Film Review: Rivers and Tides

Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy. Working with Time. Directed and Edited by Thomas Riedelsheimer. Director of Photography: Mr. Riedelsheimer. (2001).

It is not often that a film leaves me awestruck, literally speechless and filled with wonder. I had seen pictures of Andy Goldsworthy’s sculptures in nature before, yet seeing this film about him, and watching him in the act of making his ephemeral creations is something altogether splendid and unique. It brought me to a state of intense aliveness and excitement. It is rare that a work of art can do this.

Sculptor Works in the Natural World

Andy Goldsworthy, a Scottish sculptor, has been quietly following his own path for more than two decades now. He does not work in a studio. The natural world is his canvas. He is fascinated by the energy of the universe as it manifests in stones, rocks, flowing rivers, flowers, sticks, berries, bracken, snow, ice, branches, everything that one finds in nature. He uses no tools but his hands. He creates forms that may last minutes, hours or years, until they melt or sweep away in the tides, rain or snow.

Goldsworthy Fascinated by Flow of Energy and Time

“Art for me is a form of nourishment,” he says in the film. He is fascinated by the energy that flows through the landscape, not to hold it or stop it, but to be one with it, to witness it. You will see him create an extraordinary looping icicle sculpture by breaking pieces of ice and sticking them together with saliva. Magical instant beauty!

One Astonishing Image After Another

In another scene you watch as red liquid trickles over a rock face in a tumbling stream, and one thinks instantly that this is blood. Then one discovers that Goldsworthy has found iron oxide pebbles in the stream, pounded them into dust and dissolved them in water to make the blood red liquid and then poured it into the stream.

Goldsworthy wanders through the town where he lives in Scotland, describing its sheep herding history and picking bunches of yellow dandelions as he meanders. Later the camera pulls back to reveal a hole in some rocks in a stream bed filled with a mass of gold dandelion heads. The shock of the gold delights the eye.

At one point Goldsworthy painstakingly creates a fragile hanging sculpture of twigs. It is so delicate. How long can it survive? As he attaches one last piece the whole lacy structure collapses in a pile around him. I felt a deep sense of loss at first, as if a child or a beloved pet had died, and then I thought, “This is just part of life–all things die and some things have very brief lives–let it go.”

It’s About Paying Attention

As I was watching this film these words from one of my favorite poems by Mary Oliver, The Summer Day, kept going through my head:

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention . . .

In the end, Goldsworthy’s work, and Mary Oliver’s poems too, are about paying attention to this exquisitely beautiful planet we live on–and falling in love with this world, knowing that each one of us is part of this creation.

Connection of Rivers and Tides to a Peace-Filled World

What does Rivers and Tides have to do with creating a world that works for everyone? What does all this have to do with creating a world at peace? I think it has something to do with experience peace right here, right now by looking, by paying attention, wherever we are, by noticing the sun, the sky, the rain, the stars, the trees, and the blessed and infuriating and wonderful people who share this extraordinary planet with us.  Perhaps then, when and if there comes a time when we have to choose to go to war, we will remember the preciousness of life itself and the beauty of our glorious, living earth and we will put away our guns, think of future generations and let love guide our actions.

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