Sheep are on one of their last trips through the mountains in SWEETGRASS (Photo courtesy Cinema Guild)
SWEETGRASS (Lucien Castaing-Taylor, 2009)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
January 6-19
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
www.sweetgrassthemovie.com
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 that is scheduled to be released theatrically, beginning a two-week limited run at Film Forum on January 6. It’s a fascinating look at a something that is destined to soon be gone forever.
In WAITING FOR ARMAGEDDON, which made its world premiere as the closing-night selection of last year’s New York Jewish Film Festival, directors Kate Davis, David Heilbroner, and Franco Sacchi talk to Christian Evangelicals about their Zionism — they believe in the defense and protection of Israel not for political or humanistic reasons but because that is where they believe Jesus will return and lead them into the next world. The seventy-four-minute film is divided into four parts — Rapture, Tribulation, Armageddon, and the Millennium — as families such as the New England Baggs and the Edwards clan of Oklahoma and religious and community leaders including Dr. Robert L. Dean Jr. of the West Houston Bible Church, Dr. David Hunt of the Berean Call Ministry, Phillip Goodman of Prophecy Watch Television, and Dr. Thomas Ice of Liberty University detail the importance of Israel and the Jews to the coming Apocalypse. There is also footage of Jerry Falwell and John Hagee, evangelists who have had a significant impact on the political system of the United States, especially during the administration of George W. Bush. The film is at its best when it follows Dr. H. Wayne House, professor of biblical studies and apologetics at Faith Seminary in Washington State, as he leads one of his Christian Study Tours of the Holy Land, reading from his Bible as he takes the group to such sites as the Dome of the Rock and explains its importance in prophecy. Much of the rest of the film lacks proper perspective and balance — while the directors do talk to several experts who do not believe in biblical prophecy and Armageddon, it feels like they were added just to make the documentary seem more balanced. It might have been better had Davis, Heilbroner, and Sacchi simply let the Evangelicals share their stories without any so-called experts and let viewers decide for themselves. Still, WAITING FOR ARMAGEDDON examines a very complicated topic that deserves far more investigation in the media.
“Life is not easy for everyone,” Olga Bowman says about midway through Andrew Jacobs’s spectacular cinéma vérité documentary, FOUR SEASONS LODGE. “But life can be beautiful even when it’s not so easy.” For twenty-five summers, a group of Holocaust survivors, mostly Polish Jews, would meet at the Four Seasons Lodge in the Catskills, where they would talk, dance, argue, eat, hug, discuss their latest aches and pains, and primarily revel in life despite the horrific things they suffered through and witnessed at such concentration camps as Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Jacobs discovered this heartwarming community while researching a series of articles for the New York Times; when he heard that the lodge was being sold and that the 2006 season might be the group’s last, he decided to make a movie about it. Seeking advice from the legendary Albert Maysles, Jacobs actually landed the master documentarian as his chief cameraman, giving FOUR SEASONS LODGE the feel of such classic Maysles brothers’ works as SALESMAN and GREY GARDENS.
When two famous people are caught together at a hotel in the mountains, a scandal breaks out as a lurid gossip magazine prints their picture and makes up a sordid romance that is not true. With their reputations tainted, they consider suing the publication, but they run into problems with their ragtag lawyer, who has a bit of a gambling problem. Akira Kurosawa regular Toshirô Mifune stars as Ichiro Aoye, a well-known painter who likes smoking pipes and riding his flashy motorcycle. Yoshiko Yamaguchi is Miyaka Saijo, a timid pop singer who is terrified of the unwanted publicity. And Takashi Shimura is Hiruta, the struggling lawyer devoted to his young daughter, who is dying of TB. The first half of the movie is involving right from the roaring opening-titles sequence, with good characterization and an alluring story line. Unfortunately, the film bogs down in the second half, especially during the hard-to-believe courtroom scenes, the only ones of Kurosawa’s career. And the Christmas bit is tired and cliché-ridden, even if might have been unique at the time for a film made in postwar Japan. But Kurosawa’s attack on the media is still valid today, even if he did fill it with sappy melodrama.
