Although the cast is mainly a herd of sheep, a recent film delivers a profound portrait of struggling humanity \u2014 and a last glimpse of the American frontier.<\/p>\n
The documentary \u201cSweetgrass<\/a>,\u201d produced by Harvard filmmakers and husband-and-wife team\u00a0Lucien Castaing-Taylor<\/a> and Ilisa Barbash, is a moving, gritty, and visually stunning look at the life of some of the last cowboy herders in the American West, where animal, man, and land intersect.<\/p>\n Projecting a subtle intimacy and a rawness that only real life can offer, the film depicts the grueling trek made by a group of ranchers as they herd 3,000 sheep though the Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains in south-central Montana to feed in higher pastures.<\/p>\n The pair met while in graduate school at the\u00a0University of Southern California<\/a> in the late 1980s and have since collaborated on projects as varied as \u201cIn and Out of Africa,\u201d<\/a> an examination of the African art trade, and \u201cMade in USA,\u201d a film about sweatshops and child labor in the Los Angeles garment industry. Their latest book \u201cThe Cinema of Robert Gardner,\u201d explores the work of the ethnographic filmmaker and former director of Harvard\u2019s Film Study Center.<\/p>\n The couple categorize themselves as visual anthropologists who join art making with an empirical attachment to real life. Through their film work, wrote one reviewer, \u201cThey have sought to depict as honestly as possible the beauty and ache of actual lived experience.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSweetgrass\u201d lands directly in that category. It\u2019s \u201can unsentimental elegy to the American West,\u201d and a tribute to a dying way of life. When the couple learned of a Montana rancher who was the last in his county to continue the practice of driving his sheep up into the mountains to graze in the summer, they quickly decided to investigate.<\/p>\n \u201cI was interested in resuscitating this much-derided project of salvage anthropology, which in ethnographic film is predicated on going to remote cultures and documenting traditions that will no longer exist,\u201d said Barbash, associate curator of visual anthropology at\u00a0Harvard\u2019s Peabody Museum of Archaeology<\/a> and Ethnology. \u201cI liked this challenge of going to film something that was the last of something, the last of a tradition, without falling prey to all the pitfalls of the older paradigm of salvage anthropology.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2001, they moved their family from Colorado to Montana, planning to make the trek into the mountains together. But with two young children and a dangerous predator problem at higher elevations, Barbash stayed in town to film, while her husband headed into the hills. When he returned, they realized they had begun two separate pictures. They chose to focus on Castaing-Taylor\u2019s footage.<\/p>\n Over three summers, Castaing-Taylor was part of the yearly three-month expedition that took the sheep into the mountains to find greener pastures. The director of the\u00a0Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University<\/a>, who had never been on a horse, rode the arduous route alongside a pair of hardened cowboys. He strapped his camera to his back with a harness that allowed him to keep the film rolling. Hard riding, grizzly-bear encounters, and fierce weather were all part of the experience that transported him, he said, \u201cto another place, psychically, intellectually, and aesthetically.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI couldn\u2019t believe there was anywhere that remote in the lower 48,\u201d Castaing-Taylor, a current\u00a0Radcliffe<\/a> Fellow, told a crowd at a March 5 screening of the documentary at the\u00a0Harvard Film Archive<\/a>.<\/p>\n During the project, the couple shot additional winter footage and the spring lambing and shearing season. It took eight years to cull through and edit 200 hours of work.<\/p>\n The finished product offers a stirring look at a disappearing livelihood and presents the complex dynamic between man and animal amid a lush and lonesome landscape.<\/p>\n The camerawork and the absence of narration lend the documentary a powerful voyeuristic component. Instead of a voice-over, audiences listen in on a conversation between a herder and his horse, or the furious tirade of a lone herder, desperately trying to corral his wayward flock, or, simply, the constant bleating of sheep.<\/p>\n Camera angles that range from sweeping panoramas to tight shots of the herd at ground level add to the sensory feel of the film.<\/p>\n The result is that \u201cSweetgrass\u201d doesn\u2019t so much tell a story as drop you right into the middle of it.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s less of a predestined kind of visual anthropology,\u201d said Barbash. \u201cWe immerse people into a world in which they\u2019ve got to fend for themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n In a small but significant decision, the couple left out the title of \u201cdirector\u201d in the film\u2019s brief ending credits. Barbash is listed as producer, and her husband is simply referenced as \u201crecordist.\u201d The omission was intentional, explained Castaing-Taylor. \u201cThe whole notion of an expert filmmaker or expert anthropologist directing a nominally documentary film really begs a lot of questions. \u2026 What does it mean about your relationship to reality if you claim it can be directed?\u201d<\/p>\n