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TheCinemaGuild,Inc.
115West30
th
Street,Suite800
NewYork,NY10001‐4061
Tel:(212)685‐6242,Fax:(212)685‐4717
www.cinemaguild.com
ACinemaGuildRelease
a film by Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor
101minutes/35mm/1.85/DolbyDigital5.1/InEnglish /NotRated
Stillsavailableat:www.cinemaguild.com/downloads
NYPublicityContact:
SusanNorgetFilmPromotion
198SixthAve.,Ste.1
NewYork,NY10013
tel:212.431.0090
fax:212.680.3181
susan@norget.com
www.norget.com
Sweetgrass _________________________________________________
Synopsis
AnunsentimentalelegytotheAmericanWest,Sweetgrassfollowsthelastmodern‐day
cowboystoleadtheirflocksofsheepupintoMontana’sAbsaroka‐Beartoothmountains
for summer pasture. This astonishingly beautiful yet unsparing film reveals a world in
which nature and culture, animals and humans, vulnerability and violence are all
intimatelymeshed.
AbouttheFilm
Sweetgrass premiered at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival. It has since played at the New
YorkFilmFestival,theRobertFlahertyFilmSeminar,andAFIFestival,amongothers.
Recordist’sStatement
We began work on this film in the spring of 2001. Living at the time in Colorado, we
heard about a family of Norwegian‐American sheepherders in Montana, who were
amongthe lasttotrailtheirbandofsheeplongdistances—abouta hundredandfifty
mileseachyear,allof it on hoof — upto the mountainsfor summer pasture. I visited
themthatAprilduringlambing,andwassotake nwiththemagnitudeoftheirlife—at
once its allure and its arduousness — that we ended up working with them, their
friends,andtheirIrish‐Americanhiredhandsintensivelyoverthecomingyears.
Sweetgrass is one of nine films to have emerged from the footage we have shot over
thelastdecade,theonlyoneintendedprincipallyfortheatricalexhibition.Astheyhave
beenshapedthroughediting,thefilmsseemtohavebecomeasmuchaboutthesheep
as about their herders. The humans and animals that populate them commingle and
crisscross in ways that have taken us by surprise. Sweetgrass depicts the twilight of a
defining chapter in the history of the American West, the dying world of Western
herders — descendants of Scandinavian and
northern European homesteaders — as
theystruggletomakealivinginaneraincreasinglyinimicaltotheirinterests.SetinBig
Skycountry,inalandscapeofremarkablescale andbeauty,thefilmportraysalifeworld
colored by an intense propinquity between nature and culture — one that has been
integral to the fabric of human existence throughout history, but which is almost
unimaginablefortheurbanmassesoftoday.
SpendingthesummershighintheRockymountains,amongtheherders,thesheep,and
theirpredators,wasatranscendentexperiencethatwillstay withmefortherestofmy
days.
—LucienCastaing‐Taylor
Sweetgrass _________________________________________________
Producer’sStatement:HowitstartedorTheLastSheepDrive
“Iamthelastguytodothisandsomeoneoughttomakeafilm aboutit.”Sospokeold‐
time rancher Lawrence Allested in 2001, aboutthe fact that hewas thelast person to
drive his sheep up into Montana’s Absaroka‐Beartooth mountain range on a grazing
permitthathad been handed down in his Norwegian‐Americanfamilyforgenerations.
FilmmakersandanthropologistslivingatthetimeinBoulder,Colorado,wehadwanted
tomakeafilmabouttheAmericanWest,andwereinstantlyintriguedbythetopic.
