Ruminating on Sweetgrass

Interview with Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor

Scott MacDonald

Liminality is the order of the day in cinema, especially independent cinema. The once seemingly distinct histories of documentary and avant-garde film have become so interlaced that by the spring of 2009 the graduate students in cinema at the University of Iowa could announce an “Avant-Doc” conference without worrying that the title might confuse. Canonical avant-garde filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Peter Kubelka, James Benning, Peter Hutton, and Su Friedrich are increasingly seen as (also) documentary filmmakers; and “documentaries” like Taiga (1992, Ulrike Ottinger), Our Daily Bread (2005, Nikolaus Geyrhalter), The Shape of the Moon (2005, Leonard Retel Helmrich), and On the Third Planet from the Sun (2006, Pavel Medvedev) feel as much like avant-garde films as documentaries.

One of the most remarkable cinematic projects that has developed within this liminal zone has produced Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s Sweetgrass (2009), a work of self-confessed salvage ethnography that documents the final moments of a century-old practice in the American west, plus a series of eight installation works by Castaing-Taylor. Sweetgrass is a bit more obviously a documentary; the installation works, a bit more obviously avant-garde. Near the end of Sweetgrass, two intertitles explain, “Since the late nineteen century Western ranchers and their hired hands have ranged animals on public lands for summer pasture. In 2003, over three months and one hundred and fifty miles, the last band of sheep trailed through Montana’s Absaroka-Beartooth mountains.” Sweetgrass uses no narration, no music, no explanatory intertitles other than the two I just quoted; like a James Benning film, it allows us to meditate on places and moments. It is a “Western” about cowboys that involves no shoot-outs and no romance. It is a nature film that refuses that genre’s conventional distinction between “nature” and human culture, in order to reveal the intermingled lives and bodies of the sheep and the sheep-herders, or as Castaing-Taylor puts it, of the “sheeple” involved in the epic trek of thousands of sheep into and out of the mountains and the harvest of wool. The installation works focus on particular moments in the lives of sheep and sheepherders. Hell Roaring Creek (2010), for example, is a twenty-minute minimalist piece during which we watch them cross a creek as morning dawns in the mountains; the camera is situated in the middle of the creek and we experience this moment in real time, and surrounded by the dramatic sound-scape created by the creek, the sheep, and sheepherders and their dogs.

At the time when they began the Sweetgrass project, both Barbash and Castaing-Taylor were teaching at the University of Colorado, where they were regular attendees at Stan Brakhage’s salon. Barbash had studied visual anthropology at the University of Southern California with Timothy Asch; she is currently a curator of visual anthropology at the Peabody Museum at Harvard University. Castaing-Taylor, also a student of visual anthropology at USC, was editor of Visual Anthropology Review from 1991-1994, and has published Visualizing Theory (Routledge, 1994) and Transcultural Cinema, essays by David MacDougall (Princeton, 1998), and with Barbash, Cross-Cultural Filmmaking (California, 1997) and The Cinema of Robert Gardner (Berg, 2008); he teaches Visual and Environmental Studies and Anthropology at Harvard and heads Harvard’s new “Sensory Ethnography Laboratory.” I interviewed Barbash and Castaing-Taylor with my history of documentary class at Harvard in April, 2009; and the three of us have expanded that conversation on-line.

MacDonald: Could you each talk a bit about your background: how you got into film and how you came to work together? In and Out of Africa [1993] was your first film; how did that project develop? And what accounts for the gap between it and your re-entry into filmmaking with Sweetgrass? 

Barbash: I grew up loving the movies, but it never really occurred to me that an ordinary person could make them. When I got out of college I was interested in journalism, but this was during the arts cable channel boom in New York City, and it was easier to get a freelance job in television production than it was at a newspaper. At a certain point I realized that I didn’t want to climb the ladder to be a small part of a large production organization so I went back to school, to the Master’s Program in Visual Anthropology at the University of Southern California, where I learned some of the technical skills necessary to be part of a small film crew. There I met Lucien who was escaping his own insular world in England. We were part of a cohort of about eleven students, and Lucien and I started working together. In and Out of Africa was our thesis video, a discursive collage on authenticity, taste, and racial politics in the transnational African art market. 

We had originally intended to make a single-channel video about the cultural effects of tourism on the Dogon of Mali. We’d been there a few times and had a number of contacts, both African and European. But about three months before we were to shoot, there was a coup d’état in Mali, which of course meant no tourists. So we shifted gears. At the time, Lucien was editing the journal Visual Anthropology Review, and had published an article by a doctoral student, Chris Steiner, whose dissertation research was on Hausa Muslim art traders in the Ivory Coast. We called him up and asked if he knew any who were trading between the Ivory Coast and New York. Chris introduced us to Gabai Baare in New York and that summer Chris, Lucien and I met up on the Ivory Coast to film. Of course there were obvious differences between our original and our ultimate project. But what we were really interested in—exploring the various ways in which Africans and Europeans/Americans look at each other, the ways in which they represent themselves to each other and the ways in which they internalize all these representations—remained the same.

The gap between In and Out and Sweetgrass was much longer than we’d have liked. The reasons are mundane. Having vowed never to return to academia, Lucien did a doctorate in anthropology! For that we lived in Martinique for two and a half years, during which time we wrote Cross-Cultural Filmmaking and collaborated with Isaac Julien on the film Frantz Fanon: Black Skin White Mask [1996]. We moved twice, because of new jobs, started a family, and wrote and edited a number of books. I had a six month battle with head and neck cancer, which consumed all our energy for a year or more.

Each of the films was informed by a long period of reflection and revision, about what we liked and didn’t like in documentary, what we knew and didn’t know, and what we thought might be possible. I’m not sure whether we’d have been able to make Sweetgrass soon after making In and Out of Africa, even if all the funding and logistics had been in place. It takes us a long time not just physically to make a film, but also to be ready to try something new.

MacDonald: I’ve seen Sweetgrass in various forms over the past couple of years. You’ve been working on it for nearly a decade. Could you tell me how this project has evolved?

Barbash: We were living and teaching in Boulder, Colorado, when the project came to us. There was a New Jersey/Wisconsin newspaper owner, Bill Heaney, who was leasing land to Lawrence Allestad, the owner of the sheep in the film, at a point when Lawrence’s deeded land was drying up because of drought and changing weather patterns. Lawrence would graze this land during fall and spring, and then follow an eighty-year plus tradition of trailing his sheep up into the Beartooth-Absaroka range near Yellowstone, every summer. He had a family permit that had been passed down over four generations of Norwegian descendants. One day the sheep owner said to the land owner, “This is the last time I’m ever going to do this; someone should make a film about me,” and word traveled, eventually to us in March of 2001, and we thought it sounded like a wonderful project. We had small children so we didn’t want to travel very far. That summer, we went up through Wyoming to Montana with the family and a babysitter and her dog, and started shooting.

Castaing-Taylor: As Lisa said, we were living in the Rockies, and were interested in the so-called New West (the wunderkind scholar Patti Limerick was a colleague in Boulder), especially the changes wrought by yuppification, with all the neo-homesteaders—rich hobby farmers—moving in and buying up the land as a playground for their kids and guests for a few weeks every summer. It was a chance, or a challenge, for us to engage anew with “salvage ethnography”—how to represent a world on the wane—something that’s been considered totally retrograde within anthropology since the 1960s. Could we acknowledge a historical loss, without falling prey to all the pitfalls of patronizing romanticism and nostalgia?

MacDonald: When you say that the tradition of salvage ethnography has been intellectually discredited, to what extent do you feel that that negates the value of the films of crucial contributors to cinematic salvage ethnography like John Marshall and Robert Gardner?

Castaing-Taylor: Maybe it does negate their value. But is that all wrong? They remained committed to visual salvage anthropology long after written anthropology, critical theory, and art practice more generally had moved on and turned their attention to hybridizing, globalizing cultural formations in various states of emergence and becoming.

Marshall’s early sequence films among the !Kung are still remarkable, when I watch them today, not least for their unselfconscious structural rigor in a filmmaker who never, to my knowledge, had any interest in the avant-garde—as is the mythopoetic Hunters [1958], in a totally different register. A Joking Relationship [1962] is extraordinary in its coupling of the erotic and the ethnographic. But Marshall was an uneven cinematographer and a rather sloppy filmmaker. His magnum opus, A Kalahari Family, is all over the place, stylistically and substantively.

MacDonald: In the early 1970s, I had the good fortune to take a one-week intensive course on ethnographic film from Marshall (for several years the University Film Association sponsored summer courses at Hampshire College); to my surprise, he opened that course with Peter Kubelka’s flicker film, Arnulf Rainer [1960]. He did have some awareness of avant-garde filmmaking.

And Gardner?

Castaing-Taylor: Gardner lost interest in anthropology early on, and has never really done ethnographic fieldwork of his own, but in a typical cinematic division of labor, has borrowed from the anthropological expertise of others—among the Dani, the Hamar, the Wodaabe, and also in Benares. His one masterpiece, for me, is Forest of Bliss [1986], and I doubt it will seem any less of an achievement a century from now. But the anachronistic discourse of Dead Birds, and its divine cinematographic omniscience—if not falling afoul of the pathetic fallacy, then at least exemplifying a kind of pathetic infallibility—has been an embarrassment to anthropologists for decades. The purple prose voice-over imprisons the Dani within some sublimated, dehistoricized, deeply racialized Stone Age formaldehyde that was concocted in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Even Gardner’s later Deep Hearts [1979] and the cinematographically mind-blowing Rivers of Sand [1974] display almost no evidence of modernity, or of any coevality between the Hamar, the Peul, and their imagined spectators. 

