny and unfortunately for many of us, our grannies had to get the hell out of wherever they were brought up and make new lives for themselves in godforsaken places. In some cases, like my own, by the time granny left, the whole country disappeared and so there was literally nowhere to go back to. So initially I was, I admit, not overly enthusiastic. But I had forgotten one thing.

I knew Dan as a low-no budget independent even perhaps “underground” film maker, who supported his creative work by doing the usual: a bit of teaching and a bit of corporate/commercial work. Like all of us. But when Dan was making one of his first films that got attention (Berlin: Abandoned Heroes), and he was trying to find a name for his production company, he came up with “Optimistic Productions.” That should have told us all something. Dan's got spirit. Bags of it.

And he seemed particularly taken with his granny Maroussia's story. To be sure, unlike me and my other friends' grandmothers, Maroussia had produced a well written, lucid account of her life, so there was something concrete to go on. Within a month or so, Dan and his wife Hilary went off to Ukraine with a Z1, to see if they could find his granny's home town. They came back very, very excited.

Seven year later Dan's film about the whole experience, How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire, is in the cinema. I can only describe it as a labour of love. Love of film making, love of family, love of art, and a great love and trust between Dan and his many friends and supporters who have championed Dan's dream.

The film traces the whole story of Dan's discovery of the memoir, his initial visit to the winterbound Ukrainian village, his discovery of the vodka factory and his decision to try to bring the vodka to Britain as a social enterprise, to try to keep the factory going and bring some prosperity to the town. The whole process is documented by Dan and Hilary.

So, is it a good film? I was hoping it would be. I had faith in Dan and Hilary's talent, but still I wasn't sure. But I had a lot of questions. Is the story interesting enough? Don't we have enough stories of exile and “discovering my roots” pics already? Didn’t it risk being maudlin?

I need not have worried. The inventiveness and visual artistry of the film – Hilary is an amazing artist and her art direction makes the film quirky, beautiful and highly original - lifts is straight out of conventional doc territory. The “silent film” re-enactments of Maroussia's life, played out by Dan and Hilary and friends, are a brilliant self -reflexive counterpoint to the documentary footage. And they drive the story very well – we want to know equally what happens to Maroussia and what happens to Dan on his quest. Dan himself is an engaging, occasionally bumbling, charismatic and clearly stubborn character that we warm to. As I know Dan, I have to say that he really is what you see on the screen. The self-honesty is beautiful.

As a film about “discovery of roots” it's less interesting, and hopefully it won't be marketed that way. Pearl Gluck's 2003 documentary Divan is a much more effective as a story of Jewish diaspora experience, as the film maker goes to Hungary ostensibly in search of a piece of family furniture, exploring Jewish culture and identity along the way. Maroussia's story isn't about Jewish culture at all, though in making the film Dan does consider his Jewish roots – this feels much less important in the overall story. His contact with the history of his long-dead father is much more affecting and important. And of course the key to the story is his relationship with the isolated and depressed little Ukrainian town. This is a fascinating story, bringing together the 1917 revolution the Cold War and the post-Iron Curtain situation – history made real and personal. It's a great film about how history is not abstract, not even a “subject” but it's us, it's about us. After seeing this film I wanted to officially change the word “history” to “ourstory,” because it is!

Dan himself is not sure how much of Maroussia's memoir is real, and how much she embellished for literary effect. It does not matter. Her story is real enough, and it produced the greater story, the story of how one hopeful, optimistic, slightly mad film-maker and his visionary artist wife went to the frozen Ukraine to search for a story that might have been a dream, and came back with a bigger question, How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire?

So, there you have it. Once I saw a great piece of graffiti on a Montreal wall: “Sex, Lenin, Vodka” it said. That'll do for a byline. Go and see it.

http://www.myvodkaempire.com/

http://www.hilarypowell.com

©G. McIver 2012 all rights reserved