In "Rivers and Tides," Everything Is Just So Beautiful

Mr. Piccolo spoke to Marc Borbely, 536 13th St. NE, and David Kinsey, 524 13th St. NE Apt. A, yesterday. Mr. Piccolo is studying at the Corcoran College of Art and Design.

He described the film "Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working With Time." The film, which is unrated and is 100 minutes long, is playing at Bethesda Row Cinema, 7235 Woodmont Avenue, Bethesda, 301-652-7273. The movie theater lists showtimes for today through Thursday: afternoons and evenings at 2:30, 4:40, 7 and 9:20.

The movie is "Rivers and Tides." It's a documentary about an artist / sculptor, Andy Goldsworthy, who works with the concept of time.

He lives in Scotland and he works outdoors, and he sculpts with leaves and things like that.

For one of his art pieces, he made a chain out of leaves and stuck it in a little whirlpool. The leaves started getting sucked out of the whirlpool and traveled down the stream.

It's a movie about the beauty of nature, and how beauty is passing, and how things are very temporal and don't last forever.

It shows that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that it really takes someone that's really intact with themselves to be able to see beauty in nature and create beautiful things out of nature, and work with nature. It shows how he creates things that are from nature that he gives back to nature.

It's about mother earth reclaiming the work, and it seems to me very much almost like a religion-type thing, where he's paying tribute to Mother Nature by creating these works of art and allowing her to reclaim them.

In one of his works, where he made a large egg-shaped sculpture out of thin pieces of slate. [He made it] where the water would actually cover the whole piece at high tide.

He finished sculpting the whole thing by the time the tide came in, and luckily we have the video and the documentary to witness it, because no one else does, but the tide comes in slowly, and walks over it, and then the sculpture disappears, but it's just the knowledge that you know that it's there, and there's something beautiful that's under the ocean even though you can't see it , at high tide — it's that feeling inside you that it's there, and then they have the video of the tide rolling back out and showing that it's still there, intact.

He did this other really cool thing where there's this river in Scotland. And there's this iron deposit in the actual stream, and it's like bright red, like rust, like really bright red stone. So he finds it under all these rocks — and you'd never see that it was there, so he grinds up all these little stones into a powder mix, like a big ball, and it's like a big red dye, and he just throws it into the river, so then when it hits the river, it makes this big splash and it's just this big splash, it's like blood red. It's the most beautiful-looking thing. And then you watch it roll down the stream. Then he does another scene with the same stuff, where he throws it up into the air, and a big red cloud wafts away.

You liked it?

Oh, it was the most amazing movie I've ever scene. I recommend everyone going to see it.

Why did you go see it?

It was required of me to go see it, for school.

It was an art history thing. We're working with landscapers of the early American century. And we had to go see it to see what the modern idea of landscape was, and how he was treating landscape the same way that someone like Thomas Cole or Albert Bierstadt was treating the landscape.

They were viewing the landscape as a pastoral scene that was God-given and divine and beautiful — and they just wanted to record the divinity of it, and that's kind of what he's doing, too — paying homage to Mother Nature.

If you're not like a total art person, do you think you would still like it?

You'd still be able to appreciate what he's doing. Everything in it is just so beautiful.

You might have to have some type of artist's perspective on it — it's a movie that makes you think, so if you want to go and be entertained, I wouldn't recommend going to see it.

But if you want to go and you want to think, and you want to think about life, and think about your relationship to Mother Nature — especially with all the things that are going on today with the environment, it's something that's worth going to see.

It really makes you appreciate nature and, being that we live in a city and we don't really get enough of it, it really makes you want to go out into Virginia or the Shenandoahs or something like that and just kind of be with nature. §