Barbash: I disagree. I don’t think those developments you mentioned negate the value of these films at all. Certainly the Marshall family was aware that they were filming a world on the wane, and were careful not to film things like Coke bottles (a la The Gods Must be Crazy [1980]) in their work. In retrospect, we can criticize them for not being more upfront about their subject positions and the effect of their presence on their communities in their 1950s-1970s films and ethnographies. But that’s applying contemporary standards to work done fifty-odd years go. And since then, John, Lorna and Elizabeth Marshall have acknowledged the changes in the lives of the !Kung that were occurring as they did their research; John, especially in his Kalahari Family series.

Nobody sees these films outside of a classroom any more, and there they remain valuable approximations of what life what like for hunter-gatherers in the 1950s. Were the !Kung “untouched” when the Marshalls arrived? No. Are these real !Kung in their films? Yes. Is this pretty close to what their lives were like? Probably.

What’s delighted me about anthropology since I first started studying it is that at least since the mid-1980s we’ve learned that we can’t look at any kind of representation without being critical of it, and without second-guessing the ideological inclinations and personal motivations, conscious and unconscious, of the author of the ethnography. I’m not sure every other discipline reflects on itself to the same degree.

A close examination of the work of Gardner taught me this as well as anything else: that a work of ethnography emerges from the originating culture, that of the filmmaker, and is inevitably a product of its time. If you are looking for a single truth, you are not going to find it in one of Gardner’s films. But that doesn’t mean you’re not going to get anything of value from that representation.

MacDonald: Sweetgrass is not the only film to come out of your sheep-herding project.

Castaing-Taylor: No. Actually, it’s the ninth piece, but it’s the longest, and the one Lisa and I made together. I’m finishing the others now, but unlike Sweetgrass they’re intended more for gallery exhibition than theatrical. Originally we imagined we were shooting a single vérité documentary about these sheepherders’ lives. We ended up becoming so engrossed that we, all of us as a family, spent three summers there. I was on a sabbatical during this period, so during 2001-2002 I was spending three or four days out of every week or two, year round, up there—all the winter sequences, the shearing and the lambing, were shot during that time. We shot in Montana between 2001 and 2007, but far more intensively in the early years before we moved to Boston. Had we not moved east, we’d probably still be shooting. Why stop?

Barbash: The majority of the footage you see in Sweetgrass was shot that first summer—the whole trajectory of going up into the mountains and coming back down. In retrospect, this surprises me because you would think that as you get to know people better, you’re going to get more interesting, more intimate footage. Instead, what happened was that, summer by summer, we had to work harder to get good footage. Lucien shot much more the first summer than he did the second two summers, though the footage he shot later did help us fill in some gaps.

Also, over the three summers the hired hands working with the sheep changed, and that made it difficult to integrate the three years. The first summer’s footage had John and Pat, the two herders you get to know in the film; during the second summer Pat worked with someone else and was becoming discouraged with the whole sheep-herding endeavor. He was exhausted, homesick, had a girlfriend back home he missed, and was doing the bulk of the work himself. That’s when he went up to the top of the mountain and complained to his mother that he just couldn’t handle it anymore. So that sequence is from the second summer. There’s almost nothing in the film from the third summer. All of the stuff from other seasons, all the birthing and shearing and the hay being spewed out onto the landscape, was shot between the first summer and the second summer.

MacDonald: How often did you need to have the herders, or others, re-enact things they did?

Castaing-Taylor: I don’t think we staged anything. We didn’t interview anybody either, at least when the camera was rolling—though when I wasn’t shooting I probably drove them spare with my asinine questions. But it would have been antithetical to both the aesthetics and the ethics we were after to have asked anyone to re-enact anything just for the camera. Sometimes something happened and I missed it and I would pray that they would do it again—invariably in vain—but we never directed action, even in cases where it could conceivably look as if we did.

Barbash: The one scene for which we most prepared was the shot of the sheep going through town. For that we had two cameras going the first year. I was on the roof of a Land Rover shooting down the street from above and Lucien was on the ground shooting tracking shots. I focused way down the street toward the railroad tracks to catch the sheep coming up onto the horizon and crossing the tracks. As it was a super long shot, it seemed to take forever. And then as the sheep came closer I spied Lucien in the corner of the frame, wearing his harness, walking and shooting alongside Lawrence. Of course we could not do a second with three thousand sheep in the middle of town! Jump cut to the next summer. Again on or around July 5 we got up at 4:30 in the morning, got both cameras ready, quickly drove to the center of town to set up the shot, and then I realized that in our rush, I had forgotten my camera! Lucien filmed down from the Land Rover roof and that’s the shot in the film.

MacDonald: What was your relationship with the herders; they seem amazingly at ease around you, and yet, you must be kneeling on the ground right in front of them as you’re filming. They do mention you once when you’re in the tent at one point; and at the end of the phone call scene, Pat seems to talk to you about his “phone booth,” but generally your presence is not remarked by John and Pat.

Castaing-Taylor: There’s a weird moment when we’re all in the cook tent. After you hear a snore, John says to Pat that he has made it so hot in the tent that “Lucien fell asleep.” Technically, even epistemologically, that’s so bizarre as to be borderline incomprehensible. It’s definitely thought-provoking. How can the camera operator have fallen asleep? Well, as it happens, I really had, but the camera was on my lap and my right hand was still on the handle, and the camera was just mindlessly rolling on, recording away. It’s a reflexive moment, but not your garden-variety documentary mise-en-abîme. 

Another moment that bowls me over is right after Pat’s phone conversation with his mother, when his cell battery gives out. He turns to me and says “I love to torment her.” That remark speaks volumes, and you immediately have to rethink the whole sequence you’ve just seen. Was his vulnerability before his mother not genuine? Was he hamming it up for attention, and if so, hers, on the end of the line, or mine, behind the camera? Or is he making light of it to cloak his vulnerability? I rather think the latter, which only adds more pathos to the scene. There are various other moments when I’m acknowledged, explicitly or implicitly, but you’re right that, stylistically, we chose not to belabor them.

Most of our subjects knew each other well, which affected how comfortable they were around the camera. And being at eleven or twelve-thousand feet in the mountains for two-three months, looking after three thousand sheep, controlling where they graze and trying to protect them from predators, tending camp day in day out, with nobody but two guys and the animals to talk to, it’s amazing how quickly you get intimate. We had extended conversations about Uncle Snooks and Aunt Edna; John and Pat mapped their conjugal relations; I would tell them about growing up in Liverpool and life in Europe—there were some fantastic conversations that didn’t get into Sweetgrass. Pat and I are about the same age, and have kids the same age, but I was a foreigner who had never even set foot in Montana before starting this project; John is maybe twenty years older, has spent more time herding sheep, and is a Vietnam Vet. We had more than enough to talk about.

I think a number of things contributed to their apparent indifference to the camera. One is that when I wasn’t filming, when I didn’t have the camera on me, I was working as they were, or at least trying to help out as best I could. I was a greenhorn; I didn’t know sheep, had never ridden a horse before, and so on—so I was their apprentice in many ways. Obviously I had to learn fast. But I was not only a greenhorn, I was a foreigner, and had a funny, barely comprehensible British accent. I must have seemed like an alien to them, and my project might have seemed as alien as I was.

I remember when I first went out there, during lambing of 2001, before we’d met: I was on the phone with Lawrence Allestad, the rancher who owns the sheep and the grazing allotment, and I could tell he wasn’t understanding a word I was saying. Finally he said, “Hold on a second, I’ll get my wife; she speaks English. I’m a ‘Wegian.” Since the second world war, rural Montanans of Norwegian descent have felt more and more displaced by political-economic developments, as their family-oriented ranching culture has withered away; and they have sometimes internalized a sense of their own inferiority. It’s terribly sad when a culture or subculture that perceived itself as the center of its own universe gets progressively marginalized. One of the later scenes to end up on the cutting room floor was a story about a ‘Wegian kid who believed it was illegal for ‘Wegians to go to college.

Also, the camera was a gargantuan shoulder-mounted monstrosity that was suspended from a spring and aluminum bar that came up my spine and extended over my head—to help lower the center of gravity and take some of the pressure off my arms. It cut off 180 degrees of my vision, and blocked out half my face. And because I almost never lowered it from my shoulder, even when eating around the fire or herding the sheep, it became almost a prosthetic extension of my body, and I, I suppose, a kind of cyborg. Paradoxically, because it was so visible, with no possibility of dissimulation, the camera became part of the fabric of our daily lives and everyone tended to ignore it.

Contrary to what you’d expect, the effect is almost the inverse of what happens with small home video cameras, especially now that they have fold-out LCD screens—you can tell immediately whether these new cameras are recording or not, which results in this self-conscious performativity on the part of subjects. We were mostly interested in ways our subjects would reveal dimensions of themselves when they weren’t explicitly or exclusively acting out for the camera.

Barbash: The Montanans we worked with are used to going on trail-riding expeditions and hunts with East Coast dudes, and they make fun of how lame they are. I think the fact that Lucien walked up the mountain, for the most part holding an incredibly heavy camera, while other people were riding, was a kind of endurance test that he passed quite well; they could see that he was not some wimpy East Coaster.

Castaing-Taylor: I don’t know about that.

Another thing is that when I did have the camera on me and was shooting, I wouldn’t interact with them; I wouldn’t answer any questions or talk. Because they knew that I was working in my own way, and because they had a respect for work, they would stop trying to interact with me. If we were bedding the sheep down or something, we’d exchange a minimum of information through the walkie-talkies we all carried—which ended up being acoustically prominent in the sound track of Sweetgrass—but they soon realized I wasn’t very good company when I was holding the camera.

