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.