Film symbiosis: Embodied spectatorship and sensory (auto)ethnography in Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash’s Sweetgrass

Abstract

This article explores the 2009 observational-ethnographic documentary film Sweetgrass by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash. Focusing on visual cues within the observational form (a film that documents the herding of sheep across the Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains for the last time), the article draws on ethnographic and autoethnographic strains to explore the relationship between the embodied spectator and on-screen animal. Sweetgrass , in addition to several moving image works, is explored as sensory ethnography that incorporates a form of spectator address based on the idea of symbiosis. The article situates ‘the nonhuman stare’ as fundamental to this, drawing on the film phenomenology of Vivian Sobchak to consolidate this view. Sweetgrass , the article maintains, aestheticizes the non-human for specific reasons. It adds an ethical purpose to the observational documentation of herding sheep across the mountains – a salvage operation of type – and a sensory experience of ‘living with’ associated with the farming culture represented on-screen. In addition to exploring the film as a sensory object in this way, the article devises a methodology bringing autoethnographic research concerning symbiotic human–non-human animal relationships, in line with explorations of the embodied film spectator.