Rivers & Tides

Screening: 20 June, 6:30pm

Germany/UK/Finland
2000

Director/Screenplay/Cinemato-graphy/Editor: Thomas Riedelsheimer
Production co: Mediopolis Berlin, WDR, Arte
Producer: Annedore von Donop
Production designer: Christian M. Goldbeck
Sound: Alexander Weuffen
Music: Fred Frith
With: Andy Goldsworthy
90 mins
16mm
Exempt Censorship

Like Turner and Constable, Andy Goldsworthy could be termed a British nature artist. But unlike his forebears, Goldsworthy has made his chosen medium not paint, but nature itself. In the sensitive and stimulating documentary Rivers and Tides, he handcrafts numerous sculptures and installations from leaves, stones, dirt, snow, and ice, elegantly composing organic, archetypal forms like birds' nests, giant eggs, yonic folds, and snaking river-shapes. For one construction, he snaps twigs into varying lengths and weaves them together into a whirlpool-shaped web, gently suspended from a tree branch. But when Goldsworthy adds one stalk too many, his intricate curtain flutters to the ground, destroyed. The gray-bearded artist sighs, but is unfazed. "When I make a work," he explains, "I often take it to the very edge of its collapse. And that's a very beautiful balance."

His most beautiful sculptures are unsellable, but Goldsworthy is not a mendicant outsider. Museums collect his photos of the site-specific performances; he also creates more durable structures from rock and mud. Like cinema itself, his art is time-based, encouraging humbling reflections on mortality. While some live and die within mere seconds, works like his ominous, human-sized stone eggs could endure as long as Stonehenge or the Cerne Giant, two prehistoric precedents for mystic British land-art. Appropriately, Riedelsheimer shoots Goldsworthy's mini-megaliths with a landscape painter's eye; set to Fred Firth's modernist score, some images verge on Kubrick territory. The documentary ends with footage of Goldsworthy throwing armfuls of snow into the wind, forming giant ghosts that swirl overhead then dissolve.

Ed Halter, Village Voice, 1/1/03

Internet Movie Database listing

Made available with the support of the Goethe Institute

Preceded by:

Over the Hedge

USA
1994

Director: K. D. Davis
7 mins
16mm

The wild world of topiary.