At a certain point, Thomas Riedelsheimer's Rivers and Tides evolves into a deadpan, existentialist comedy. It is focused on the artist Andy Goldsworthy, who makes purposefully painstaking structures of sticks, mud, grass, and ice -- only to see them collapse. When they do, Goldsworthy just kind of sits there, his head lowered in despair, us watching (and plausibly laughing at) his struggle from a distance. However deep the implications of his "4-dimensional" art may be, he is a child at heart, sad to see what he has made go away so soon.

And that childlike fascination is what drives the art and the film, and may also be the reason it also feels a bit unsatisfying. Goldsworthy's endlessly meandering patterns, his densely structured domes of ice and wood, and his web-like sensitivity-based chicken games, all comment on their own fragility, their own nature, and their own eternal present existence. One of the rare times we get to hear him speak about what may be the inner beauty behind his work is when he discusses how he and an old woman friend recall the changing population of his town. He remembers all the births and she remembers all the deaths. Goldsworthy has said that the essence of his work is its destruction, and there is a sequence near the end where he throws disentigrating balls of dust and snow in the air that reflects his obsession with the temporariness of beauty quite nicely. But for all the births and all the dust floating tenderly into nothing, what is there after? This is the question that haunts me about Goldsworthy, after seeing him sink into the ground so many times.

I admire Goldsworthy's embodiments of the flowing nature of time, and I was transfixed by his figures for much of the running time -- I might recommend it to anyone who's pretty interested in this stuff. But I don't think it's the great film or even the good, resolved one it could have been. The film's heart is in conflict with its spirit. It seems to be about transcending the nature of time and all its frustration through art, but it is mostly filmed in serene awe, Riedelsheimer holding anxiety back in lieu of being able to record one small moment. There is a deep insecurity about the end of things at the center of Rivers and Tides, an insecurity that can be recognized in Goldsworthy's less than very communicative home life, and his attitude while working, and the film doesn't really stand to face or dig into that insecurity; it really only digs around it.

1.3.03

baaab