A few things have changed, however. The new film opens with Williams at the wheel of a car he's now using to tow the caravan we saw lodged up in the trees a decade ago. (Rivers hones in on the arrangement's telling detail: the toothbrush wedged in the car's air vents, the dead pheasant lying among the caravan's clutter.) Though another decade older, greyer and shaggier, Williams appears more active than ever, leading Rivers to dedicate the bulk of the film to recording his various processes. Two Years at Sea had that memorable setpiece in which the hermit constructed a raft for himself, the kind of task a man might reasonably undertake when his inbox has long been purged of emails (or, indeed, when he's not even on email). In Bogancloch, we observe Williams feeding his cat, tending to seedlings, skiing through the forest, clearing the snow from his yard, and donning overalls to fashion a discarded beer-garden parasol into a model of the cosmos he can show to local schoolchildren. (The film's first surprise: this is no longer a one-man universe.) We quickly realise why Rivers finds Williams so compelling. It isn't just his life choices; it's that Williams is an artist of a type, someone who doesn't have vast sums of money to play with, but has nevertheless cultivated his own interests (curating, for example, a notable collection of world-music cassettes, much as some normies cling to obscure vinyl), developed methods and techniques for survival, and found he doesn't mind operating at the very margins of society under entirely his own steam. Williams is visibly part of a nonconformist tradition, but his chosen medium and canvas is life itself: he's afforded himself time and space, the circumstances under which the artist typically functions best.
By filming him, Rivers can give us the same gifts. This creative came to prominence during the emergence of what was labelled slow cinema, a new form that defined itself against the rapid and often vapid accelerationism of fast and furious mainstream fare. One sequence here is textbook slow cinema: Williams potters through a forest, settles at the base of a sturdy tree, murmurs a song to himself, takes a hearty swig of whatever is in his flask, and then apparently nods off as the camera keeps rolling. Though the sequence is eventually interrupted by the arrival of a group of hikers - the Rivers equivalent of a crowd scene - it's one of several where the director stands back and allows us to soak a scene in, a line of approach he sustains right through to Bogancloch's wonderful, how-did-they-do-that? closing image. Crucially, this is not some featherheaded utopian vision: the weathered Williams - whose home appears to house everything but the duster it really needs, as is the case with so many artists' hovels - inspires as much worry as wonder. (Not least in a stretch where his workshop fills with smoke from an unseen source.) That grainy black-and-white photography captures a hardscrabble, make-do-and-mend existence; the surrounding hillsides are romantic only in the sense that an Edward Gorey print might be considered romantic. Yet Williams has made it all work for him, which is why he's still here some fourteen years later, long after many of his contemporaries in bigger houses have departed. For him, this is a way of life; for his director, a source of ongoing fascination; for us, a break from the hyperaccelerated norm, be that AI boosterism, the endless bellowing about borders, or the quest for upward mobility in a society that doesn't - and won't - allow it. I don't think I entirely grasped what Two Years at Sea represented back in 2011; in 2025, it would be impossible not to notice, appreciate, even cherish it.
Bogancloch opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow.