MacDonald: One thing that troubles me about Sweetgrass is a technological issue. When I saw the blow-up to 35mm at the Flaherty seminar and again, at the New York Film Festival, the most epic landscape shots often seemed to break down a bit. I didn’t notice this when I originally saw the material on DVD before the blow-up, and I assume this is a function of the limitations of the video technology you had in the early 2000s. Could you talk about your struggles to get this film looking its best? 

Castaing-Taylor: You’re such a snob. But I agree, it was unwatchable in Alice Tully Hall. The screen is too large, and it’s also a multi-purpose space, with red lights from the aisles shining on the screen. Incredible! But it looked fantastic at Film Forum, where the cinema screens are probably smaller than some people’s private plasma screens on the Upper East Side. What can I say? We had no money. With our kind of uncontrolled, unscripted methodology, we knew we’d end up with a high shooting ratio. We had no choice but to shoot it on standard definition NTSC digital video. We used three cameras, but almost all of it was shot on a 3 2/3” CCD DVCAM camera, a really excellent model that no student today would touch with a ten-foot barge pole. “Standard” definition video has 480 lines of horizontal resolution—actually two interlaced fields of 243 lines. “High” definition, which wasn’t yet available, has 720, 1080, or more.

Blowing up a standard def NTSC signal to 35mm is never straightforward. Pedro Costa’s Lisbon trilogy, and a number of his other works, were shot on PAL DV, which is superior to NTSC, but still a far cry from the equivalent native resolution of analog 35mm film, which is usually reckoned as somewhere around 15-18,000 pixels. Costa is often shooting in low light, with very high contrast ratios, yet his work looks out of this world. He told me about his colorist, Patrick Lindenmaier, who’s based in Zurich, and has hand-built the most advanced digital-to-film transfer facilities in the world. I sent Patrick a rough cut of Sweetgrass on DVD, and when he saw the shot of the newly shorn sheep shivering in the snow, he agreed to work with us, but warned us that he could only do so much. To the extent that Sweetgrass is watchable at all is in large part due to his efforts. We spent two long weeks in Zurich and Bern doing final post-production and film-out. But when Sweetgrass premiered in Berlin, on the largest screen in that obscene shrine to unfettered post-unification global capital, Potsdamer Platz, I looked at Patrick halfway through the screening, and he had his head in his hands, eyes averted from the screen. Even 35mm film resolution doesn’t hold up at that size. Big Sky is God’s country, and it wasn’t made to be rendered on standard def. But beggars can’t be choosers.

Barbash: I would add that I don’t think that anyone with a 35mm camera rig would have gotten up into these mountains and been able to film all that went on, so from the get-go it was obvious that there would be some technical compromises.

MacDonald: Lucien, I’ve heard you say that Sweetgrass is more interested in the sheep than the humans. Could you talk about this? 

Castaing-Taylor: Oh, I don’t know. I don’t trust anything I say about the film. The other day at a Q and A after a screening, I even found myself reciting something from a review as if it was my own take on the film! If we could say in words what the film—our collaborator Ernst Karel prefers “vilm,” as an umbrella term to encompass video and film, by analogy with “photograph,” which doesn’t discriminate against digital or analogue—if we could say in words what the vilm is about, we wouldn’t have had to make it.

But I think Sweetgrass is interested in both the sheep and the people, or more precisely their intertwined naturecultures within the context of their larger ecological fold. Sheep and humans have existed uneasily with each other since we first domesticated them in Mesopotamia ten-thousand-odd years ago in the Neolithic Revolution; they were quite possibly the first domesticated livestock animal in history. They gave humanity our first staple proteins: milk and meat. Not to mention their skins, for shelter—and a couple of thousand years later, also their wool. They wouldn’t exist without us, and couldn’t survive without us, because of the way we’ve bred them (to maximize both birth weight and the number of live births) over the millennia. So I don’t think you can distinguish between “people” and “sheep.” It’s more that we’re so many variations of sheeple.

But it’s true that while we started off more interested in the herders, and their relationships to their animals and the land, I do feel the sheep crept up on us and in a way stole the film. I hadn’t given much thought to the aesthetics of sheep before, never mind their lifeworld, the phenomenology of sheep. Come to think of it, the Christian iconography of lambs and sheep (Jacob, David, Isaac, Abraham, Moses, and of course Mohammed, were all shepherds, don’t forget) had probably inured me to sheep as a subject. But it’s hard not to spend countless hours herding and filming them in the back of beyond without starting to think about their subjectivities, and also of course their objectivities—their appearance. I find their bodies fascinating just to look at.

Western thought from the Greeks on, and especially after Descartes, has been hell bent on setting humanity apart from animalia. Linnaeus was the one exception—as he put it in his Systema naturae in reference to the Cartesian conception of animals as so many soulless automata mechanica, “Cartesius certe non vidit simios.” Evidently Descartes never saw a monkey! Linnaeus was dead right. The same has held true ever since, from Heidegger, for whom animals inhabited an “environment,” but never a “Welt,” a world, through Benjamin, Levinas, Lacan, even Derrida—who tried harder than anyone to turn the theoretical tables on the human/animal dyad in his last book, L’animal que donc je suis, but failed miserably. His efforts to extend any ontological density to animalia never went any further than the disquiet he felt before his cat—his chatte, his pussy, as he insists—as she beheld his limp bitte in his Parisian apartment. 

In any event, in some way Sweetgrass does seek to anthropomorphize sheep, and simultaneously to bestialise humanity. I think Dewey was dead right in his 1934 Art as Experience where he insisted that the best art recouples us with our base, bestial selves, and yokes culture back to nature, and the human to the live animal. Most social theory now supposes that “nature” is just some secondary elaboration, a cultural construction—Bruno Latour has argued that the concept of nature has been coopted by the singular authoritative voice of capital-S Science and should therefore be abolished altogether—but that’s pure poppycock, postmodernism of the most parochial kind.

Barbash:  I’d like to propose that the dogs are the unsung heroes and heroines of the film. They function on all sorts of levels, as real helpmates, as physical extensions of the herders, and as their psychological mirrors. There are at least two kinds of dogs in the film. There are the herders—border collies. They’re working dogs but are like pets, played with, and have names: Coco, Breck, Tommy dog, Lena, and my favorite, Maybe. They take commands, as many as two in order. And they can be directed to round up masses of sheep, corral strays, push a herd forward. These dogs seem to function as emotional extensions of the people. When all is chaotic, Lena seems to be running out of control. Breck won't follow John the way he would like. When Pat is at the end of his tether, Tommy dog needs an affectionate pat and a drink of water. 

Then there are the big white dogs, five Great Pyrenees and one Turkish Akbash. These are the guard dogs. They are raised with the sheep and are not treated like pets. They don't have names; in many ways, they’re almost feral. They live and sleep with the sheep, and will protect them as long as the sheep are alive and healthy. In fact, you may notice that they even allow the sheep to push them around a bit. They will fight to the death defending their flock against a bear. But right after the cell phone call, when we know that things are falling apart, we see the white dogs snarling at each other, tearing apart the carcass of a sheep. They're always hungry, and the moment one of their charges is dead, well, she becomes meat. They reflect the dramatic, and now very dark, tenor of the film. They remind me of the three old witches at the beginning ofMacbeth: "Fair is foul, and foul is fair: Hover through the fog and filthy air.”

MacDonald: In what ways did your thinking about humans and animals affect the structuring of Sweetgrass?

Castaing-Taylor: In both filming and later editing Sweetgrass, we became more and more invested in nature, both our identity within it and our experience of it. It’s no accident that the film begins in the domain of the sheep, and humans enter the fray only later and gradually. One of the most trenchant qualities invoked by philosophers and anthropologists as evidence of our separation from the animal kingdom has been our putative monopoly of language, which is why, when humans eventually do appear in Sweetgrass, they do so largely non-verbally. Other than AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” lyrics, which I worry are read as overtly allegorical, or as editorializing on our part, there are no intelligible spoken words during the shearing sequence.

The first spoken human word in Sweetgrass is the call of the shepherd trying to get the sheep to follow him into the shearing pen. He yells something unintelligible to non-locals, “Kumbudday.” When I first heard this, I asked what it meant. The Norwegians told me it was a bastardization of old Norwegian that their grandparent homesteaders had brought with them. The local Irish thought it was a corruption of “Come Paddy!” In fact they were both wrong. In certain valleys in the south of England in Stuart and Tudor days, when you let your ducks out of their coop in the morning, you would call for them to follow you so you could feed them grain, “Coom biddy, coom biddy.” It’s a contraction of “Come, I bid thee!” So to my knowledge these twenty-first century Montanans are the last people on earth to speak this Stuart and Tudor vernacular (I’ve certainly never heard any rural Brits use it).

The next human enunciation in Sweetgrass is in my favorite, and the longest, shot of the movie—when the woman in the night lambing shed is trying to coax the ewe to acknowledge and follow its lamb into a “jug,” a pen. She’s mimicking the sound of the lamb, and if you’re not a sheep person, you probably can’t be sure in this shot which sounds are ovine and which human. Mimicry of course is behind all communication, and is a much more profound form of commensality than propositional language. So here we have proto-language, uttered by a human imitating an animal, but we’re still delaying the introduction of language per se.

It’s interesting how slowly these “ideas,” or idea-images, if that is what they are, came to us. While nature loomed ever larger in my mind, not to mention my body, as we were filming, the structure of the film, which now seems so self-evident and conventional—basically just reflecting the narrative of the sheep drive to and from the mountains, as if it were somehow naturally secreted by the journey itself—was only created right at the end of editing. Originally all the snow footage that you see at the beginning, the sheep eating the cake, the unraveling of the hay bail, the shearing, came at the end. We wanted to end the film back in the domain of the sheep, relegating humanity to the periphery, beyond figure, and even beyond ground. But very late in the editing we shifted that material to the beginning. After the release of the journey down the mountain and the semi-closure of the train tracks and stock yards, it seemed too grueling for the spectator to be submitted to the shearing. 

