here’s something fascinating about vanishing ways of life, and documentaries dedicated to those lifeways have an inherent poignancy about them–though good cinematography certainly doesn’t hurt. Whether it’s the 1959 black and white documentary Araya, which examined the hard life eked out by Venezuelan salt workers, or the new film Sweetgrass by Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, such films act to preserve glimpses into worlds that modernity is steadily leaving behind. In the case of Sweetgrass, the subject is sheepherders who set out from Big Timber, Montana, with a sizable flock that they guide across the Beartooth Mountains during the summer of 2003–the last summer they took their sheep up for summer pasture. The film starts in late spring, as the last snows fall and the sheep are sheared and give birth to new lambs; the sheepherders take an almost factory worker approach to the livestock, pinning them down, tossing them around, making choices about which orphaned lambs will be paired up with which bereft mothers whose own offspring have not survived. We’re offered no narration to explain who these sheepherders are or what they are doing. Often, though we might not be entirely sure about the what and the why of the job at hand, the who comes through even without introductions. One young man tells a joke to his companions as he castrates young male sheep; a young woman rides her horse with complete assurance and easy authority. Atop a mountain, hundreds of miles into the wild and months into the summer pasturage, one sheepherder, near tears, vents to his mother with the last of his cell phone’s battery. His companion, a weathered sheepherder named John, assesses an ongoing problem with predation: is it a bear or a wolverine that’s coming around at night to pick off members of the flock? These are good-natured people, tolerating rough terrain and sometimes harsh conditions–until their nerves start to fray and things go awry. When the herd starts to spread out, or wander off the trail and up steep slopes, the sheepherders let loose with scorching diatribes; even on the wide, wild range, under a big sky, workplace discontent is part of the package. This film is the production of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, but it has more poetry than academia about it. The editing is clean and the rhythm is clear; the filmmakers allow for long, meditative shots that allow the viewer to get immersed into the action and the environments, from high-elevation meadows to sun-dappled woodlands. Restful, dramatic, and occasionally funny, Sweetgrass will remain both a scholarly resource and an enjoyable sample of its genre for decades to come.
by Kilian Melloy
