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    FILM & VIDEO

    Sweetgrass by Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor

    Sweetgrass by Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor

    Presented by Harvard Film Archive at Harvard Film Archive

    March 5, 2010

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    Celebrated since its Berlin and New York film festival premieres, Sweetgrass offers both a sweeping panorama and intimate portrait of the vanishing way of life of Montana’s possibly last generation of sheep herders. Sensitively documenting the efforts of a small group of herders to drive their sheep into Montana’s Beartooth Mountains for summer pasture, Sweetgrass reveals a breathtakingly epic study of man in nature that is shaded by a mournful eulogy for the vanishing frontier that recalls the revisionist Westerns of the 1970s. Barbash and Castaing-Taylor make their points visually, beginning with the sheep and only gradually coming to focus on the herders themselves, and using an evocative sound design that doesn’t necessarily foreground speech over the sound of wind and bleating sheep. Indeed, the spoken word comes later, reaching its apotheosis during a tearful cell phone call from a herder in a remote meadow. Sweetgrass is equally successful as an observational documentary as a landscape film, with the filmmakers’ background in visual anthropology clearly evident in their skillful rendering of the herders’ life and labor. Carefully avoiding any romanticization of the pastoral, Sweetgrass is instead an unsentimental witness to the changing nature of man’s relationship to the environment.


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      • Venue Info

        Harvard Film Archive

        Harvard Film Archive Cinematheque
        24 Quincy Street
        Cambridge, MA 02138

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      • Admission Info

        Tickets: $12 Special Event Tickets,Free for HFA Members, Peabody Museum Members and Harvard ID holders

      • Dates & Times

        Dates:
        March 5, 2010

        Times:
        7pm

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