But this then left us ending on John and the other guy driving away in the pick-up, which was initially very hard for me to be reconciled to—ending on humans, I mean, the obsessive subject of cinema since its invention—after all we had done to try to relativize them and relocate them within a larger matrix of nature. And it seemed to hint at a kind of closure that was both specious (the humans’ future is in fact so uncertain, totally open-ended) and clichéd. But, by extending the shot for as long as possible, and thereby minimizing the significance of the already laconic dialogue in it, and then by extending it acoustically for as long again after the hard cut to black, I came around to it. 

And it was important that after the main credits we return to the mountains, the view of the Beartooths from the Absarokas, but with a totally different soundscape: it’s fall, elk are bugling (an eery sound that most city folks can’t identify), the domesticated animals are gone, the humans are gone. In a sense, nature has returned.

MacDonald: Did the route of the seasonal migration take you into Yellowstone National Park? Pat brings the environmentalist issue up when he and John are talking about the “problem bears” that are not afraid of humans. Did the environmental issue play into the demise of this sheep migration?

Castaing-Taylor: Yes and no. The grazing permits in the area date back to the early part of the twentieth century, long after the park was established back in 1872, and were for Bureau of Land Management and National Forest lands just to the north. In 1975 the area was designated a federal “Wilderness” area (preserves of putative “wildness” that, etymologically, impose their extra-human “will” on you), which prohibits all “development,” and since then the Forest Service, under pressure from various self-identified “environmentalist” constituencies, has sought to phase out all herding allotments. The Allestads’ was the last grazing permit to go. 

They will tell you it was because of pressure from environmentalists, and that’s half true. But it was also economic and cultural. This kind of transhumance is extraordinarily labor-intensive, and costly. As a system, capitalism will substitute commodities for people, and machines for people’s labor, whenever and wherever it can. And it can on ranches, down on the plains. For the cost of a new pick-up, you could probably pay the salary of three or four old-time hired hands. Every rancher I know would prefer the pick-up. But you can’t get pick-ups into the mountains. And finding qualified help to herd sheep, and defend them (and yourself) against protected predators like grizzly bears and re-introduced grey wolfs, is no easy feat.

In Breakfast, one of the installation pieces that came out of this project, Pat casually lets slip his contempt for “backpackers, granolas, and environmentalists.” The words just slide out of his mouth, almost unthinkingly, and virtually devoid of affect. It’s an amazing line, there’s a whole worldview contained within it, and a whole unwritten history of dispossession of rural folk by educated urbanites patronizing them about how to be proper custodians of the land.

Barbash: Even while we were in Big Timber, they had already started dealing with other kinds of environmental issues with perhaps more significant consequences. The Stillwater Mining company had recently opened up a new corridor into the U.S.’s only palladium and platinum mine. Some of the people in our film worked there—Pat’s brother–in-law for example—in four twelve-hour shifts a week. In 2001 I filmed a town meeting called to discuss the mine, but it didn’t make it into the final cut. The people who attended seemed pretty divided about the impact of the mine on their town. While some of the year-round Big Timber population saw the employment benefits of the mine, others were concerned about the effect of drainage from the mines going into the Boulder river, and changing its temperature and chemistry. And there were also people worried about the social and economic impact of suddenly adding new families to the local area. When we were there, they had to hastily attach some modular classrooms to the schools. By 2008, the mine was the county’s largest employer and paid about forty percent of the county’s tax revenue, and when they started to lay people off because of a mining bust, it hit the community hard. The mine has had other problems more recently during the downturn in the auto industry as the metals it produces are used in vehicle catalytic converters to screen out auto pollution, of all things.

MacDonald: Your use of sound is fascinating, not just because of the sounds of the sheep, but because of the way the sound-scape of the film is constructed. As you mentioned earlier in relation to the “lullaby scene,” we’re often hearing in close-up, extreme close-up, as we’re seeing in long shot, even extreme long-shot. Could you talk about how you did this and what led to this approach? The only place I can remember a similar use of sound and image is at the beginning of Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us [1999].

Barbash: The discrepancy between what you hear and what you think you should hear in sync with an image emerged in the editing room rather than being planned. Initially, we just wanted to get the best sound possible, and it was clear that we had to do that with radio microphones. As we edited we had to think about which sounds we’d privilege and then these odd pairings began to emerge, but Lucien can speak more to the actual recording process.

Castaing-Taylor: When I was recording up in the mountains, I would put up to eight wireless mikes on people—and occasionally on a horse, a dog, or a sheep, but the mikes were expensive, and the cables would easily tear, so we couldn’t afford that as much as we’d have liked. I think we ended up spending more money on mikes than we did on the camera. I could only record four tracks at any one time, two through the camera and two through a tape recorder, so I would be listening through headphones to the different sound sources and deciding which to plug in and record. My experience of being high in the mountains, with these incredible views, but of listening all the while to these sound sources had a huge effect on the final film. In the first place, because lavaliere mikes are so close to the sound source, they result in this very subjective, guttural, highly embodied sound. Roland Barthes spoke not of the mouth, but of the animalic muzzle—the museau, not the bouche, or even the gueule—and I thought a lot about what he meant when I was recording the sound.

If we succeed in adequately bestializing humanity in Sweetgrass, I’d guess it’s in large part due to the sound. Exclamations, heavy breathing, non-propositional fragments of language half mumbled under someone’s breath, tailing off into song or a cough or a cry. This is how we speak, these are the sounds we all make. But documentary has almost entirely turned a deaf ear to them. Also, documentary conventions of naturalism are such that acoustical and optical perspective are generally made to appear to be one and the same. If someone is close to the camera they should sound close; if they’re far away, they should sound far away. Fiction films are not nearly so literal-minded, and with wireless lavaliere mikes, sources always sound close, because they are close, not to the receiver, but to the mike feeding the transmitter. When we were editing, the aesthetic tension between the perspective and spatiality of the sound and picture really came to the fore, and we often tried to push the discrepancy as far as we could.

The danger of lavaliere mikes is of course twofold: you privilege speech over other kinds of sound, which is probably documentary’s greatest failing, and you collapse the space. But we wanted to combine the intimacy of the eavesdropping the lavs allowed us with the monumental magnitude of the mountains, often filmed with long lenses, compressing and pictorialising and in a sense de-realizing the space. One other quality of recording with so many lavs that jumped out at me while shooting was the absurd, often completely surreal synchronicities that would result. The transmitters we used were 250 millawatt, the most powerful that are legal in the U.S., which would transmit a signal to me from up to a mile and a half away. So I could be simultaneously recording with four lavs up to three miles away from each other, none of which might suggest anything whatsoever in common with what the camera was recording through its lens. Other times, when I’d hear something interesting through a lav, I’d see if I could locate where it was, and try to turn the camera onto it—like the shot of John riding along the horizon bedding his “girlies” down in the lullaby sequence, singing a ditty to his horse and himself.

MacDonald: Was everything shot in synch?

Castaing-Taylor: A few times we moved a word or two a few seconds one way or another so it would be intelligible, but basically all the speech is synch. At times, though, we really wanted people to wonder whether the sound was sync or not. For example, during the first night-time scene, above the timberline, up in the basins—what we call the lullaby scene—it’s getting dark and John goes into a kind of reverie as he tries to round the sheep up and get them to settle on the bed ground next to his tipi for the night. He has to go all the way around the band to get the sheep close enough to give him a chance of protecting them from bears and wolves; and so he rides up to the horizon.

The scene is almost surreal because, even when John is perhaps three-quarters of a mile away from the camera, his lovely, subjective, guttural voice gets recorded and feels very intimate. A litany of “girly, girlies,” almost a soliloquy, gently cascades from his mouth, and then he starts singing these half-remembered fragments of old-time Western songs. And when he and his horse ride along the horizon, you feel like you’re being subjected to a classic, over-mythologized Western stereotype—it’s almost too good to be true. It’s such a cliché that you might doubt the nonfiction status of the image. At the very least, you lose confidence for a moment in the filmmaker for peddling you a corny stereotype of the cowboy. But when he breaks from his song, halfway along the horizon, to bark “Get back, Breck!” at his dog, and you faintly make out his dog before him, it clicks, and you know, as impossible as it may seem, that this was being recorded in sync. There are quite a few moments like that scattered throughout.

The sound was edited and mixed by Ernst Karel, an experimental musician, phonographer, sound artist—even an anthropologist. A jack-of-all-trades. He designed a highly orchestrated multi-track soundscape that layered many different kinds of sounds, especially of ambience and of the sheep. My own on-camera mono microphone couldn’t begin to do justice to the vastness of mountain acoustics. He eventually mixed his composition down into two versions, a 5.1 surround sound mix for the Dolby SRD, and a stereo version for the analog optical track. I’m almost completely tone deaf, so it was a godsend to find him.

MacDonald: Your end credits say “Produced by Ilisa Barbash” and “Recorded by Lucien Castaing-Taylor.” Lisa, I’d be interested in knowing what was involved in producing the film. And, Lucien, why the unusual “Recorded by”? You both have editing credit, but no one is listed as “Director” or “Filmmaker.”

