Slow Motion Picture
The clip above is a good representation of its film, Sweetgrass (2009): slow, deliberate, and beautifully shot. The artistry is apparent, but the filmmakers, Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, have the good sense to make the "story" subtle. As in this excerpt, the documentary is not narrated or prefaced or even introduced except through these lingering images. Although it risks losing its audience, the strategy works by forcing us to pay close attention to what we see and hear. The quizzical expression on a sheep's face. The sound of birdsong. The wind ever-rustling.
There is in fact a story here about change and motion, but it is told through stillness. Montana cowboys have driven their sheep to pasture in the Beartooth Mountains for decades, but the film documents the last run in 2003. As a documentary Sweetgrass is unsparing and unsentimental: it cuts from a silhouetted Marlboro man standing on a ridge to a foul-mouthed cowboy cursing out his sheep.
Barbash and Castaing-Taylor like to disrupt our assumptions about nature and the West. They linger on broken landscapes like the ones that begin this trailer, where lines cut across and interrupt the picturesque and sublime. There is beauty here, they imply, but don't take it for granted.
The sheep themselves can surprise too. At the end of the trailer they transform from a few stragglers to a shifting abstraction that moves as one. In a breathtaking shot later in the film we see a shadowed mountain across a green valley. As the camera slowly moves closer we make out a line of white trailing down its side. Then the line of white appears to move. Then we see that the white line is actually hundreds of sheep making their way down the cliff. The mountain that seemed so motionless was never still at all and the camera's slow motion made us see it (and the sheep) afresh. The filmmakers' restraint is admirable: they let the story tell itself and its structure emerges organically from the material. They show a remarkable confidence in their own vision and judgment, and they earn it.
