Ben Rivers' Trees Down Here (2018) is exclusively showing October 23 – November 21, 2018 on MUBI as part of the series New York Film Festival's Projections.
6a architects and MUBI co-produced the short film Trees Down Here by artist Ben Rivers, which reflects on the natural history of Cowan Court, Churchill College Cambridge, for La Biennale di Venezia 2018. Since opening in May, it has been shown at several film festivals including Toronto, New York and the London Film Festival this October. Shot on 16mm, the 14-minute film playfully captures the delicate balance not just between past design and innovation, but also between buildings humans, animals and their shared environment.
We invited Ben Rivers and 6a architects co-founder Tom Emerson to discuss the origin and creation of the project
NOTEBOOK: Why did you want to make a film and not an installation?
TOM EMERSON: The starting point was when we were invited to show Cowan Court at the Venice Biennale and specifically because it has rough material quality. They were expecting a rough installation which I didn’t want to do. These sort of simulations of architecture are problematic—occasionally there is some nice form-making, quite fun. But generally as something that says something about architecture or about the environment they are pretty crude. So I really wanted to make a film because I like the shift to a completely different medium and experience, especially when talking about nature and the environment. And Ben [Rivers]’s work it is really ambiguous about what constitutes nature, whether the humans within the films are participants in or foreign to the situation. There is a kind of mystery and an emotional register rather than a didactic one. The other thing that was really important to me, which I thought was slightly scary, slightly risky, was the idea that once that ball was passed [to Ben Rivers], we would leave it entirely to him. Which is something architects don’t do—we are slight control freaks.
BEN RIVERS: That’s what I thought, so that process to me was really surprising. I was expecting more emails saying, “how’s it going? what’s happening? can I see some stuff?” but it was really nice to feel that you had complete confidence in handing over and leaving me to it. I am not really used to making a film which is a commission for somebody else. Normally I am just making things that I’ve instigated myself. So it took me a little while to get my head around having the parameters of a building from the start. And how to approach that and claim it—make it mine? I visited a few times, always with my camera, and just being there, being around the buildings and getting a sense of the space, enabled me to start figuring out what I wanted to do. But we did have an important discussion at the beginning, which was key to the whole film and is in the title, about the trees and how the trees were such an important part of Churchill College and the history of it. How the different courts of the college center around these different species of tree, from different parts of the world and the interaction between the natural world and this brutal architectural world, the inside and the outside. The way that the students are interacting with nature while living in these spaces was key to early conversations which shaped the film.
EMERSON: Once we decided that we wanted to make a film we were still aware of the problems of making films about architecture, because barring a couple of notable examples, they’re invariably bad. It’s not a good subject to make films about essentially. It’s also not a good subject to make an exhibition about—architecture is incredibly difficult to exhibit and very difficult to film because it becomes mediated. You have to live in it, experience it, walk past it. But I knew it would be completely counter to your art practice to place the subject in front of the camera in a direct way—you would have an oblique take on it.I knew that the building would be in the film but it wouldn’t be the subject of the film. Urth [Ben Rivers, 2016] is so architectural but it’s not about the architecture. Spatially, it’s very precise, each shot is really carefully composed in relation to its architecture or its architectures, but it’s never about the building so it never delivers a false impression. At Churchill College the trees are a great alibi for setting a scene. I wasn’t expecting the owls or snakes in sneakers, that was a bonus.
NOTEBOOK: The owl becomes almost the star of the film. How did you decide to integrate animals into the film?
RIVERS: It was partly this thing that Tom just mentioned, about the difficulty of filming a building when really buildings are meant to be experienced in the world. They can become a bit dead when they’re represented photographically. Also, I didn’t want to do the obvious thing of filming students mooching around—although I did film one student, an architecture student, working in her own private space, within the new Cowan Court building designed by 6a. It needed this interaction between what we think of as nature and the ambiguity that Tom mentioned, of not being certain about where nature starts and ends. I thought, if I introduce some animals into it, that weren’t meant to be there, it would accentuate this weird line between the constructed world and the natural world. Somebody pointed out to me afterwards, which really was not my intention but was really funny, that it’s like a modernist riff on Harry Potter [laughs], with the owl and the snake. That really wasn’t my intention. There is something about these particular animals which chimes with the college; knowledge and forbidden desire. Sometimes you just have to trust what pops into your head.
NOTEBOOK: The owl because you don’t really see owls during the day, and…
RIVERS: …the snake, you generally don’t see them slithering around colleges and especially not into sneakers. Obviously working with animals is very unpredictable and you don’t know what they’re going to do. I didn’t tell the college that I was doing it.
