What documentary film can do: Sweetgrass

Inspired by NYT article yesterday watched the very unusual 2009 (?) documentary "Sweetgrass" - about as pure a documentary as you'll ever see, and like nothing else you've ever seen most likely. The director - (looking it up) : Lucien Castaing-Taylor, and she calls herself the "recorder," not the director - builds this great film from footage shot over two years with a group of sheep farmers in Montana - on the surface, not an immediately appealing topic to most people, but amazing what C-T gets out of this: it's a sorrowful elegy to a whole way of life and one of the finest examples I've ever seen of a study of the interaction between people and nature. Very unusual in that the people - grizzled cowboys, mostly - are secondary to the livestock, the thousands of sheep, and the herding dogs. The film has no script whatsoever, no interview, and, except for the opening and closing moments, no title screens - we just observe, through the camera, a way of life: birth and nurturing of lambs, shearing, herding, and then moving the herd up a rocky, difficult trail to the summer grazing pasture. Who the people (cowboys) are, what they think, what brought them to this life, where they're heading: we know nothing more about them than we know about any one of the sheep, really. This film is in the tradition that goes back to Vertov's I Am A Camera (I think the nyt mentioned this as well), but with today's portable equipment documentarians can do so much more. C-T captures some astonishing moments, both emotionally and visually: a younger cowboy breaking down in tears during cell-phone call to his mother, confusion when a bear or wolverine attacks some sheep in the middle of the night, the rough hands of a sheep farmer assisting with the birth of a lamb. The movie gives us no context - we (or at least I) don't know if ultimately these sheep are bound for slaughter, or if they're raised for wool only - but it's a great demonstration of the power of film: putting us right into a life, immersing us in a another, largely inaccessible world, and let us see and hear it with our own eyes and ears - the camera, the filmmaker - are just invisible, a clear lens through which we peer.