"SWEETGRASS" AND THE FUTURE OF NONFICTION CINEMA
an essay by robert koehler
Two myths about cinema have been so widely promulgated that, like so many myths before them, they have become commonly accepted as truth. The first is that we are on the precipice of the death of cinema, if not falling over the cliff and about to go splat. Although it's been a decade and more since a spate of essays, articles and pronouncements from as disparate a field as Jean-Luc Godard to David Thomsen stated in no uncertain terms that the art form as it's existed for a century is expiring of any number of causes, from an exhaustion of the imagination to business cycles in the exhibition industry to a post-celluloid technological revolution, the sentiment has retained the dogged consistency and belief of that of ufologists and supporters of Bigfoot. Never mind that there was no genuinely philosophical or theoretical underpinning to the death-of-cinema claims (though such has been their power that even the likes of Susan Sontag were pulled into these intellectual doldrums); they were easily refuted by the best evidence possible: The new cinema emerging right around the beginning of the new century, just as certain palpable resignation could be felt from those disheartened by the rise of digital filmmaking and the noticeable reduction in film-as-film. Did the death cult happen to notice, for example, Lisandro Alonso's "La libertad" when it appeared in 2001, demonstrably the seminal film of the decade to follow, and a work made not only by a young, unknown director, but one devoted to 35mm and the thinking of Andre Bazin? Did they notice the irony of this convergence of factors? Could even devout Bazinians have predicted as recently as the late 1990s that Bazin would re-emerge as the most important theoretical mind for a new generation of filmmakers around the world? Would it have been conceivable that the decade could yield the most exciting re-examination of cinematic possibilities since at least the 1960s, one that would result in a slate of films, from Pedro Costa's "In Vanda's Room" to Apichatpong Weerasethakul's "Syndromes and a Century" which would blast away at old precepts of what a film was, what fiction and nonfiction actually were and where the boundaries lay, and send viewers into a realm of fresh approaches to cinema grammar that simultaneously acknowledged the classical masters from Ford to Ozu?
Which leads to the second, somewhat contradictory myth: that, even though we may be witnessing the death of cinema, we are surely in the midst of a grand renaissance of documentaries. Ah, the old D-word. This sentiment has been particularly intense and centered in the U.S., where documentaries such as Michael Moore's Cannes Palme d'Or-winning "Fahrenheit 911" and Morgan Spurlock's "Super Size Me" ventured where few documentaries outside of those by Jacques Cousteau had gone before: to American suburban multiplexes, land of the mainstream. It wasn't that they snared awards, including the Oscar; it was that general moviegoers were paying to see something that they might ostensibly have watched previously on television. It was a myth additionally promulgated by a cadre of media entities with skin in the game, indebted to the notion that especially the topical, issue-oriented, hot-button documentary was where the action was; namely, the Sundance film festival, HBO's documentary division, PBS and ITVS, the latter three being primary suppliers of product to the former, which has long been the key launch pad for American independent film and particularly documentary film. (Or, as the adage goes-and this is most definitely not a myth-everyone knows that when you go to Sundance, see the documentaries first.) While this network of interests has undoubtedly created a business climate for documentary filmmakers, who are nothing if not prolific, that is not to say that they have produced a renaissance. In a public conversation at the 2005 Toronto film festival which I had with Albert Maysles, one of the living masters of the nonfiction film and a rigorous proponent of "direct cinema," he pointedly expressed his distress over the myriad techniques which supposed documentarians were using to create "dramatic" effects in a clear attempt to mimic "movies," to say nothing of the promulgation of mistruths, including how Michael Moore had actually spoken multiple times with GM CEO Roger Smith in the course of making "Roger & Me," a film hinging on the notion that Moore could never actually speak directly with Smith, a point further detailed in the Canadian-made deconstruction of Moore's brand of documentary, "Manufacturing Dissent." Maysles was not sounding the crank, the crusty veteran railing against the young whippersnappers. Rather, he was pointing to the corrupting influence of television and theatrical modes on his chosen art form, most notably in the ways in which American documentary was still largely tethered to the old "educational" methods of schoolroom "audio-visual" pedagogy.
The "renaissance" has been, in actuality, something of a disaster for the American school of documentary. The work that emerges from the Sundance world, so to speak, is fundamentally instructional in purpose, tone and method, fully derived from the educational uses of films from grade school through college. The content, whether it's environmental degradation or the fast-food industry's hold on our bellies, is driven by a sense of entertaining journalism. This must always include the foregrounding of central "characters" with rooting interests (preferably three of varying shapes, sizes and tendencies). The form must always incorporate cross-cutting or various effects-laden decoration, buttressed by a music score founded on the principle of indicating which direction the audience's emotions must turn-in essence, the art and science of the Hollywood movie composer's craft. The structural imperative behind it all is a three-act narrative-all of Moore's films, to cite only one example, are grounded in this-which expressly borrows from Hollywood. The resulting feedback loop is self-reinforcing: The closer that a "documentary" adheres to these principles, the better its chances of being accepted by the mainstream as a "movie," since it becomes indistinguishable from one. The logical end point of this is a documentary becoming a Hollywood product, and unrecognizable to the direct cinema voices like Maysles, whose careers have been founded on the principle of resisting Hollywood's hegemony over American cinema.
