Sweetgrass, and other shorts, Lucien Castaing-Taylor

Sheep.  Lots and lots of sheep.  About 3000 head.  Billed as "the last ride of the American cowboy,"  Sweetgrass documents the perilous journey of moving 3000 sheep over the treacherous Absaroka-Bearthooth mountains to summer pasture.  It's a masterpiece.  However, I want to blog about the forthcoming films we were privileged to see last Friday.  

Castaing-Taylor is a professor of Visual & Environmental Studies and of Anthropology as well as the director of Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab.  If this is what Sensory Ethnography is, I like it.  Is this to be considered at new genre of ethnographic film?  I think so.  We were lucky enough to watch his mini-movies – different edits of footage used in the feature length film, Sweetgrass – assembled to engage the senses (visual and audible) with Castaing-Taylor himself.  These short films seem to be intended as installations.  Art installations.  Gallery or museum installations.  

Two films we watched were Coom Biddy, and Kinship, both to be released in 2010.  Coom Biddy, according to Castain-Taylor is a derivative of "Come I thee bid."  This is the call of the sheep herder "bidding" the sheep to come; to follow him. Kinship, suffice to say, is a relationship between animals and humans.  Since they are not released, I don't feel right detailing the scenes, and anyway this is for our class, and we all saw it.  

I do want to say that I'm completely inspired and, in conjunction with our reading of John Dewey's Art as Experience, I think I've found something that speaks to me on the esthetic level of which Dewey writes.  According to Castaing-Taylor, documentary has some privilege on "reality," however, real life does not have the markers of subtitles and explanations.  The experiences are internalized and, and if crystalized and condensed within the person, it goes beyond culture to "tie to our natural selves," said Castaing-Taylor.  This experience of having "an experience," (Dewey) is what Castaing-Taylor is going for, I believe.  Dewey says that an esthetic experience can exist all around at anytime, and Castaing-Taylor embodies this in his films of Sensory Ethnographic work.  

I like this very much, and am thinking of sensory ethnographic work of my own.  I think a new genre of ethnographic film is upon us, and for me this representation of an experience of life is what art is, and it's great.  

Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life

Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life, by
Merian Cooper (concept),
Ernest Shoedsack (camera),
Marguerite Harrison (author)
Terry Ramsey (writer)
B/W, 1925

I thought I would blog about this movie today as it is the celebration day of the Persian New Year.
This movie is a tour across Asia minor along the Angora passage.  We begin in Angora (present day Turkey) and head east to find…'The Forgotten People.'  These 'forgotten people' are the Bakhtiari, a nomadic people of Persia (today Iran). 
Though deeply Orientalist I love it!  Like Nanook it is a document of the struggle with nature for survival. Although not entirely 'deep,' it does reveal where and how people live, and what they eat, and how they manage the world about them.
It's a silent film narrated with titles, and overlaid with Persian music.  The music is brilliant, and I wish in fact, I could obtain a sound track from it.  Beautiful. 
The opening scene–a caravan of camels spread out across, and splitting the screen horizontally–hooks one visually, immediately.  For the rest of the film we encounter incredibly gorgeous scenery, thanks to the talented Mr. Shoedsack.  We encounter remote mud villages with dancing bears, and bleak landscapes fronted by formidable sandstorms.  We arrive with an encounter of Haidar Khan, "Chief of Tribes, Master among Men." 
Here the chief tells us that he must do the impossible and move his people–animals, men, women and children–hundreds of miles over treacherous terrain to escape the drought which has killed many. 
One of the most incredible scenes of the movie, and indeed, possibly that I've ever seen is the crossing of the river Karun. 
Chief Haidar Khan has to cross this huge river with it's glacial waters and torrential flow–with his entire community of 50,000+ people, and another who-knows-how-many in animals!  It's incredible.  It takes 6-days.  Roaring waters, screaming tribesmen, bellowing herds of goats and sheep.  The cries of the drowning.  What a description!  To cross the chief takes the hides of slaughtered goats, inverts them, and inflates them like balloons.  Goat balloons!  These are strapped together and lashed cross-ways with wood to make rafts.  All the people and belongings cross first.  The animals are the last to cross and must swim.  In all directions horses, goats, sheep, men trying to make it to the other side.  It's so amazing, and (again) the music is so beautiful, and the admiration I conjure up for this hardship makes me almost cry. 
The film is full of amazing landscapes and encounters with exotic peoples and ways of life: eating, dancing, smoking, playing games, transportation, craft work, etc. 
Although many of the titles are a bit corny by today's standards, I assume they were not to audiences of the late 1920's.  And, viewing the film now, that hokey part of the film is touching and comical and does not overshadow the beauty and information, or the extremely difficult conditions which the filmmakers must have had in getting such wide-ranging (in terms of territory and content) content in such a harsh place. 
This film should either replace, or sit next to Nanook within the ivory walls of ethnographic film studies.

Monsoon Reflection, Stephanie Spray

Sonically and visually rich, Stephanie uses sounds, camera angles, color and lighting, constructing a film in the Lucien-Taylor-Sensory-Ethnographic-school-of-Visual-Anthropology mode.  The practice of daily life, filmed with long takes and vivid, enhanced sound is skillfully done as several women work at agriculture, sharing their meager existence (meager by Western standards) among themselves and with the audience.
Opening the film is a shot of a woman’s hands working a grinding stone on a metate (to use the Spanish word).  The low, frontal angle of the camera gives the sense that if the hands push the grinding stone too much further it will actually hit the lens of the camera.  It’s as if from a child’s point-of-view, their head on the ground directly in front of the metate.  The lighting is beautiful, with an almost reverence shown to the hands.  Sonically, we hear the crunch and grind as if our own ear were in the stone itself.
Following this is another arresting shot of a landscape.  Overlooking green fields–rice paddy–we see nothing but the field, and the green beyond.  However, we are not alone.  We hear the obvious sound of someone working.  It’s loud, and working just below the frame of the camera.  The camera slowly tilts downward to appease our curiosity revealing an elderly woman as she thins the field.
As a student of modern anthropological film, these techniques are a wonderful use of sync sound, and a welcome addition in ethnographic video/film.  That we can determine where the sound is coming from–it’s coming from below the frame–brings us into what is happening on screen.  Were I not learning film making myself, I would not ask:  Where are the mics?  How many?  How are they deployed?  What mic’s is she using?  Were I not concerned with these questions at this stage of my career I would not at all be concerned.  Which is sort of the point.  The enhanced sound is not distracting.  Contrarily it’s enhancing to the experience of the business of watching the film. 
There are many other scenes, which can be talked about, such as the long takes of one woman smoking, enhanced by the loud sound of her struggling lungs.  I won’t go into all of it for this blog, and suffice to say that the lighting and sound is great in this film, and in this style of ethnographic film making.