Reflective Blog on Documentary 'Rivers and Tides'

Andy Goldsworthy Working With Time is the most spiritually literate documentary you will see this year. It won the Golden Gate Award Grand Prize for Best Documentary at the 2003 San Francisco International Film Festival. The DVD includes a gallery of images so you can see again the sculptures that caught your eye; and a filmography of German director, cinematographer, and editor Thomas Riedelsheimer; and a brief biography of Andy Goldsworthy which lists his books. This extraordinary documentary will enchant you in many ways with its startling images, its exotic music by Fred Frith, and its ability to stimulate your inner artist, who will likely begin dreaming up creative projects to do with all the materials at hand around your own place.

And, as if that were not enough, the DVD also includes seven short films. Storm King Wall is a 20-minute look at that impressive work. Autumn Works, also shot at Storm King, shows various pieces, including a circle with a black center surrounded by yellow and red leaves. In Garlic Leaves, filmed in Scotland, the artist is seen drawing with a thorn on garlic leaves. He's perched on a rock overlooking the river, and as the camera pulls back, we see that his line of leaves is aligned with the path of the river and the drawings recreate its flow. Ice Arch shows him building an arch out of sheets of ice in Nova Scotia; Goldsworthy pays tribute to the "elusive energy" of the cold, which comes and goes. In Black Stone, filmed during the summer in Scotland, he talks about being drawn to work with a particular stone in the field, noting that these elements all have a sacred quality to them. In Leaf Works, he explains how he learns from dialogue with trees and allows forms to grow out of the shape of his materials. The result in this instance is a spiral made of leaves, which he places on a tree branch. The Old Studio, shot in his home village in Scotland, shows a small interior space completely filled with stone arches.

D. H. Lawrence said wonder was the sixth sense and called it "the natural religious sense." You cannot watch this documentary without being astonished again and again. Goldsworthy opens our eyes and all of our senses to the beauty and the multiple enchantments of the natural world that we so often take for granted. He is also a spiritual teacher of play, demonstrating a child-like capacity for curiosity. He seems to enjoy kneeling down in the mud or creating something in the face of a cold stiff wind. He doesn't worry about who will see his art or whether it will stand the test of time. He accepts failure as part of the learning process and moves on to new challenges.

Goldsworthy is also a practitioner of what Albert Schweitzer called "reverence for life." He salutes the individuality of stones and muses over the memories they carry of the things they have seen and the changes they have experienced. He relishes the particularity of place and the deep resonances that a certain milieu can have with our souls. And last but not least, Goldsworthy is a connoisseur of mystery. He is not frightened of death or the destruction of things. He accepts that everything is ephemeral and subject to the ravages of time. Day by day, he plunges into new marvels and stays with the present moment which is unrepeatable and precious. Just like this extraordinary documentary.