Born in 1972 in Somerset, Ben Rivers studied sculpture then moved into photography and film. He won the Fipresci international critics prize at the Venice film festival in 2011 for Two Years at Sea . Last year he created the multi-projection installation The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers, co-commissioned by Artangel, in the BBC’s since largely demolished television centre in London. This month the installation will be at Manchester’s Whitworth Gallery.
For this show, five films are projected in a “salvaged cinema” made of plywood flats. How would you describe the installation?
It’s a multiple-screen version of looking at films being made in Morocco. I shot it near Ouarzazate, which is used by film crews as a double for many places such as the Middle East, the wild west, Tibet. You’ll find semi-abandoned sets from Lawrence of Arabia and Orson Welles’s Othello or TV series, just standing there in the desert. From a distance they look like real places, but up close you can see the backs of things. I wanted to make a film about the construction of films – and I’ve built viewing spaces that mimic these sets. So the piece looks at the layers of reality in film-making, and within that there are other stories going on.
You say the BBC’s drama block was like another artwork. Will they look different in a white-walled gallery?
I’m excited about seeing it in the Whitworth because the BBC was such a powerful space that it took over at times. It was perfect for the work, but in a way I felt these structures that we built got lost. In the Whitworth they will be much more sculptural and imposing – like the sensation of coming across them in the desert.
The installation was inspired by the 1947 Paul Bowles short story, A Distant Episode, about a man travelling through the desert, and you also interview Bowles’s translator, Mohammed Mrabet. Do you seek out literary texts?
I read because I love to read – not because I’m looking for the source of a project. But it all gets stored up. I’ll be halfway through making a project and then a piece of text will come back to me and find its way into the film. With the Paul Bowles story I got a couple of really strong images, particularly the final image of this tin-can man running into the desert. It probably took six years before I did anything, but when I started thinking about making a film about film-making, and doing it in Morocco, the episode came back. There’s something in the Bowles about being an outsider in another country and having the confidence to feel like you can do what you want there, which film-makers, me included, often feel.
Your films blend reality and fiction, using non-actors. Critics have called them bleak and dystopian but with moments of joy. Does that resonate?
I don’t think they’re that bleak. To me they’re a mix of both joy and unease about certain ways of living. I try to put in elements of humour even if the subject is quite dark. In Two Years at Sea, Jake is a guy who lives on his own in the middle of a forest, and he loves his life, and I like it too. So it’s a matter of perception.
When you’re not embedded in your own films, what do you watch?
I’m always embedded! But even so, I do like to watch all kinds of things, not just high art, from Star Wars to old, slightly trashy movies from the 70s and 80s. I do have a dream of making a more straightforward horror movie at some point.
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