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Rarely in cinema do we have the chance
to witness both an elegy and a eulogy. A simultaneous lament for and
celebration of a life that has recently passed on. Such is the power
of the silver screen: to take footage of people doing their job, and
in the process, encapsulate the death of an era, an occupation, and
a national myth of identity. Or at least that's how the team behind
SWEETGRASS chooses to use movie magic. Aside from being an excellent
collection of Bierdstadtian landscape shots of the Montana Wilderness,
the film tells the story of a band of sheep, horses, cowboys (sheep
herders, actually), and their dogs during a summer spent grazing on
the public lands in high mountain valleys. The film opens in late spring,
with snow still on the ground. Quiet and stillness dominate our world,
as wide shots of mountain peaks seem to get ever closer to an unseen
destination, when finally we cut to a low angle shot of the commercial
sheep herd. Hundreds of white sheep stand still, filling the screen
and stretching into the distance. The texture of their wool resembles
the melting snow we've seen in the preceding shots, and the lack of
noise will stand in stark contrast to the rest of the film. Finally
we move in to a close-up of a single sheep standing, chewing on grass.
Slowly, he turns his head towards the camera, chewing constantly. At
the very moment when he finally turns to look straight at the camera,
he suddenly stops chewing. He stares straight ahead, blankly, silently,
with a small hint of fear, and completely still. And after the title
card, our audio endurance test begins. A "baah!" here, and a "baah!"
there. Eventually the incessant and overbearing sound of the herd emerges,
and a constant drone sustains throughout the entire film. "BAAH! BAAH!
BAAH!" Constantly. The sound is deafening, but eventually you begin
to pick out the differences in the noises, and almost hear them as voices,
and understand the mood of the vocalist. When the Drive begins, we head
out as one gigantic group of 1000 sheep, horses, dogs, and people. As
we move through forests and over creeks, the skill of the sheep dogs
becomes evident. The cowboys constantly call to them, and the dogs usher
the herd towards safety. The cowboys split up on the way, and each take
a few hundred sheep, a horse, and two or three dogs into a valley, where
they stay for the summer. There's quite a bit more humor and drama than
you might expect from these men of few words. They live a primitive
life, harkening back to an earlier era. They sleep in canvas tents and
cook with wood-burning stoves. But they also carry sophisticated cameras
(for documenting a sheep killed by a bear) and cell phones. They exist
in two worlds, and one of those worlds is coming to a close. However,
this really is the story of the sheep, and when everyone comes back
from the mountains for the very last time, the sheep are sent off to
slaughter. The cowboys, knowing that an occupation that they personally
had held for a lifetime was gone forever, drive home, saying nothing
to one another. The sheep were gone, and in the typical Western economy
of language, so were all the words. (2009, 101 min, 35mm) JH - Cine-File.info