EMERSON: What I really liked about the snake and the owl was it shifted the focus away from the building even though the architecture and the space are all around it. The snake in the shoes for example and in a very architectural space; a bedroom. But you’re not looking at the bedroom anymore. At least not in the same way, because it has an unexpected slightly surreal character in it. And adds a some humor to it, it’s kind of fun, everybody smiles when they see the owl and the snake.
RIVERS: I think architecture films generally tend to be quite dry…
EMERSON: And the animals are also related to other character in the film, which were not quite as surprising like the images from the archive. The archive is a big player in the film, sifting through documents and drawings.
RIVERS: I wanted to explore unseen or overlooked areas of the college—the early sketches, and the abandoned model of the original college which had been stored underneath the stage for decades. I was thinking about time and wanting to make your building seem less new—almost like the film is from the future. So that your building has already become completely immersed and a part of the college as a whole, almost to the point where the whole college is nearly abandoned. It’s now the animals and a few human stragglers who remain there, in a Ballardian sense.
NOTEBOOK: And the Latin names, as a reference to the past…
EMERSON: You have no idea where the disembodied narrative fits into the thing. The John Ashbery [poem] also took me by surprise. I didn’t actually know it was John Ashbery [reading the poem]—when I first heard it. But that was also a nice thing because that also displaces it, because it’s so not Cambridge.
RIVERS: He’s not at the college, but he says it was his first poem that he wrote when he was at college. It’s actually Cambridge Massachusetts.
John Cage is also heard at the beginning. Afterwards I realized that the stain glass windows in the film, they were made by John Piper—so with Ashbery it’s the three Johns. Cage is actually talking to a group architecture students—you can’t really tell that from the film, but he is talking about space.
NOTEBOOK: That’s something that you had said—that you are happy to move away from the sort of Churchill, English side of things.
EMERSON: Gary Oldman’s Darkest Hour had just come out when we were first talking about it—so the idea of having a resonant Churchillian voice to it was definitely to be avoided—there are many voices in the college.
RIVERS: He didn’t like the building anyway…
NOTEBOOK: A lot of artist’s voices—the college is known for all these artists.
RIVERS: Yes, and those stained glass windows were incredible because the chapel was actually really contested—some people didn’t want a chapel at all so they put it in the back of the grounds. But what they did with it architecturally and with the stained glass windows is really amazing.
EMERSON: It was really smart— it’s a very beautiful little pavilion. Almost like a landscape pavilion in the grounds. These great windows brought out the texture and color into the film. It was also nice that you moved around the ground.
RIVERS: I was lucky because the few months I was filming, between February and April, the seasons changed so much it looked like I’d filmed over the whole year, because of a late snow and a really great spring—though autumn is missing—which also helps with the ambiguity about the time.
NOTEBOOK: Tom, could you speak a bit more about your design for Cowan Court as opposed to the existing building?
EMERSON: Cowan Court was the first new court building in Cambridge for a generation. It’s exactly the same photoprint as the original courts of the Brutalist college built in the early 1960’s, like a doppelgänger. Essentially, we took the original building and said, “just do another one” in terms of the scale of the courtyard typology, but then we switched the materiality. The original is all concrete and brick, so it’s very mineral, of the ground. We made it totally organic—above the ground. But then the opposition between the mineral and the organic was not so neat, because concrete cast against boards has the same texture as wood. So then when we started doing the building, we became interested less in how different it was and more in how similar it would be to the concrete. One question was, “can you make Brutalism today?” conceptually, practically, technically… and, “is it possible to do it in wood?” We wanted a resonance, that this is fundamentally a Churchill College building—but it’s also completely different, two generations after the original.
RIVERS: But also there is a big enough gap in age that they do get along—they are not too close.
EMERSON: We wanted it to be a little bit archaic. Brutalism is very archaic. I think it comes from the same part of the brain that is attracted to ruins.
RIVERS: Every time I got a cab there, the drivers would say it’s just boxes. These modern architects, they don’t know how to make a bay window, there is no details on it—it’s just blocks put together.
EMERSON: —But those are cab drivers who are used to delivering people to Kings College, Trinity College, Peterhouse College. Even if it’s a fairly widely held view in the public, mistrust of contemporary or modern architecture, as it is modern or contemporary art, a Cambridge cab driver is probably unusually saturated with the best of the last eight hundred years of British architecture. In Cambridge they are slightly spoiled so it’s a slightly warped perspective.
RIVERS: What I liked about Churchill was that it’s quite labyrinthine. It’s quite easy to get lost in, When you are in and out of those little courtyards you lose your bearings. I also really liked the apertures that occur through the buildings. It was a good way of seeing your building through these openings in a labyrinth. It frames brilliantly, and that’s why the film had to be four-three aspect ratio as well, in terms of the analog physicality of the buildings. But also the format ratio that somehow those apertures were calling out for.