We drove up to Big Timber that summer ready to make a film called “The Last Sheep
Drive.” Our cars were loaded to the brim with three camera rigs, a bunch of radio
microphones,ourtwokids,a doganda babysitter.Forthefirstfewweekswe’dwake
upat4a.m.tohelpdrivethesheepthroughtownandthenup theroadstowardsthe
hills.Itwasafamily adventureforus, andafamilyenterprise fortheranchers—with
kids, grandparents, neighbors and passers‐by all helping.It soon became clear,
however,thatbecauseofthegrowinggrizzlybearandgreywolfpopulation,takingthe
kidsupintothemountainswould beimpossible.SoLucienwentupwithoutus,hiking
and riding, while I filmed other events in town—rodeos, dog trials, shooting contests,
haying,theSweetgrassCountyFair…
WhenLuciengotdownfromthemountainsthatfall,hewasunrecognizable –bearded
beyondbelief,20lbslighter,carryingatonoffootage,andlimping.Hewouldlater be
diagnosedwithtrauma‐inducedadvanceddegenerativearthritis,causedbycarryingthe
equipmentdayandnight,andneeddoublefootsurgery.Whenwestartedtowatchthe
footage,werealizedthatwehadtwo,ormore,differentfilms.(Andsomanydifferent
pointsofviewthatIthoughtaboutcallingthefilm“APieceoftheBigSky.”)Wedecided
themostcompellingstoryforatheatricalfilmwastheoriginalonewe’dbeeninterested
in:thesheepdriveitself—asritual,ashistory,aschallenge.Eventhen,wehadagood
200hoursoffootagetowadethrough.Littledidweknowthatthiswouldtakeusabout
eightyears.Inthemeantime,wewentbackuptofilmlambing,shearing,thefollowing
year’s sheep drive, and the one after that.We even moved to the East Coast. (We
started
joking that we’d call the film, “The Penultimate Sheep Drive.”) Most of the
footage, however is from that first summer. In 2006, the ranch was sold, along with
mostofthesheep.Nowthefilmisfinallyfinished.Asforatitle,we’dstartedusing“Big
Timber,” as it was the
name of the town where the drive began, butas fittingas that
was for the title of a Western, it implied a film about logging.We finally settled on
“Sweetgrass.”Whilethejourneyistremendouslyhard,itisundertakennotjustforthe
literal goal of reaching (sweet) grass, but also to carry on tradition against all sorts of
odds.Thereisasilent1925documentary,calledGrass:ANation'sBattleforLife(1925)
1925byMerianC.Cooper,ErnestSchoedsack, andMargueriteHarrison,aboutanheroic
seasonal trek (transhumance) of herds and Bakhtiari herdsmen in Persia.Sweetgrass
tips its
hat to that film, and is a tribute to past and contemporary people who still
managetoekeoutabittersweetlivingontheland.
—IlisaBarbash
Sweetgrass _________________________________________________
Filmmakers’Biographies
BarbashandCastaing‐Taylor’sworkseekstoconjugatetheambiguityandprovocations
of art with a documentary attachment to the immediate flux of lived experience.
Workingin Montanasince2001, theyhavedeployeddifferentstylistic registersin film,
video, and photography to evoke at once the attractions and the ambivalence of the
pastoral by juxtaposing monumental and mythological Western landscapes with
multiple tracks of subjective synchronous sound. Forthcoming works in 2010 include
HellRoaringCreek,CoomBiddy,Into‐the‐jug(geworfen),TurnedatthePass,Breakfast,
DaybreakontheBedGround,BeddingDown,andTheHighTrail.
PreviousworksincludeMade
inUSA(1990),afilmaboutsweatshopsandchildlaborin
the Los Angeles garment industry, and In and Out of Africa (1992), an ethnographic
video about authenticity, taste, and racial politics in the transnational African art
market, which won eight international awards. Their work hasbeen exhibited and the
subject
of symposia at the Smithsonian Institution and the British Museum, and also
exhibited at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and the James Gallery at CUNY
GraduateCenter.
Their written publications include Visualizing Theory (Taylor, ed., Routledge, 1994),
Cross‐CulturalFilmmaking(California,1997),TransculturalCinema,acollectionofessays
bytheethnographicfilmmakerDavidMacDougall(Taylored.,Princeton,1998),andThe
CinemaofRobertGardner(Berg,2008).TaylorwasthefoundingeditoroftheAmerican
AnthropologicalAssociation’sjournalVisualAnthropologyReview(1991–94).
Ilisa Barbash is Associate Curator of Visual Anthropology at the Peabody Museum,
Harvard University. Lucien Castaing‐Taylor is the Director of the Sensory Ethnography
Lab,andformerDirectoroftheFilmStudyCenteratHarvardUniversity, wherehealso
teachesinVisual&EnvironmentalStudiesandinAnthropology.
Sweetgrass _________________________________________________
Crew
ProducedbyIlisaBarbash
RecordedbyLucienCastaing‐Taylor
SoundEditingandMixby ErnstKarel
DigitalPost‐Productionby PatrickLindenmaier
FeaturingJohnAhern,ElaineAllestad,
LawrenceAllestad,PatConnolly
FundedinpartbygrantsfromtheLEFFoundation
andtheOshkoshAreaCommunityF oundation
. TheCinemaGuild,Inc.
115West30
th
Street,Suite800
NewYork,NY10001‐4061
Tel:(212)685‐6242,Fax:(212)685‐4717
www.cinemaguild.com
A CinemaGuildRelease
a film by Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor
101minutes/35mm/1.85/DolbyDigital5.1/InEnglish /NotRated
Stillsavailableat:www.cinemaguild.com/downloads
. still
managetoekeout a bittersweetlivingontheland.
— Ilisa Barbash
Sweetgrass _________________________________________________
Filmmakers’Biographies
Barbash and Castaing‐Taylor’sworkseekstoconjugatetheambiguity and provocations
of
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