Salina Art Center

With Sweetgrass, husband-and-wife filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash tread on tricky ground, chronicling the work of modern-day sheepherders after nearly a decade of homophobic snickering about “gay cowboys” from moviegoers intimidated by Brokeback Mountain.  There’s no conscious aim to “rescue” the image of the sheepherder from such snickering, but it wouldn’t be truthful to say that the specter of politically incorrect amusement doesn’t loom over Sweetgrass.  Within the first few minutes, however, any concerns are swept away: Castaing-Taylor and Barbash deal with their subject without an ironic wink or sly nod to the audience.  Their empathy and admiration for the men who shear, herd, and drive over 3,000 sheep across the gorgeous Absoroka-Beartooth Mountains in Montana is sincere yet unsentimental.  They also resist the temptation to exploit the lambs’ cuteness, though at times the ranchers treat their wooly charges with great affection and tenderness; or, in one amusing scene of prolonged, old-fashioned cussin’, with impotent rage (after all, they’re sheep—you can’t expect them to always do what you want them to).  The two main sheepherders, Pat and John, are also viewed through an objective lens that doesn’t turn them into grizzled, macho archetypes like Jack Palance’s dying cowboy in City Slickers.  They’re as tough as the job demands but they’re human beings, not modern-day John Waynes carved out of granite.  That’s not to say that Sweetgrass doesn’t evoke honest emotions from the audience, for Castaing-Taylor and Barbash do have an agenda: they’ve been documenting this annual sheep drive for three years, knowing that it would be soon be the “last round-up” for the men they’ve been following (the owners moved the sheep ranch to the Canadian wilderness).  When we witness the end of traditions like this massive, yearly sheep drive (through mountainous terrain and public lands, including town streets), it makes us feel a stronger sense of our American heritage.  Sweetgrass doesn’t play with audience sympathies or saturate us in a nostalgic mood, but it has the feel of a genuine American elegy for the dying days of a certain way of life that helped define our country.  The feeling doesn’t need to be overstated, because it’s inherent in the subject, which is starkly filmed by Castaing-Taylor using digital video.  The visuals are generally simple, not prettied-up like picture postcards but quite memorable: screen-filling tableaux of jagged rocks, running streams, lone men on horseback, verdant woods, grey skies, limitless horizons—even the most agoraphobic, cubicle-dwelling office worker will feel his or her blood roused by these awesome, often haunting images.  That imagery has earned critical comparisons to a much more abstract, “artistic” look at the natural world, the cult-classic Koyaanisqatsi.  Actually, Sweetgrass has more kinship to the cinematic Western, the best of which paid tribute to our vanishing past, praised values like endurance, strength, dignity, work ethic, professionalism, and showed respect for our remaining cowboys (even if today’s cowboys have a few modern foibles like complaining about the lousy reception on their cell phones when riding over the mountains).  Sweetgrass is an examination of the natural world and American culture, showing how the two are connected and suggesting just how much our society loses when either is forgotten.