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Pleasant Perfection
Harvard Film Archive presents Sweetgrass
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Sweetgrass is at once innovative and time-honored, the sort of documentary that hearkens back to the inception of the art while simultaneously making new strides. From filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash, Sweetgrass follows the vanishing way of life of Montana’s possibly last generation of sheepherders. Part landscape film (Castaing-Taylor and Barbash used footage for several installations) and part observational tale, the documentary was lauded at its showings at both the New York Film Festival and the Berlin Film Festival. It will be presented in conjunction with the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study and the Department of Anthropology at the Harvard Film Archive Cinematheque at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138) March 5 at 7:00 pm.
The film documents a small group of herders as they attempt to drive their herd into Montana’s Beartooth Mountains. The filmmakers have deftly avoided the danger of presenting a saccharine pastoral tale by objectively showing the audience every element of the story from afar, from the rolling hills to the sound of the sheep bellowing, to the emotions of the herders themselves. Barbash and Castaing-Taylor’s background in visual anthropology is apparent and the nature itself is as much a star of the film as the herders who live off of it.
The showing of Sweetgrass will be followed by a talk with Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash, who will be present at the screening. Tickets for this special event are $12 or are free for Harvard ID holders, HFA Member and Peabody Museum Members. Tickets are available 45 minutes before show time at the Cinematheque on the lower level of the Carpenter Center. For more information, visit http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/.