World Famous Comics: Andy Goldsworthy's Rivers & Tides
Andy Goldsworthy's Rivers & Tides
Starring: Andy Goldsworthy Directed By: Thomas Riedelsheimer Average Rating: Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1 Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated) Binding: DVD Format: Color, DVD-Video, NTSC Label: NEW VIDEO GROUP Number of Items: 1 Region Code: 1 Release Date: September 28, 2004 Running Time: 90 minutes Theatrical Release Date: 2001
Amazon.com: Andy Goldsworthy's Rivers and Tides is a truly beautiful, Scottish-German 2001 documentary about artist Goldsworthy, a Scotsman whose medium is nature itself and whose preferred studio is the outdoors, particularly where water forever flows, rises, and/or retreats. The soft-spoken, secluded Goldsworthy is seen hard at work making ephemeral sculptures out of bits of ice in the trees, or building tall, mysterious cones from loose rock, which stand like spiritual sentinels in forests and on shorelines, overgrown by plants or swallowed daily by high tides. Filmmaker-cinematographer Thomas Reidelsheimer goes to great and sometimes inexplicable lengths to make visual corollaries to Goldsworthy's ideas about underappreciated relationships between light, color, movement, balance, and fluidity of form in the real world, making Rivers and Tides a lively and always surprising cinematic gallery. Some of Goldsworthy's most miraculous natural installations--stone walls that snake through hundreds of feet of forest and stream, for instance--show up in the last half-hour. --Tom Keogh
Description: Wildly praised by the nation's top critics, the smash theatrical hit RIVERS AND TIDES is a mesmerizing, poetic and curiously contemplative portrait of revered Scottish sculptor Andy Goldsworthy, whose long-winding rock walls, icicle assemblages and other intricate, druidic masterpieces are made entirely of materials found in the wild. Gorgeously shot and edited by director Thomas Riedelsheimer, RIVERS AND TIDES is an intoxicating study of the fragile relationship between man, art and nature.
The Art of the Ephemeral Andy Goldsworthy creates art that a 5-year old can understand, stacking rocks, arranging leaves, piling sticks, drawing in the snow. His "work" (as he keeps calling it) is simple in concept, but maybe not so simple to execute.
And that is both the strength of it, and its downfall. The simplicity is unpretentious and pure in a way that art very rarely is, these days. At the same time it is fun and silly and unsophisticated in a way that makes Andy's serious pronouncements about "his work" and "my art" sound like a 5-year old kid who never got his parents' approval. The fact that he spends so much energy building contructs of such fragile beauty, which are almost always blown away by the wind or tides until nothing remains -- and the fact that he gets so agitated when the inevitable collapse occurs -- make you wonder after his sanity. Why does he torture himself so, what drives him to such Promethean frustration?
The film, by Thomas Reidelsheimer, deserves five stars for the languid portrait it paints of the hunger artist. Like his following film Touch The Sound, it is a masterful exploration of a driven personality, one which manages to both illuminate -- and puzzle over -- the subject artist. Both films also benefit from stunning soundtracks by Fred Frith.
Rivers and Tides-an artist at work Andy Goldsworthy is an amazing artist and seeing him in action is incredible. He builds sculptures out of natural materials (stones, leaves, ice) and then waits for nature to do her part in the natural destruction of them. His books have pictures of both the finished product and sometimes the sequence either leading up to or after the sculpture is complete, but to see the painstaking process of building (not always successfully) is very impressive. Nice narration too.
great stuff I enjoyed this video very much and thought that it was a beautiful piece of work. For anyone that it interested in seeing the earth and its makeup in a different light, this is something you might be interested in.
Goldsworthy DVD is a little slow moving I bought this for my high school art class. They were fascinated for the first 20 minutes. After that they lost interest. I thought Goldsworthy was much more exciting than this.
Visual Wonder! Andy Goldsworthy is an artist to the core of his being, nature is his bloodstream, and he is keenly attuned to its mysteries and rhythms. If you want to experience sculpture as a living breathing integral part of our environment, then treat yourself to the transitory poetry Andy creates so hypnotically.
Anything Goes Trivia
Trevor
Megaton Man