Barbash: I’m not entirely comfortable with dividing up the credits in this way. I think elaborate titles make more sense when there is a larger crew and a need to make sure the division of labor is clear, and that the credit for doing various kinds of work is evident. I’d say that we’re both the “filmmakers,” and I’d almost have been happy leaving it at that. We both conceived of the film, edited it, and both produced it, and dealt with all the production logistics. But Lucien did more, having shot all of footage that ended up in this film, and he “directed” himself as a cameraman. No one “directed” the participants, except perhaps the ranch owner, Lawrence Allestad!

Castaing-Taylor: “Directed” just seems all wrong. We’re not out to disavow our agency or anything, but what or who did we direct? We never interviewed anyone. We never told anyone what to do, or to do anything again, however much I sometimes wished they would. I was a parasite, along for the ride. Anything that made it into the film did so through contingency, happenstance, serendipity. Cinéma vérité, at its best, works through a unique combination of anticipation and accident, and although our engagement with aesthetics is very unlike vérité’s—remember the old quip that vérité makes up in immediacy what it lacks in appearance?—our renunciation of directorial control rendered us dependent on the accidental and correspondingly elevated the importance of our capacity to anticipate action before it happened.

Our only “direction” was unwitting, when I got in the way, especially in the early weeks, trying to get the camera angle I wanted and turning the sheep back from a gate, or, if I was leading the sheep through the timber when trailing into the mountains, going the wrong way and causing a wreck. Maybe it should be say “De-rected by.” “Directed by” smacks of a documentary inferiority complex, fiction film-envy, what have you. It’s both epistemologically dubious and ethically duplicitous.

MacDonald: I wonder how much you were thinking of particular westerns—Red River [1948], for example—as you shot or edited Sweetgrass.

Barbash: I grew up watching Gunsmoke and Bonanza, and when I first met the people who ended up in Sweetgrass, they reminded me of characters from these shows, and from Western movies I had seen. Pat’s intonation, for example, always reminds me of John Wayne. One of the characters has a brother whose nickname is Festus, as in Gunsmoke. When we started this project I bought a whole bunch of DVDs of Westerns, and we kept intending to watch them, but ended up not doing that kind of homework. What’s interesting to me is how accurately in some ways and how inaccurately in others Hollywood has portrayed the West. Our film confirms some of what you see in Hollywood Westerns and perhaps corrects other things.

The people in Sweetgrass really do wear cowboy hats. $350 a shot, pure beaver pelt. One of them came to visit us and wore his cowboy hat on the T and in Sever Hall at Harvard; all the groomsmen wore cowboy hats at his wedding. On the other hand, the people we filmed were really good at riding four-wheelers (often just on two wheels) and at using cell phones and communicating by walkie-talkie, so in a way, Sweetgrass is meant to show you what the Old West has become. But I definitely meant for our film to refer back to films like Red River, though we weren’t informed by Red River in particular.

Castaing-Taylor: I grew up in Liverpool, in the northwest of England, a post-industrial detritus of a city. We didn’t have television at home, and we never went to the movies. I’ve never seen Red River, though Lisa’s told me about it; I’ve seen hardly any Westerns. In fact, when it comes to cinema, I’m pretty illiterate. I don’t really like movies, to be honest: most are so audio-visually intrusive that I resent them. All about spectacle and distraction. Literature at once gives freer reign to and intrudes less on your imagination. It’s less sensorially stimulating and less coercive—seems more intellectually democratic somehow.

MacDonald: Brokeback Mountain [2005] came out during the time when you were working on this project; I confess I’ve sometimes described Sweetgrass to people as “Brokeback Mountain without the sex”! What are your thoughts on the Ang Lee film—its early sequence of sheep-herding is much less intimate than yours, but it’s spectacular in its own way. Did the herders you worked with have a reaction to Brokeback?

Barbash: I was probably the only person in the audience who watched Brokeback thinking, “Oh, no, don’t cut to Jake Gyllenahl, the sheep are about to do something really interesting.” Of course, Brokeback was shot in a beautiful setting (British Columbia), but I really did feel that a lot of the beauty of the landscape and motion of the sheep were neglected for the story. Understandably so.

I’ve heard that Ang Lee had to make some compromises with Brokeback Mountain—that ninety percent of the film was shot within seventy feet of a road and they couldn’t wrangle enough real life sheep to go the right way and so they tripled them in digital recreations. We had a much more cooperative cast.

Castaing-Taylor: Brokeback was pure spectacle, and a total melodrama, quite the contrary of the restraint and subtlety of Annie Proux’s minimalist prose. The performances redeemed it, especially the wives. But I don’t think I know anyone in Montana who actually saw the film.

MacDonald: You’ve described the sheep-herding project as salvage ethnography, which in many senses it is, of course; but sometimes it seems as close to James Benning’s films and the work of other avant-garde filmmakers, as to traditional documentaries. In Sweetgrass what is normally thought of as avant-garde film history and documentary history seem to merge. Did your working in Boulder have an impact on the way you think of yourselves as filmmakers? Stan Brakhage and Phil Solomon are thanked in the end credits. 

Barbash: At every point during the editing, because of our anthropological training, we, or at least I, thought about both ethnography and aesthetics, or art; and when the two concerns didn’t seem to mesh, we’d incline one way or the other. I don’t think we put our chips in one particular camp. I do think we could have made the film more “ethnographic” if we had provided more information within the film. A friend of ours showed a film of his to Clifford Geertz, an eminent anthropologist, and Geertz’s response was something like, “Well, how many people lived in that village? Your film doesn’t even show me that.” We could have told you how many people lived in Big Timber; at the very beginning, we could have explained that this was the last sheep drive, but we decided not to impart information in what felt was an artificial or extraneous way. 

If we end up showing Sweetgrass to anthropologists and people are disgruntled that we don’t give them enough information, we’ll have to defend ourselves. But we’re happy with the choices we made. I never studied Stan’s work but came to know it when we were colleagues in Boulder, and as I showed his films in my classes. Stan would go to a café on Pearl Street every day and paint directly on celluloid. That was how he was making his films at the time. One Christmas he generously gave us a few frames as a present. I think that attention to detail, to the frame itself, in fact to parts within the frame, was influential on our thinking about film, and even about video—which for Stan was, of course, toxic waste. Each tiny element, each frame, each sound needs to be carefully considered. But while he would build up a frame, by painting or gluing layers upon layers, we would deconstruct what we’d shot on video, pulling bits apart, separating sound from video at times, separating out the various synch sound tracks, and then reconstructing it all back together. 

MacDonald: Lucien, your sensory ethnography approach to teaching film at Harvard blurs the boundaries of documentary and avant-garde film; did your living in Boulder move you in this direction, or does your interest in the widest spectrum of cinema pre-date those years? 

Castaing-Taylor: It’s hard to say. It was definitely influenced by joining Harvard’s Art Department, and realizing just to what degree artists and anthropologists talk past each other, even, indeed especially, when they think they’re addressing one another. Anthropologists are the guiltier by far, heirs to a kind of post-structuralism that still sees all the world as a text, a form of cultural textology that has totally discolored the way the discipline has engaged aesthetics. To have artists as colleagues and collaborators, and to see how conceptually and perceptually freeing it was not to be forever hung up on rendering the whole magnitude of existence and all the vicissitudes of experience as so many iterations of linguified “meaning,”was a huge revelation to me.

But the Sensory Ethnography Lab equally reflects the particular culture of anthropology at Harvard, and the non-canonical literary sensibilities and philosophical inclination of many of my anthropology colleagues. Not to mention the intellectual provocations of the grad students, which I didn’t expect at all: I thought they’d be as conservative as could be, Goody Two-Shoes straight-A students; they have turned out to be my greatest stimulation of all.

As for Boulder, being in Film Studies expanded my horizons no end, but not really beyond avant-garde film. I’m working now in sound, as well as photography, and video; I don’t relate to the desire to identify with, or feel confined to, any particular “art form.” Greenbergian medium-specificity seems so myopic and almost self-validating; art may be species-specific, and so all of ours’ anthropomorphic, but not much more than that.

MacDonald: One final question: Is the title Sweetgrass in any sense a reference to the Merian C. Cooper, Ernest P. Schoedsack film, Grass [1925]? There too, domesticated animals climb over a mountain. 

Barbash: By calling it Sweetgrass, I think we make it fairly clear that we are referencing Grass. We don’t expect that most people who see our film will have seen Grass, but when we were thinking about our project as a kind of salvage ethnography, we thought back to films we’d seen and studied and taught, and about ways in which we might respond to this history in our work, either by doing some kind of imitation or some kind of contradiction. Certainly Grass was foremost in our minds because it is about this huge seasonal migration of animals.

Castaing-Taylor: “Sweet Grass” is the name of one of the counties where we shot, where the town of Big Timber is. Sweetgrass was Lisa’s title and the tilt of the hat to Cooper and Schoedsack was hers. I wanted “Sweetgrass Beartooth,” which I now realize is too much of a mouthful. Grass is an amazing work, in its own way—though it’s also classically Orientalist; in its representation of the Bakhtiari it’s much closer to the racialising and patronizing colonial travelogues of the period than Nanook [1921], which incarnated a kind of humanism that seems to me totally without precedent. In any case, Sweetgrass is not predicated on anyone getting that reference. I see Sweetgrass as a revisionist riff on the pastoral, an age-old form in literature and painting. 

Barbash: And now that Sweetgrass is finished, we’re going to depart from the pastoral and make our own version of King Kong! Seriously, I do think it’s interesting that after exploring the intensity of a mass migration of animals, Cooper and Schoedsack delved further into animality by exploring the dark, bestial nature of man.

MacDonald: I first became aware of the sheepherding project when you showed the short pieces as a kind of feature at Hamilton College, and indeed they work as a feature for me—a feature as evocative and beautiful, in many ways, as Sweetgrass itself. Am I correct that these short pieces were completed before the final cuts of Sweetgrass?

