All the way back in 2001, director Thomas Riedelsheimer released Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy. The documentary followed the titular UK artist as he used the natural world as his playground, letting long chains of leaves flow down a stream or building and rebuilding egg-shaped piles of rocks until they could stand on their own. Riedelsheimer’s latest follow-up, Leaning into the Wind: Andy Goldsworthy, treads much of the same ground, but the environment and mankind’s relationship to it has changed a lot since 2001.
For those unfamiliar with Goldsworthy’s art, the only way to describe it is that he uses nature as both canvas and paint brush. While the previous film focused largely on works created in water-logged environments, Leaning into the Wind is more free ranging. He goes from rivers to hill tops to man-made buildings he fills with mud. It’s hard to find common ground in such a wide range of work, but perhaps the thing that most ties them together is their ephemerality.
Early in the film, Goldsworthy talks about how he waits all year for the leaves on the trees on his land to turn a certain shade of yellow. While most years he can use them in his art, sometimes, a hard rain or an early frost takes them away before he can use them. And while he’s disappointed, he also understands that nature is unpredictable and he can only appreciate what it gives him.
We frequently see him take advantage of nature’s rare gifts throughout the film. Sometimes it’s in the way he uses wet leaves to cover a fallen tree or the way he constantly lays down on the dry sidewalk as it starts to rain and only gets up when a dry outline of his body remains. There’s something beautiful about it, but there’s also something reminiscent of the way a child plays. It’s easy to imagine a little boy crashing through a hedgerow the way he does or climbing a tree just to shake the pollen out of it.
However, in those moments, there is something almost vulgar in the way he insists on marking his presence in natural spaces. Like the odd, ovoid shapes he carves out of stone and leaves in the middle of a forest or atop a rock-covered hill. They look like some leftover relic from an extraterrestrial species left behind thousands of years ago. One could read it as having a special relationship ship with nature, but there’s an arrogance to the way he plods his way through the world and shapes it to his vision. Perhaps the best example is the endless way he crawls through a series of short, bare trees. As he painstakingly moves through the tangle, he takes no notice of how many of the dark branches he snaps along the way—he’s too focused on making his artistic statement.
A few broken branches in the British countryside may not matter in the grand scheme of things, but in a world where humans colonize more and more land and climate change irrevocably changes entire ecosystems, it’s difficult not to resent the ownership Goldsworthy so clearly takes over every natural space he can find. Maybe we wouldn’t have to be reminded of nature’s beauty if more of us just left it the hell alone.
Rating: 7/10