The irony of this myth is that there really has been a renaissance, only elsewhere in the world, where the prerogatives of nonfiction follow entirely different modes from those of Moore and company. Attendees of FID Marseilles, artistic director Jean-Pierre Rehm's annual festival of independent non-fiction, know this, as well as those who pay attention to nonfiction at festivals like Rotterdam, Belfort, Era New Horizons, Jeonju and BAFICI (to name a few) know that they will see precious few films instructing them on how to think or how to feel about the subject at hand. These films, loosely termed "observational" or "objectivist" (even "materialist"), represent the ideological and formal opposite of the Sundance world. They are realized with the notion, expressed in Bazin and others, of comprehension through the act of seeing and listening, a possible fathoming of reality through non-intrusive means, a liberation of the viewer from intentionality. What compounds the irony of our current situation is that just as a certain materiality, even scientific thought (as much as is possible in a work of cinema) guides this kind of work I prefer to term nonfiction rather than the musty documentary, the most thrilling tendency of the past decade has been toward the "in-between" film, where notions of narrative and reality dissolve and fold into each other, smudging the boundaries. Bazin's admittedly romantic and profoundly Catholic-based idea of a reality made through plan-sequence, depth of field, long shots, and then radically advanced by (atheist) Antonioni through a cinema of the duration of the shot has now been taken several steps further by Apichatpong, Costa, Alonso, Sharon Lockhart, Lav Diaz, Uruphong Raksasad and Kelly Reichardt (again, naming only a few), whose films tend to dissolve fiction and nonfiction, with nonfiction driving the vehicle rather than the American commercial documentary being driven by the Hollywood bus.
This context, I think, is where it's best to understand the key importance of Lucien Castaing-Taylor's and Ilisa Barbash's masterpiece of nonfiction, "Sweetgrass." Another layer should be added to this context. The anthropological cinema of Jean Rouch, as well as the pure fieldwork film used in the growing genre of anthropological filmmaking, has a way of joining up with Bazinian notions initially formed around narrative, and especially that other Jean R., Renoir. Claude Lévi-Strauss' cultural anthropology, Marxist and firmly anti-colonialist, was in many ways made visible by Rouch's work, particularly that made in Africa. The central idea, made manifest in "Sweetgrass" to an extent that's rarely been equaled, is that the subject is recorded and observed almost purely through image and sound (and a minimum if not absence of supporting text), but with considerable research and understanding of the cultural and political realities informing and affecting that subject. In spite of the continual feuding that embroils much of academic anthropology regarding the scientific virtues of field recording and its contribution to analytical interpretation-a battlefield that amuses Castaing-Taylor and Barbash no end-the cinematic value of the work is undoubted, and its possibly unintended connections to an Antonioni-to-Alonso cinema are endlessly fascinating. (As Castaing-Taylor noted to critic Jay Kuehner in his extensive interview in Cinema Scope magazine, "the virtues of the long take crept up on us and changed the way 'Sweetgrass' was edited.") For the makers of "Sweetgrass"-or, specifically, Castaing-Taylor, who did the camerawork on the footage that found its way into the final film-call themselves "recordists," not "directors." Semantics? No. The intent of the word is precisely meant, and points to the film's essence. Castaing-Taylor, on camera, and Barbash, at the editing table, are practicing their anthropological discipline through cinema as removed observers of the subject at hand: A family-run sheepherding operation based in Big Timber, Sweet Grass County, Montana, using leased public lands to run sheep into the Absaroka-Beartooth mountains until 2003. Barbash is a curator of visual anthropology at Harvard University's Peabody Museum, while Castaing-Taylor is a professor of Visual and Environmental Studies and Anthropology at Harvard, where he heads the university's Sensory Ethnography Lab. They have collaborated on the previous nonfiction films, "Made in USA" (about Los Angeles sweatshops) and "In and Out of Africa" (on the international market in African art), and co-authored the 2008 book, "The Cinema of Robert Gardner," as well as texts on transcultural cinema. But their adventure that led to the making of "Sweetgrass" started far from their current Harvard home and the academic grove; indeed, their subject's sheer remoteness from civilization while being firmly American gives the film its extraordinary qualities of timelessness and rigorous attention to the here and now.
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