Rotterdam p2: TWO YEARS AT SEA (dir. Ben Rivers)

A supremely mysterious film; less narrative than pure recording of the activies of Jake, the film’s scruffy, bearded subject, who director Ben Rivers spent time with in and around his ramshackle abode in the British hinterlands, documenting his daily activities and solitary existence. Over the course of the film, Jake showers, sleeps, fishes in a self-made raft, reads, drives into town (contact with other humans remain unseen) and assembles a caravan atop the trees.. nothing too dramatic on paper, but each given grandeur through the aesthetic delight of the widescreen frame and swirling mosquito-cloud of film grain that the images are shrouded in. And eventually, the succession of tasks become fraught with melancholy, with the occasional photograph of (presumably) a loved one back home, intimating a life he's still vaguely tethered to.

It’s worth mentioning just how brilliantly Rivers uses the 16mm stock, probably the best use of the format I can recall in a contemporary feature film. It is, of course, a rarefied format apt for chronicling recluses living in social and geographic isolation, with the amplified grain of the widescreen transfer blurring man and nature together even further. And it helps that Jake is a pretty great camera subject – a wiry, weathered thing with a big white beard and soulful eyes that invite transference from the viewer at every step.

The film (barely) qualifies as fiction only because he never looks at the camera, although bestowing the ‘doco/fiction hybrid’ label also seems inadequate. Similarly, Rivers uses mostly diegetic sound and music for full immersive effect, but he isn’t too rigorous, and scores one scene of Jake taking a mountain stroll to the spare twangs of some string instrument (later identified in the post-screening Q&A as something Jake made himself), and the effect is some serious next-level-shit. It’s a film that presents us with little more than the actions of a man who governs his own time, which is of course the opposite of the position we’re put in as we observe him. Thus, he remains unknowable, with those actions providing the only key to understanding him, in turn raising a questions about what we can know about our fellow man based on what they do, whether he’s truly a ‘free man’, whether solitude is the purest form of freedom… there’s rarely a moment that isn’t suffused with the space for this kind of contemplation. This is a film that breathes.