The Shape of Things
2016 | 2 min
Director: Ben Rivers
Original format: 16mm
Commissioned by Harvard Art Museums, The Shape of Things brings together ancient objects, cave drawings and fragments of found film, accompanied by William Bronk reading his poem At Tikal. Across two concentrated minutes, Rivers reflects on humanity’s enduring desire to give shape and order to the world – and on the fragile constructions we create to make it intelligible.
Close Up
2025 | 2 min
Director: Ben Rivers
Original format: 16mm
Made for the 20th anniversary of London’s Close-Up Film Centre, Close Up was created as part of a programme inviting fifty filmmakers to respond to a place dedicated to cinema. Rivers’ two-minute 16mm miniature becomes an intimate reflection on the cinema as both a physical space and a shared experience – a place for looking, gathering and keeping film culture alive.
The House Was Quiet
2021 | 4 mi
Director: Ben Rivers
Original format: 16mm
An old schoolhouse on an island in Scotland becomes the setting for Wallace Stevens’ poem The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm. Rivers turns the empty house into a space of stillness, reading and contemplation, where words, images and silence begin to merge and the boundaries between the interior world of the reader and the world outside quietly dissolve.
The Wind, One Brilliant Day
2026 | 7 min
Director: Ben Rivers
Format: 16mm
Inspired by a poem by Antonio Machado, The Wind, One Brilliant Day follows a woman wandering through an ancient garden and into the wilderness. Restless and searching for something she cannot name, she speaks to the wind and is gradually drawn away from the familiar. Rivers transforms the encounter into a mysterious meditation on loss, renewal and the possibility of dissolving into the natural world.
Ijen / London
2022 | 7min
Duration: 7 min
Director: Ben Rivers
Original format: Super 16mm
Originally shot as research for Rivers’ unrealised film After London, Ijen / London descends into the crater of the Ijen volcano in East Java, where sulphur miners work amid toxic smoke and flames. What began as test footage becomes a film of its own, accompanied by Herbert Read’s poem The Autumn of the World – an eerie vision of extraction, poisoned landscapes and an imagined world after ours.
Trees Down Here
2018 | 14 min
Director: Ben Rivers
Original format: 16mm
At Churchill College in Cambridge, trees become the silent protagonists of a film about architecture, landscape and time. Moving between swaying branches, animals, changing seasons and the timber and concrete structures of the college, Rivers gradually dissolves the distinction between human habitation and the natural world, creating a dreamlike environment in which architecture itself appears to grow, age and leave traces.
