Ilisa Barbash is Curator of Visual Anthropology at Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, where she makes films, writes, and curates exhibitions on photography. She has taught ethnographic film production and the history and theory of ethnographic film at San Francisco State University, UC Berkeley, and the University of Colorado Boulder.
Sweetgrass
Sweetgrass
Sweetgrass
Synopsis
An unsentimental elegy to the American West, Sweetgrass follows the last modern-day cowboys to lead their flocks of sheep up into Montana's breathtaking and often dangerous Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains for summer pasture. This astonishingly beautiful yet unsparing film reveals a world in which nature and culture, animals and humans, vulnerability and violence are all intimately entwined.
Lucien Castaing-Taylor: 'We were living in the Rockies and were interested in the so-called New West, especially the changes wrought by yuppification, with all the neo-homesteaders — rich hobby farmers — moving in and buying up the land as a playground for their kids and guests for a few weeks every summer. It was a chance, or a challenge, for us to engage anew with "salvage ethnography"— how to represent a world on the wane — something that's been considered totally retrograde within anthropology since the 1960s. Could we acknowledge a historical loss without falling prey to all the pitfalls of patronising romanticism and nostalgia?’
— Excerpted from Scott MacDonald, 'Conversations on the Avant-Doc: Scott MacDonald Interviews', FRAMEWORK: The Journal of Cinema and Media, Vol. 54, No. 2, Fall 2013
Festivals & Awards
2009 Berlinale
2009 IDFA
Director's Profile
Ilisa BARBASH
Filmography
1992 In and Out of Africa
2009 Sweetgrass
Director's Profile
Lucien CASTAING-TAYLOR
Lucien Castaing-Taylor, born in 1966 in Liverpool, is a British anthropologist and filmmaker. He teaches at Harvard University and is the director of the Sensory Ethnography Laboratory. Seeking to conjugate art's negative capability with an ethnographic attachment to the flux of life, his work has been widely exhibited at major film festivals and institutions, and is held in the permanent collections of MoMA and the British Museum.
Filmography
1992 In and Out of Africa
2009 Sweetgrass
2012 Leviathan
2013 Still Life
2015 Ah Humanity!
2016 Somniloquies
2017 Commensal
2017 Caniba
2022 De Humani Corporis Fabrica
Credit
Producer ｜Ilisa BARBASH
Video and Recorded by｜Lucien CASTAING-TAYLOR
Editor｜Ilisa BARBASH, Lucien CASTAING-TAYLOR
Additional Sound Recordist ｜Kevin J. COLVER
Sound Editor／Sound Mix｜Ernst KAREL
Print Source
Lucien CASTAING-TAYLOR