A ravishing pastoral to restore the senses. A shepherdess guides her flock of 3,000 sheep across the wildest stream in Montana, Hell Roaring Creek. In this film, Castaing-Taylor, one of the directors of Sweetgrass, portrays a mythical ritual at dawn with a technique he describes as “pictorialisation.” “There is a kind of withdrawal of my subjectivity holding the camera as if it were on a tripod. I had a kind of outer-body experience. I really felt that I reconnected with nature. Subjectively I started engaging with the sheep, with this landscape and with this river in a way that took me out of my immediate bodily experience.”
Festivals
Toronto International Film Festival; Viennale; Locarno International Film Festival.
Lucien Castaing-Taylor. He is a British anthropologist and artist who works in film, video, and photography. His works are part of the permanent collection of New York’s MoMA and have also been shown at the British Museum, the Quai Branly Museum, and the Smithsonian Institution. His films have been screened at multiple festivals, Berlin, Locarno, New York, and Toronto among them. At present, Castaing-Taylor is working on a series of videos and photos capturing the charm and the ambivalence of the shepherd’s trade. His best known films include In and Out of Africa (an ethnographic video about issues of authenticity, taste, and racial politics in the African art market that won eight international awards) and Made in USA, which examines sweatshops and child labour in the Los Angeles garment industry. Since 2002 he has taught at Harvard University, where he is Director of the Sensory Ethnography Lab and the Film Study Center.
Selected filmography
Made in USA (1990)
In and Out of Africa (1992)
Sweetgrass (2009)
The High Trail (2010)