Castaing-Taylor: In really rough cut form, yes. Long before. But the sound work was all done after, in the fall of 2009 with Ernst Karel, and for me they’re more sound pieces than they are video. And I also fiddled with the picture, making hundreds of changes even after I’d exhibited earlier versions of them, with just rough and ready stereo sound patched in.

MacDonald: You’ve said that the short pieces that you’ve completed along with Sweetgrass were conceived as gallery pieces, though I’ve never quite understood why you would want them seen in a gallery, where their unusually patient sense of time would get lost on nearly everyone strolling through. It’s true that some avant-garde filmmakers (I don’t know that this is the case with documentary makers) have moved toward gallery installation because of what seems an almost unbelievable disparity in potential financial reward between installation work and works made for theatrical projection. Can you help me understand why you would consider these pieces for gallery presentation, and second, how they would work as installations in an ideal situation?

Castaing-Taylor: Hell Roaring Creek might seem patient to you, as a spectator, though I kick myself for my impetuousness when shooting it, but you can hardly call The High Trail, or Bedding Down, or Into-the-jug (“Geworfen”) patient, or durational in any meaningful way. They all bombard you with different kinds of frenetic, tactile intensity.

Basically, in the course of editing the material we had shot, which was around two hundred hours all in, various sequences jumped out at me as having a kind of structural integrity or some kind of aesthetic autonomy or value that would be eclipsed or at least radically attenuated if they were included in the single-channel documentary. I remember Umberto Eco a long time ago describing film as being constituted by so many “syntagmatic chains imbued with argumentative capacity.” This is a weakness, a foreclosing of aesthetic possibility, as well as a strength. Documentary is even worse in this regard than so-called narrative cinema, in that it conjoins the kinds of closure to which narrative typically tends with its explicit concern with expository argumentation, or logical propositionality. As Gabriel Marcel once said, you don’t go to the movies to hear a lecture on the “doctrine of Kant” or to “listen to explications.” Yet often times with documentaries that’s about all you get!

As much as we sought to resist this in Sweetgrass, the film still has a narrative structure, an ostensibly very simple one at that, and hence all the limits that narrative entails. The other works assumed their rough shape before we finished Sweetgrass, and a few of them. in earlier versions, were installed at Marian Goodman Gallery in 2007 and at CUNY’s James Gallery in 2008, but I’m actually only getting around to finishing them now, in 2010. These pieces explore different structures, and also quite different stylistic registers from Sweetgrass. It feels to me like they made themselves, in a sense. I didn’t have an exhibition space in mind when they were being edited. But your question points to a real conundrum. I’d be staggered if there weren’t as many starving self-appelled artists as there are starving self-appelled filmmakers, so I’m not at all sure that financial motivation can often be a factor; and for many, the obscenity of the recent high capitalization of the art world might be more a source of repulsion than of attraction.

I know in my case, and I’d guess also for many working in so-called film or video art, the motivating factor is a desire to get more from your audience, a deeper and a different kind of spectatorial attention to the work—one, for me at least, less attuned to narrative chains of meaning than to sheer manifestations of being, and to forms of figural expressivity that are more ambiguous and opaque than narrative’s proclivity to discursive clarity usually allows. I don’t think art is usually apprehended with the same desire to circumscribe meaning. 

Liam Gillick often frames “relational aesthetics” in terms of a return to discourse, as if that’s an ideological, or political gesture. But I think he has it quite wrong, and that Lyotard got it pretty much dead right in Discours/figure: figuration is much more unruly, much more of a provocation, and an intervention, than discourse, which, in its self-sufficiency and capacity to say essentially anything, and its faith in lucidity and transparency, constantly threatens to control and manipulate the messy material world which we inhabit, and which mercifully will always have a magnitude to it in excess of our representations of it. Discourse is about signification, its space is essentially flat; the figural is about sense, and the sensorial, and its space is deep. Of course, everything, even discourse, is, in the end, figural—if you take the metaphor and metonymy out of language there’s nothing left—but it’s attenuated, almost ashamed, figuration, which is perhaps why it’s constantly trying to colonize and control it.

But you point to a very real problem that I think all film and video artists, and art curators, struggle with, and which is never going to go away: how best to exhibit time-based figural media in a gallery or art context? To be super crude and schematic, there’s this dyad of a white cube versus a black box. In reality of course, any site, theatre, studio or street, public or private, has its own specificity to it. But when Sharon Lockhart’s recent Lunch Break was installed at Barbara Gladstone gallery in New York, I think they made a big mistake in simply recreating a black box within a white cube. They also left the rear wall white, reducing the contrast ratio of the projection by over 50%. But had the film been installed in a long dark tunnel mirroring the corridor that is the subject of the piece, as I imagine Sharon would have liked, it would have been something else entirely.

The biggest problem though seems to me the temporal one, and the aesthetic of a loop, which has to be an aesthetic of the fragment, a metonymic aesthetic whereby a part, any part, has to be able to work on its own terms, and also in some ways stand in for the whole. The Dutch artists de Rijke and de Rooij would sometimes announce the screening times of their films, when shown in museums, and even try to prohibit admission once they had started rolling, replicating the finite temporality of the theater in a non-theatrical site. But in general, even if you want a richer and less circumscribed kind of attention when showing work in an art context than a cinema one, you also get less, at least temporally, as people walk in and out of a loop willy-nilly.

If you take Hell Roaring Creek (2010), which is my favorite piece I’ve made, except maybe for Bedding Down (2010), it consists of seven movements if you see it linearly, but only six if you experience it as a loop and stay with it all the way through: three periods of black with sound and three of picture with sound. The three periods of picture are all iterations of or excerpts from what originated as a single shot, a fusion of real and cinematic time. There’s a temporality, and a narrativity, to the whole, with the first period of black and then the first of picture setting up the expectation of an event, a happening of some unknown kind, which only begins to take form towards the end of the first shot. The “event” turns out to be both infinite, or seemingly infinite, in the second shot, and then to become something of a non-event (dawn is past, the sky is overcast, the creek has returned to its undisturbed self) in the third. But the piece is also made to be seen in part: to be sure, what you get experiencing one, say, ninety-second fragment is not the same as what you get from another, so there’s also an interactivity and a recunciation of authorial control there, but this can be liberating and part of the open-endedness of the work.

I should maybe mention another thing, which is huge. I call all of these pieces “audiovideo” works, because they have five discrete channels of sound; and in many ways sound is more important to them than picture. Few theaters are equipped to play back 5.1 or 7.1 (or any other format of) surround sound, and fewer still from HD video, rather than 35mm film. So to show them in a non-surround theater, which is the norm for avant-garde and documentary screenings, is like cutting off more than half their limbs, and to privilege a kind of ocularcentricity which the works themselves oppose.

Two more points, then I’ll shut up. James Benning’s given up on film, or so he says (Ngugi wa Thiongo returned to English having vowed he’d write only in Kikuyu thenceforth), because he can’t deal with the nightmare of 16mm processing any more. Who can blame him? But, for all of the putatively “lossless” infinite clonability of the digital, and its subversion of the distinction between original and copy, video exhibition is as fickle and mercurial, and downright complex, as anything ever invented, far more unreliable than even 16m projection ever was. It’s an unmitigated nightmare. But if you install a work in an exhibition space, you potentially have much more control over the playback of the picture—as well as the sound. 

Lastly, the site-specificity of theatrical spaces is essentially repressed, or a given—if you’re present, you might fiddle with the sound level, or ask for a new bulb for the projector, but your choices are very limited, and if you’re absent, you don’t even give it a thought. We haven’t the foggiest inkling about the theatrical spaces where Sweetgrass is showing. But gallery installation engages with the space directly and unavoidably. Hell Roaring Creek, for instance, is designed to be projected onto a hanging, translucent screen, so you can view it from either side. You can’t walk through it, in the stream itself, but you can walk around it, in effect along either bank of the creek, and watch and listen to it from either side. The five-channel surround is also to be installed on both sides of the screen, so you’re effectively dealing with ten channels of sound, all situated spatially in relationship to a two-sided screen. A far cry from a cinema, or, worse, a class room.

MacDonald: I have some questions about the individual short pieces. Only two are made up exclusively of material that didn’t get into the final cut of Sweetgrass: Hell Roaring Creek and Bedding Down. Of all the short pieces, Hell Roaring Creek seems most obviously its own piece; for me it’s the gem of the project, and of the short pieces, the most closely related to avant-garde work (the other short pieces seem more like, say, John Marshall’s “sequence films” on the !Kung and Timothy Asch’s, on the Yanomami). Hell Roaring Creek reminds me of Benning and Hutton and also of J. J. Murphy’s Sky Blue Water Light Sign—I wonder if you know it?

Castaing-Taylor: I’ve never seen it. In fact, I’ve never seen anything by Murphy.

MacDonald: Hell Roaring Creek is made up of three shots, each separated from the other by a ten-second moment of black. Why those breaks?—it is clear that for the second shot, you’ve moved the camera closer (or have readjusted your zoom lens) and that you move back to the original position after the second pause—does each visual pause represent a break in time? The two caesuras do function to wake the viewer up, to refresh one’s attention.

Castaing-Taylor: I don’t really know how to talk about this work yet. It wasn’t shot as a conceptual piece, but it’s become one, at least in part, for me. It was a mistake. It was my first time in the mountains, and my first year with that many sheep. We were trailing in, we set up camp, bedded the sheep down, and then Lawrence, the rancher, showed me where we’d cross the creek the next morning. I think the whole effect of Hell Roaring Creek is predicated on my not knowing anything about it, so hopefully nobody will read this who hasn’t seen it already.

