Derek Walcott will deliver the Robert B. Silvers Lecture on December 3 at the New York Public Library
New York Public Library
Celeste Bartos Forum
11 West 40th St. at Fifth Ave.
Tickets go on sale Monday, September 13, at 10:00 am
Series runs September 20 – December 4
212-930-0855
www.nypl.org
Season tickets for the New York Public Library’s always exciting Live from the NYPL series go on sale September 13. This year’s all-star lineup includes Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen Breyer, Jonathan Lethem, Antonia Fraser, Edwidge Danticat, Zadie Smith, Derek Walcott, Ruth Reichl, Nicole Krauss, the Moth, W. S. Merwin, and Angela Davis in conversation with Toni Morrison, among others. There are also two very special musical guests, Keith Richards on October 29 and Jay-Z on November 15, for which tickets will be announced via an e-mail blast only.
Husband-and-wife filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash follow a flock of sheep herded by a family of Norwegian-American cowboys on their last sojourns through the public lands of Montana’s Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness in the gorgeously photographed, surprisingly intimate, and sometimes very funny documentary SWEETGRASS. In 2001, Castaing-Taylor, director of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard, and Barbash, a curator of Visual Anthropology at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, found out about the Allestad ranch, an old-fashioned, Old West group of sheepherders who still did everything by hand, including leading hundreds of sheep on a 150-mile journey into the mountains for summer pasture with only a few dogs and horses. Director Castaing-Taylor uses no voice-over narration or intertitles, instead inviting the viewer to join in the story as if in the middle of the action, offering no judgments or additional information. The film begins with shearing and feeding, then birthing and mothering, before heading out on the long, sometimes treacherous trail, especially at night, when bears and wolves sneak around, looking for food. Slowly the focus switches to the men themselves, primarily an old-time singing grizzled ranch hand and a cursing, complaining cowboy. Castaing-Taylor and Barbash spent three years with the sheepherders and in the surrounding areas, amassing more than two hundred hours of footage and making to date nine films out of their experiences, mostly shorter work to be displayed in gallery installations or for anthropological reasons; SWEETGRASS is the only one to be released theatrically. It’s a fascinating look at a something that is destined to soon be gone forever. The film is closing out 92YTribeca’s monthly Eat This Film! series with a special screening September 15, introduced by Castaing-Taylor, Barbash, and local sheep farmer Eugene Wyatt.
