I watched Rivers and Tides multiple times in a theater in Berkeley before it was demolished for a new apartment complex.
It blew my mind.
The pacing was deliberate and the images were gorgeous.
I was entranced by the musings of Andy Goldsworthy.
When I gushed about it to a professor, she pushed back,
“Don’t you think it mythologizes the artist too much?”
That dampened my enthusiasm for two decades.
Last year, we rewatched the movie with the kids.
I see where my prof was coming from.
So what! She’s wrong.
Yes, the movie glamorizes the artist and his work.
But it’s about failure as part of the artist’s process.
It takes a metric shitton of boring-ass effort.
If this is mythology, then we need more myth to do the work.
It’s a great film, equally matched by the avante-garde music of Fred Frith.
The entire soundtrack is great, but my favorite moment in the movie is at the start of this clip, where Goldsworthy discusses the effect of sheep on the land while the music builds towards a muted climax when the camera pans around a huge stone sculpture.