I knew we’d be getting up about 4:00, and would cross the creek around 5:00 or a little later. I guessed where the sun would come up. And then I guessed how long it would take for the herd, all 3,000 of them, to cross. I was thinking three-four minutes. I decided I’d stand in the creek, and film the crossing in a single shot. The sun would be coming up behind, it would be beautiful, and I thought it might make a great three-minute pre-title sequence to what would become Sweetgrass, and alert viewers to the durational qualities of the film, and the kind of patience it would demand.

Well, what did I know? It took them thirty minutes, not three to cross. I could only guess at the time while I was shooting, but I knew it wouldn’t work in the way I’d imagined the night before. So I was thinking on the fly, and I lost confidence in it as a single-shot—only partially, but enough to screw it up. After about ten minutes, I slowly zoomed in, to change the camera angle. I somehow instinctively knew not to stop shooting, to hold on to that conflation between real and cinematic time, but I was still thinking about Sweetgrass, and felt the need to change camera angle, or in this case focal length, so we’d have the option of cutting later. But after twenty minutes the crossing was still going strong, the band seemingly infinite, like Rabelais’s “moutons de Panurge” in Pantegruel. And I started fretting about the zoom in, and what that had done to the shot, so I slowly zoomed out again, as if that might somehow rectify my original sin. And still the crossing took another ten minutes.

Had I not zoomed, in or out, my guess is that I would have left it as this structural single-shot. But I tried that and was never happy with it. Because zooming is forbidden, tainted by its use and abuse in television, I really wanted to include the zooms, and stick with the shot as a whole. But I just found it too distracting, and too much about me. I’m a biped, not a tripod, and even though I was trying to hold the camera as still as if it were on a tripod, all the little movements tell you that it’s handheld. I like them, but also feel that that was enough about me. And in the same way that I initially wanted to retain the zooms because they’re forbidden, I also wanted to subvert or somehow move beyond all the macho heroics of structural filmmaking, which seem dated now, the dogmatic slumber of a certain generation, and often also, epistemologically pretty naïve. Benning’s RR—which I love—feels so impatient as almost to be impetuous, in its complete exclusion of the before and after, those periods of transformation that are so much more revealing than the restricted times the trains take to traverse the frame. So then I cut out the two zoom movements, and for years—honestly, years—played with how to combine the truncated shots that were left, from straight cuts to using as many minutes of black as I’d cut out. Every time I thought I’d got it right, I’d watch it again, a few months later, and it felt all wrong. In the end I settled on two sections of ten seconds, and another of a minute (or two of thirty seconds, if you don’t see it as a loop).

With the surround sound composition that Ernst and I built, that feels about right to me now. Maybe it’ll feel all wrong in five years. As I see it, the stretches of black ask you to question what you think you’re seeing. You might even wonder, when you return to the image, if this is the same crossing, or if it was shot another time. Or if you trust that it’s one and the same, you still have to ask yourself what was cut out, and why, or wonder if there was more than one camera, because of the shift in focal length combined with apparent infinity of Panurge’s sheep. The first ten-second section of black is hell, a killer, a complete violation of the temporal fusion you’ve been experiencing, and of the unconsummated anticipation of an event that’s only just beginning, but the second period of black, or rather the return to the wider shot at the end of the second stretch of black, recontextualizes that. It also returns humans to the ecological fold, somewhat bestialized after the three thousand head of sheep, and you’re jerked out of the almost atemporal synchronicity of the middle section, which has no beginning or end, where you’re engaging essentially aesthetically, rather than narratively, your attention fluctuating between the vertical stream of water and the horizontal one of sheep, between the sheep as a collectivity and all of their individual particularities—the ewes and the lambs, the shorn and the unshorn, the arthritic and the athletic, the fearful and the fearless—you’re jerked out of these ruminations, and forcibly plunged back into the narrative temporality of the crossing, with the end now in sight.

So you, or I (it’s just awful when an artist tells you how you feel) simultaneously give myself over to the perceptual experience of this durational flow and ask myself all these conceptual questions. As the unraveling of an “image-idea,” that took forever to congeal, I’m finally reconciled to it.

MacDonald: It’s interesting to see how the longer film sometimes includes a substantial portion of the relevant short piece (Coom Biddy, for example, Daybreak on the Bedground and Turned at the Pass) and sometimes uses very little of the short piece (The High Trail, Into-the-Jug). Having finished the short pieces, was it difficult to re-edit them into a form that felt comfortable in Sweetgrass?

Castaing-Taylor: No. From around 2006 on, they were already separate in my mind. In a sense Sweetgrass quotes or lifts from some of the audiovideo pieces, but not actually that much, and with the shorter shot lengths and recontextualization within Sweetgrass the shared shots feel quite different to me. Coom Biddy is a triptych, with the two formal, static images sandwiching the long interior tracking shot. There’s no way that tracking shot could have been sustained within Sweetgrass, because of the narrative thrust propelling the film forward, and excluding other kinds of aesthetic engagement.

Bedding Down is about the real, in a totally different register from the other works, with nothing but jump cuts, its low-res handheld horseback video, and initially unlocatable sync soundtrack that, as the piece proceeds, increasingly channels the agonistic, diabolic descent into a kind of violent interiority. The picture seems in places to decompose, moving in amorphous waves as the rider rises and falls. It’s at once at the threshold of the visible and at the threshold of the technological, pushing the camera’s sensors and automation beyond their capabilities. It’s true that some of these pieces can be seen to reframe or elaborate a sequence that also appears in Sweetgrass, like the dialogue-heavy Breakfast, but for me they’re quite separate.

MacDonald: Where does the title Into-the-Jug (translated as Geworfen) come from?

Castaing-Taylor: “Geworfen” is actually part of the title, not its translation. The small pens that newborn lambs and their “mothers” are placed in for the first few days of the lambs’ life are called “jugs.” Don’t ask me why, unless it’s just as a symbol of containment. I’ve asked a few people, and they don’t know either. I suppose, if it weren’t for the roving, fallible camera, that this is the one piece—an eleven-minute single shot, limited in dutiful Bazinian fashion to the duration of the various births it depicts—that might be seen to give itself over to some of the indulgences of structural film.

For me, it proceeds through slow disclosure, and progressively defamiliarizes and reframes its subject as it goes along. But birth, especially of course of innocent, harmless, soon-to-be-gambolling lambs, is as over-determined as anything could ever be, and the births we’re witness to are so tactile, so viscous, so acoustically overbearing, and so physically intense that it’s hard not to avert your gaze. As Susan Sontag once put it, we’re not blessed with earlids, so unless you leave the room you can’t avert your consciousness altogether. In Into-the-Jug (“Geworfen”), sound is even more a vector of the abject than the picture. But it’s hard to give the piece your full attention on an initial viewing. And even if you do, it probably takes anyone other than a sheep rancher the full eleven minutes to figure out what exactly is going on: to realize that the lambs are being mixed and matched like nobody’s business, and that the ties of kinship being created are fictive, not biological, and mediated through and through with the well-nigh omnipotent agency of the man pulling them out. A very particular, and rather disturbing form of consanguinity! 

Basically, mothering ewes have different amounts of milk, and some can support two (very occasionally, three) lambs, and some (especially many two year-olds) just one. But once you start mixing and matching, you create this pool of “bum” lambs. And you only have about a twenty-four hour window when you can convince an ewe that a lamb that is not her biological offspring is hers, by covering it in the caul and amniotic fluid of her own newborn (or the flayed skin of her stillborn). So you automatically take the biological lamb away from her because you have others who have been alive for going-on twenty-four hours and who need a mother bad. The clock’s ticking. The man, in short, is God, a deus ex machina, even if he’s down on his knees in the jug grunting and groaning with his bloody arm stuck up the vaginas of the mothers in labor.

What kind of “nature” is this? “Domesticated” doesn’t seem the right word for it; it’s not about taming, it’s more precisely a form of wildness and unholy alchemy that we don’t even have a word for. In short, within the space of these eleven minutes, the whole ideological edifice and opposition between Nature and Culture collapses in a pool of impure interspecies nascency on the floor of the strawed jug. In any event, as for the title, this piece evokes for me Martin Heidegger’s core concept, his neologism Geworfenheit, which is usually translated as “Thrownness,” or “Thrown-into-the-World” in English. It was his principal revision to Husserlian phenomonology and Husserl’s notion of the Lebenswelt—immediate, intuitive, unreflective lived experience—as opposed to the Weltanschaung, one’s worldview, which is a matter of metaphysics, of belief, of rationality, of ideology.

Heidegger wanted to emphasize the way our lot in life, our Dasein, the flux of our Being-in-the-world is constrained and structured and in many ways is a function of all these variables and contingencies that lie outside of our control, beyond our grasp, that predate us, and so on. For me,Into-the-Jug is an absolutely literal exemplification of that thrownness, that Geworfenheit, all these newborn lambs being thrown around with such abandon but also with such attention. And their being paired up with mothers—not willy nilly, because the rancher is processing a mass of calculations as he chooses who to couple with whom, but in ways and for reasons unknown to the lambs but which will go a long way to determining the kind of life they’ll lead. And in everyday, colloquial German, Geworfen (without the nominalizing suffix) is used to describe both whelping and foaling. Quite possibly also, though not so far as I know, lambing. Metaphorically, then, being born is being thrown. What more perfect image of Dasein is there than this moving, messy image of liquid, liminal entry into life itself?  

