Ghost Strata (Ben Rivers, 2019) (Patreon)

Although Rivers is getting most of his festival exposure this year with Krabi, 2562, the feature he co-directed with Thai helmer Anocha Suwichakornpong, he also made a medium-length solo work that, while perhaps more of a piece with his previous work than Krabi, nevertheless represents a significant departure as well. Rivers' work has typically operated in a zone I would call the non-argumentative cinema of fact, a lyrical documentary form that values poetic form and phenomenological exploration over expository communication. As such, Rivers' films have tended to look outward at the larger world. Ghost Strata is no exception. But to a somewhat different extent, it also looks in. It's as close as this filmmaker has come so far to producing a cinematic diary.

Of course, a diary for Rivers is hardly solipsistic or insular. It reflects his globetrotting ways and operates in the interstices of his otherwise outward-bound filmmaking style. So landscape plays a huge role in Ghost Strata, and in fact the film takes its title from a geological concept. (The long durée of geological time is a frequent fixation in Rivers' films.) But as a scientist explains in the film, "ghost strata" are theoretical layers of time. When you see the strata of sedimentary rock, you are given to understand that the space around that rock, the very space you occupy, was once filled with earth as well. Erosion has cleared that earth away over millions of years, but we can hypothesize and reconstruct the missing "ghost strata" that surround the actual rock, the negative space that time has worn away.

Rivers composes the film as a calendar, with twelve sections, one for each month of the year of its making, 2017. January and December both contain tarot readings, in which the reader describes Rivers' relationship to the film itself and the material he is documenting around him. "All your movies are about you," the first woman says, "about your relation to time." We see this borne out across the running time of Ghost Strata, as Rivers' travels are summed up in sometimes small, metonymic ways: a sunset over a mountain, a set of photos of a trashed dormitory space, a group of hands in close-up dislodging various objects from the mud of tide pools.

As a counterpoint to these scenes, Rivers layers in audio clips of poems by W.S. Merwin, Fernando Pessoa, and Muriel Rukeyser, or shows us outtakes of his own films: a sequence shot in Greece with a friend who cannot stop laughing, and finally some behind-the-scenes footage of Krabi. One gets the sense that these are fragments of films, or half-formed memories, a bit like Kristen Johnson's Cameraperson or Thomas Heise's Material, experiences that could have become films in themselves but didn't, or snapshots too precious to burden with the weight of a beginning or an ending.

The film is a notebook of subtle, contained gestures. Appropriately enough, Rivers dedicates Ghost Strata to the memory of Jonathan Schwartz, he an artist who was quietly defiant in his faith in small things.