What is left in the absence of form but memory? The Four Columns, directed by Dominick Rivers, explores the ideas of loss, impermanence, and how memory can become tied to a place, ingrained in the foundations of a home and buried within the very ground, even after the destruction of a physical framework. The film centers around the depiction of the childhood home of Rivers and his late brother, and its demolition.  

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The film opens on an image of the home, standing but already overgrown. It lingers on the structure before cutting to the home being torn apart. This continues into a back and forth between the home in these two states–the existing and the demolition, the past and the present, the remembered and the remains. It also becomes clear throughout the film that the house has already begun to crumble, even before the destruction, nature creeping back in, paint peeling, drywall hanging from the ceiling. Time has already changed the landscape of this place, which holds so much sentiment and reminiscence.  

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On top of this, the film itself is degraded, buried in the ground at the site of the house for 27 days–a day for every year of Rivers’ brother’s life. This intentional deterioration has resulted in abstract visuals and shapes over the images, portions of the film becoming completely indecipherable, creating a clouded, intangible feeling which visually contributes to the overarching theme of memory. Memory is enduring but disconnected from the present, often hazy or disjointed, always colored, bittersweet, by emotion and by all the time spent in the in-between. At the core of this film there is decomposition–the film, a home, a life, a memory.  

 

This not only alludes to the theme of decomposition, however, but also reflects the idea that the memories of Rivers’ brother and all the memories shaped by their childhood home are still tied to this place, in the very soil beneath it, the mind still rooted among the remnants of the past. The final images of this film, the titular four columns, show the only physical remnants of the home. The columns still standing, lonely in the emptiness without the context of the house, create the feeling of an absence with a presence. The columns–the remnants, strikingly recognizable, illustrate both the impermanence of the physical and the persistence of memory. When something is gone, there is something that remains, held both within the mind and ingrained within a physical place–in the ground itself. In essence, The Four Columns invites a rumination on grief, the function of memory, and the fleeting nature of all things.  

 

- Leo Bell, BFA Film Production '28