MacDonald: You’ve developed the “Sensory Ethnography” program at Harvard. I assume you're using “sensory ethnography” as opposed to verbal ethnography (writing about cultural practices in essays, books, or in screenplays for documentaries that use a lecture format). Your interest in filmmaking seems experiential in the sense that John Dewey talks about artworks being concentrations/intensifications of lived experiences, rather than informational presentations and/or theoretical conjectures; and your sense of “ethnographic film” seems much broader than what that term traditionally is taken to mean. Tell me about the thinking that resulted in the Sensory Ethnography program, your decision to use “sensory ethnography,” and how your program plays out practically.

Castaing-Taylor: Well, you pretty much just said it all. Juxtaposing perspectives from the sciences, the arts, and the humanities, the aim of the Sensory Ethnography Lab is to support innovative combinations of aesthetics and ethnography, especially with work conducted through audiovisual media (video, sound, film, photography, and “new” hypermedia), that are at an angle to dominant conventions in anthropology, documentary, and art practice.

I suppose it’s worth situating the Sensory Ethnography Lab both within the provincial domain of Harvard and within the larger trajectories of visual anthropology, documentary, and art practice. Harvard has long been extremely intellectually timorous about the arts—happy to exhibit them (in the Fogg), commodify them (make the odd purchase—though these days neither the Fogg and the Art Museums nor the Peabody has a significant acquisition budget to speak of), and perform them (especially undergraduate orchestras and dramatic groups), but not to actively produce them within the academic belly of the beast. The Art department has a name (Visual and Environmental Studies) that does its level best to disavow the art-making that goes on there and which corresponds to no disciplinary nomenclature outside the university. The same is true, in a way, of the History of Consciousness program at University of California Santa Cruz, but because of the distinctiveness of the work that came out of there, especially during the early decades, it achieved a kind of totemic status, and was recognized within the humanities and the human sciences. That’s not really the case for VES, which until recently has been an undergraduate-only program which has signally failed to conjugate the “visual” and the “environmental” in any systematic way.

But all this is now changing, and very fast. Drew Faust, Harvard’s President, has three big agendas—art practice and creative work, global health, and environmental consciousness. Her first significant act as President was to create a Task Force for the Arts, chaired by Stephen Greenblatt, which recommended integrating art-making into the cognitive life of the university across the board, and especially in the graduate and undergraduate curricula. The sequel to the Task Force, a new Committee on the Arts (HUCA), is now deciding how to implement the recommendations, and what kind of graduate art-making programs to establish. The Sensory Ethnography Lab, the Graduate School of Design’s new degree in Art, Design, and the Public Domain, the practice-based Ph.D. in Media Anthropology, and the new fellowship program at the Film Study Center (Harvard’s one Center devoted to art-making or creative work), all have to be understood within this new commitment to take art-making as seriously, as a cultural and intellectual endeavor, as traditional scientific and humanistic forms of academic scholarship.

As for situating the Sensory Ethnography Lab within the larger trajectories of visual anthropology, documentary, and contemporary art, your reference to Dewey seems right on. On the one hand, the SEL’s ethnographic imperatives mean that the work coming out of it is generally more committed to the “real” than art is, especially conceptual and post-conceptual art, and to a form of expression that is somehow adequate to the magnitude of human experience. Or, if that’s too much, at least to working within (as well as against) various species of realism. Dewey seems crucial here, especially Art as Experience, which has somehow been neglected by anthropologists of art. I would guess there are at least two reasons why. In the first place, Dewey takes as his subject, although he does not use the term, the phenomenology of aesthetic experience—experience that surely is at the heart of human existence if anything is, but which is something that anthropologists of art have actually not been very interested in, concerned instead to reduce being to mere meaning, and art to so many epiphenomena of one or another culture, to mere “material culture,” or to something analogous to ritual, and so on and so forth.

In the second place, Dewey is deeply invested in “nature,” to recursively coupling aesthetic experience not simply with everyday experience, but also with its infra-human animalic sources, and the at once sub- and supra-cutaneous interaction between what he called—three decades or more before the coinage of “cyborgs”—the co-constituting “live creature” and its “environment,” whereas for social and cultural anthropologists talk of nature has long been something of an embarrassment—to be disavowed, immediately transformed into “second nature,” mediated through-and-through by culture, a mere social construction, or (as with Bruno Latour) a dangerous political or scientific ideology to be actively combated.

Like Dewey, the SEL is concerned, not to analyze, but to actively produce aesthetic experience, and of kinds that reflect and draw on but do not necessarily clarify or leave one with the illusion of “understanding” everyday experience, and it also seeks to transcend what is often considered the particular province of the human, and delve into nature—in short, to re-conjugate culture with nature, to pursue promiscuities between animalic and non-animalic selves and others, and to restore us both to the domain of perception, in all its plenitude, rather than the academic game of what Dewey called “recognition,” or of naming, that he derided as a barely conscious endeavor; and to the fleshy realm, in Merleau-Ponty’s phrase, of “wild being,” in which the invisible, far from being the negation or contradiction of the visible, is in fact its “secret sharer,” itsmembrure…

I think it is also true that the works emerging from the SEL are more concerned with issues of aesthetics and form than documentary usually is, and are for the most part opposed to conventional documentary on a slew of counts: to the journalistic use of interviews, or of featuring subjects merely talking about their lives, ex post facto, rather than actually living them; to the reductive range of dramaturgical narrative structures documentary typically deploys, their linearity and predilection for resolution and closure; and to the narrow repertoire of styles that are sanctioned by the gatekeepers of documentary practice—in particular the ongoing hegemony half a century after the fact of a kind of lazy and lax cinéma vérité, and the consecration of a frequently unseeing and unsensing, putatively “observational,” aesthetic within the ethnographic film world, and its dismissal of anything experimental, structurally rigorous, or stylistically demanding as provincially “avant-garde” or unduly self-reflexive or self-indulgent. It is as if the custodians of the sacred flame of ethnographic cinema are oblivious to any developments in art or in film since Jean Rouch’s experiments in ethno-fiction in the 1960s and 1970s.

Lastly, I think it’s true that the SEL is also opposed, though this time in the name of art and its inherent exegetical ambiguity—in the name, that is to say, of the figural and its opacity, over against the discursive and its desire for transparency—to the clarity and interpretive self-sufficiency to which anthropology and academia typically tend, and is much more invested in what John Keats, in his famous letter to his brother, characterized as “negative capability”—the quintessentially human capacity to be, as he put it, “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” In regards to anthropology, this inclination to the perceptual first and the conceptual second implicitly entails a relativization of the “cultural textology,” in Barbara Stafford’s phrase, bequeathed by the hermeneutic turn of Clifford Geertz, and a renewed interrogation of core abstractions like culture, society, and the self (or at least, representations of the self), and a return to the primacy of the individual, the body, and above all inter-subjective and inter-corporeal experience—as the ground of what is thought and what is said, as the ground of both meaning and symbolism. 

There are more than enough precursors for this move in addition to Dewey, Keats, and Merleau-Ponty. This is the domain, in part, of what Mead and Bateson (in Balinese Character) called “kinaesthetic learning.” In existential anthropologist Michael Jackson’s more recent expression, it is “practical mimesis.” It is also, to be sure, the realm of the non-verbal and the non-discursive, or, in Foucault’s neo-Kantian terms, the “seeable” (though why privilege sight? Why not simply sensible) but “un-sayable.” The cinema, video, and sound, all have a particular purchase on the experiential that differs quite fundamentally from that of our written representations, particularly in their deployment, as Vivian Sobchack emphasized, of acts of moving, hearing, and seeing as at once the originary structures of embodied existence and the mediating structures of discourse. 

MacDonald: Not only Sweetgrass and the related installation works, but the films I've seen by your students J.P. Sniadecki (Songhua, 2007; Demolition/Chaiqian, 2008), Sniadecki and Verena Paravel (Foreign Parts, 2010), and Stephanie Spray (Kale and Kale, 2007; Monsoon-Reflections, 2008; As Long As There’s Breath, 2009) seem to fit within two traditionally distinct historical paradigms: they are documentaries of cultural places, moments, and practices; but they are also contributions to the strand of avant-garde filmmaking that includes Bruce Baillie, James Benning, Peter Hutton, Nathaniel Dorsky, and Sharon Lockhart. Am I correct that you have jettisoned the distinction between “documentary” and “avant-garde”?

Castaing-Taylor: Yes. Not deliberately, I don’t think, or in some kind of dogmatic way. But just because the distinction seems indefensible, and it would never occur to me to invoke it. It’s also unfortunate: documentarians as a result often don’t see any reason to engage with so-called “experimental” or “avant-garde” traditions, and on the flip side, a category like “experimental” implicitly sets itself off against a domain that is thereby defined as non-experimental, as if documentarians just follow the rules and regulations of a genre by rote. But all genres have their conventions, are in a constant state of flux and de- and re-formation.

I think Bourdieu overstated his case that artists, like intellectuals, are forever in competition with their fellows, as they seek to carve out a niche in which to inscribe their “authority” in a particular “field” of cultural production. It’s not, of course, that artists are any less self-interested than anyone else, but rather that many are often willfully ignorant of what others are doing even within their own “field” (a term that only makes sense to me if the root metaphor is a multi-dimensional electromagnetic field, rather than a planar agricultural one). For my part, I know that when I’m working on a project, I often feel the need not to know about or experience work that is in some sense “related,” lest it compromise my efforts to find the proper form for whatever it is I’m doing. In any event, consigning the works of such different film- and video-makers as, say, Jana Sevcikova, Dorothy Cross, Sergei Dvortsevoy, Pedro Costa, Rosalind Nashashibi, Sharon Lockhart, Alexandr Sokurov, Steve McQueen, or Phil Collins exclusively to either the avant-garde, or contemporary art, or documentary, makes no sense.

---