You are cordially invited to the film screening and talk organized by the Department of American Culture and Literature.
Ilısa Barbash, is Curator of Visual Anthropology at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology where she makes films, and writes books and curates exhibitions about photography. She made the films In and Out of Africa (1992), about authenticity and taste in the transnational trade in African art, and Sweetgrass (2009) about an unsentimental elegy at once to the American West and to the 10,000 years of uneasy accommodation between post-Paleolithic humans and animals, (with Lucien Castaing-Taylor.) Sweetgrass premiered at the Berlinale and NYFF, and was a best documentary nominee for two Independent Spirit, Gotham, IDA and two Cinema Eye Awards. Together they co-wrote Cross-cultural Filmmaking: A Handbook for Making Documentary and Ethnographic Films and Video, and co-edited The Cinema of Robert Gardner. Barbash’s book, Where the Roads All End: Photography and Anthropology in the Kalahari (2016) was awarded the Society for Visual Anthropology prize for best book about anthropology and photography. Barbash co-edited with Molly Rogers and Deborah Willis, To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Life of the Zealy Daguerreotypes, which received the Rencontres D’Arles best historical photography book in 2021.
Film Screening:
On March 19, Tuesday, Sweetgrass (2009) by Ilisa Barbash, Lucien Castaing-Taylor will be screened in FB-309 at 13:30 (IST).
Webinar 18:00 IST
This is an online seminar. To obtain event details please send a message to department.
Synopsis
An unsentimental elegy to the American West, Sweetgrass follows the last modern-day cowboys to lead their flocks of sheep up into Montana’s breathtaking and often dangerous Absaroka-Beartooth mountains for summer pasture. This astonishingly beautiful yet unsparing film reveals a world in which nature and culture, animals and humans, vulnerability and violence are all intimately meshed.