Plinth

On the occasion of Ben Rivers' retrospective Ghost Strata, and other stories, held at Jeu de Paume in Paris in November 2023, the artist invited fourteen authors to watch one of his films and respond in writing in any way they wished. The result is Collected Stories, which features the following response by Gina Apostol.

At its base, its beauty comes, of course, from the nature that it captures not only with its camera’s lingering eye but also, very moving for me, its extended sound cuts: I hear a rooster before I see it, and the river’s insects even after the camera has left sight of water. As someone who grew up with those sounds, the way in real life for me as a child nature seemed to reverberate in Sensurround, the movie’s crafty sound design tells me: these are filmmakers who not only see but listen. Listening is an art this movie foregrounds. What plot it unfolds lies in interviews with no questions, just responses. We listen for clues about a woman’s disappearance from a receptionist, retired boxer, tour guide, movie theatre caretaker, anonymous workers of a resort town milieu who are the movie’s Ariadnes, spooling threads that may or may not get us, or the woman, in or out of the tourist cave, the labyrinth.

An aspect of that labyrinth, the film’s plot, is moviemaking. The film’s patient pace, its correct insistence on allowing a shot to prolong, meditates on the act of filming itself. The film’s beauty also comes from what is not nature, from what is technological and constructed – the movie’s cross and parallel cuts seam its trifurcated scenarios: a woman’s tourist trek through a resort town, her goals unknown; the making of a commercial; and the gestures of survival of what appears to be an aboriginal or prehistoric couple, who are the movie’s nub. The presence of the couple provides not only a veritable, plausible historical haunting but also a historical cause for filmic cuts. For instance, an image from one scenario, depicting the commercial’s shoot in front of ancient, mythological crags, is joined to another of the disappeared woman trekking through what could be either simultaneous or parallel – and beautiful – folkloric crags. In this cut, the film uses geology as splice, which both confuses and calms, making us wonder: is it the same place but different time, or the same time but different place? The movie makes sense and un-sense out of the seamed scenes, so that part of its detective plot, directing the viewer’s enquiry and gaze, is the mystery of the stitching of film itself.

But it’s the presence of the silent, aboriginal couple, bound to their cave and to the rhythms of nature, not in a saccharinely soulful, moody, or grieving way, but in an offhand, casual, even cursory way, so that the camera seems only slightly curious about their habits, that ties the movie together. We see them first through the commercial Tarzan’s flustered gaze. The actor taking a leak and the Indigenous man meet in the tropic trope of a paradisiacal forest. Through the piss haze of the drunken actor’s eyes, what’s primeval at first looks like a haunting: a ghost, a supernatural monster amid his world’s natural bounty. But the camera’s lens on the Indigenous couple is of-fact, documentary, and inverts our conception. The couple are ordinary. They fish in the same waters that for the commercial are only a backdrop and they are perhaps the last local witnesses, un-interviewed, of the woman’s waterlogged trail. In the figure of the couple, the film’s beauty also comes from its political undertow: the twinning of land with history, and nature with its contra-vida: capital.

Submerged, underwater, is the story of what settlers have done to the land, in which the ordinary modern citizen, or receptionist or tour guide or market researcher or film director, is part of the plot of settler colonisation. The simultaneous presence of the Indigenous couple – a man silently roasting his caught fish and a woman patiently watching – with the movie world of the comic Tarzan and the tourist world of the disappeared woman of mysterious aims (they could be artistic or unethical, familial or commercial, charming and/or invidious, all at the same time) produces the movie’s logic. That is, the logic of its cuts, its beautifully unexplained transitions, its ambiguous nature sequences, its unerring, unsentimental, and generous eye on local colour. On the one hand, this simultaneity of a couple who seem prehistoric, even geological, with the very modern presence of an independent city girl and her twin, her fellow outsider in Krabi, the dazed movie-actor Tarzan man, is the film’s commentary. Our personal epics and mysteries, what drives us to go trekking beyond our homes, are not separate from historical and still ongoing Indigenous removal. More obviously, blatantly, and yes, always, absurdly, outrageously, the selling of commodities is a direct cause of historical and ongoing Indigenous removal. The movie corrects the modern fantasy that we are haunted by history: history is a presence, among us, roasting the fish it has caught over a real fire.

But this simultaneity is not only polemic, a commentary. When I finally emerged from the movie, I realised what riveted me was the way that in Krabi, 2562 meaning and means are the same. Simultaneity is both Krabi, 2562’s argument and its art. As I mentioned, in the shots there’s a sense of transience, of beauty that passes before I notice, and when it is gone I wish I had captured it. And then I realise – the movie already did. What Krabi, 2562 does is stitch through filmic measures how our world, both man-made and natural, is revealed and unseen and in danger, disappearing, before our eyes. But its disappearance is no mystery. For after all, Krabi, its ordinary people and supernatural caves and breathtaking beaches, is still here with us, and we know our human depredations even as we visit, partake, and tour. With Ben Rivers and Anocha Suwichakornpong’s camera, we see beauty passing: their camera is witness, but it is a wise one; it knows that the beauty of what is nature lies not only in our environment but also in how at each moment we must look, with the dawning recognition of what we have done. Glimpsed too late, we wish to capture it as it goes – the fragmented, seamed, stitched memory of our presence, whose consequence still passes us by, eludes us.

By Gina Apostol

Ben Rivers' Collected Stories is available now from Fireflies Press. Alongside Gina Apostol, the book features writing by Chloe Aridjis, Kevin Barry, Xiaolu Guo, Golan Haji, M John Harrison, Daisy Hildyard, Nathalie Léger, Vanessa Onwuemezi, Helen Oyeyemi, Iain Sinclair, Irene Solà, Lynne Tillman and Marina Warner. Text courtesy of Ben Rivers and Fireflies Press.