Bogancloch

A homespun contraption involving a large pub umbrella, an ice-cream lid cut in the shape of the Moon and a tin can lid representing the Sun is twirled by Jake Williams as he explains their movement to a group of senior schoolchildren. It’s an audience you might not expect for Williams, whose isolated and off-the-grid forest-living lifestyle was previously documented by Ben Rivers in 2011’s Two Years At Sea. It’s also an indication of the more existential questions about our place in the universe that the latest work by the experimental filmmaker seems intent on provoking.

More than a decade on from the first film Williams is still living in Bogancloch, his Aberdeenshire forest bolthole filled with what appears to be enough clutter to fill about four lifetimes. Rivers, whose films are almost passive-aggressively arthouse, shoots for the most part in 16mm black and white, which is then hand-processed, as he captures Williams going about his quotidian bits and bobs.

The grainy, sometimes fuzzy, sometimes almost shimmering but always intriguing result gives the film an almost out-of-time quality. If it wasn’t for the excellent, immersive sound design from Chu-Li Shewring, you could easily believe you were watching a piece of silent movie found footage. Williams, with his long beard and hair and elderly knitted hat, complete with a bobble that has seen better days, also has an ambiguity, he could almost be a backwoodsman anywhere at any time.

While there’s no discernible narrative, as such, as we watch Williams work or pluck and cook a roadkill pheasant, there are constant nudges to a bigger picture we are left to define for ourselves. Periodic cuts to black are bookended by moments of colour film, showing water-damaged photos of what appear to be far-flung places, including one with a signpost to Dubai. Elsewhere, a bin bag full of tapes, reveals a trove of what sounds like Arabic music, a touch of the exotic in this damp corner of Scotland. Colour too, is used to challenge assumptions. A snatch of Williams on different film stock indicates a jaunty love of colour that flies in the face of black and white austerity.

Beyond the suggestion of the Cosmos, present in that classroom and also in a tatty offcut of carpet with a Solar System pattern, questions of more earthly existence are also raised. We hear Seamus Heaney chasing after his wife in poem The Underground, which has moons aplenty. Later, a choir - Williams’ voice raised with them - sing Hamish Henderson’s The Flyting O’ Life And Death, a back and forth argument between the two opposing forces. Finally, a bath tub with a fire beneath it, one of those places in the world where we can truly be alone, is shown to have its own little spot within the universe, all of us, including Williams, part of a bigger picture even if we can’t always see it.