If you don't know Andy Goldworthy's art, I think you're in for a treat. This is also QUITE child-friendly.
HIs basic brief is to go out into the world and make something from what he finds there. Then he photographs it, and then lets it return to what it was. Some of his installation pieces in galleries have been pine-cone shaped stacks of slate, or other naturally occurring building material. Tori Amos stood in one of the slate stacks, as if it were a skirt, for the cover of one of her early records. Once he made a collection of snow balls with various contents, stored them, and the put them out in the gallery to melt and reveal their content.
Its all about using what's actually there, but also all about time and how impermanent the world is. Nothing we see, not the rocks, not the mountains, not even the sea, will last for ever. Ok, ok, and the point is???? Ok. The first piece in this film is filmed before dawn, in Newfoundland. Goldworthy is out with a little bowl of water, and he's collected a bunch of carrot-sized icicles, and he's breaking them into segments and using the water to stick them back together to make an arc that starts and ends on the side of a big rock down by the ocean- like a letter C stuck to the rock as if: / C| / then the camera pulls back and you can see he's made a series of these, like the old arrow-though the head gag, a series of loops on both sides of the rock
.........I
.........L/ \
........./.....D
......C/......\
......./........D
....C/..........\
so it looks like the icicle is threaded back and forth through the rock and the at the top it turns and goes up a couple of feet straight up. Nice. He's got gloves but he's working with bare fingers because he gets better control of the ice pieces that way. It looks COLD. Just as he's about to take the picture, the sun comes up, its been twilight as he's been working, and the sunlight falls on the icicle pieces and they turn on with the golden light as if they're neon tubes or something like that... completely unexpected.
I find this charming, and it may not be the best piece in the film. Maybe the failures, the stack of rocks that keeps collapsing, the screen of sticks pinned together with thorns that a tiny breeze destroys, are the best. Good lesson for kids- some ideas don't work out- give it your best, and if it isn't going to happen, do something else. Its like going back 50,000 years to when art and engineering and science were more or less the same thing... What happens to the gallery wall he covers with mud is so cool I'm not going to reveal it. Suffice to say, its really, really, cool. Goldsworthy is playful, but also thoughful and direct.
In Berkeley, California, this was the Star Wars of documentaries- it ran for 6 months in a theater on Shattuck. That's whare I first saw it.
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