Using 16mm cameras, artist Ben Rivers documents the solitary existence of Jake, a man who lives in isolation in the middle of the forest in a remote part of Scotland. The film follows his unconventional life, capturing moments of profound beauty. Jake is seen in all seasons, surviving frugally, passing the time with strange projects, living the radical dream he had as a younger man, a dream he spent two years working at sea to realise.

Gracefully constructed, Two Years at Sea creates an intimate connection with an individual who would otherwise be a complete outsider to us.

Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen are not filmmakers first and foremost; they are film theorists, critics and thinkers. Mulvey and Wollen’s texts from the 1970s set their sights on utopian and revolutionary perspectives. Mulvey emphasizes the gestures necessary for a cinematic liberation struggle, while Wollen draws on the power of fantasy and adopts cinema as a model for a new avant-garde. Both play a role in writing a manifesto for a different kind of cinema, whose militant nature is gained from radical work on (cinematic) symbolization processes.

In the 1990s, James Benning’s films were characterized primarily by an ongoing investigation of the relationship between the image and the (spoken or written) word. This 2-disc set features the two key works representing the peak of this “text-image film” period. In Deseret Benning (by way of the New York Times) retells the history of America’s Mormon State Utah through spectacular black & white and color images. Art and landscape join as one in Benning’s following film Four Corners, which serves as both a tribute to the famous region in the USA where four states converge and a portrait of four very different artists.