Before and during the opening credits, Leaning Into the Wind shows us something of the intuitive, spontaneous working method of British artist and environmentalist Andy Goldsworthy. As he explores an old adobe hut in Brazil, you can see his mind working. His eyes light upon a shaft of sunlight through a hole in the wall and he begins an impromptu act, creating an ephemeral, momentary performance involving only beams of light, his body, and handfuls of dust from the earthen floor. The next project we see, outside of San Francisco, is a much more elaborate construct of cut logs and tree limbs snaking through a forest. But it’s prone to the elements and, like most of Goldsworthy’s art, not built to last.
Leaning Into the Wind is director Thomas Riedelsheimer’s follow-up to his previous documentary on Goldsworthy, Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time. Like the previous film, it is a portrait in time, offering the viewer a chance to experience many short-lived endeavors created in various locations, including Gabon, France, and his home country of Scotland.
Had it not been for Riedelsheimer’s access to Goldsworthy, we would never get to see many of these fleeting works of art at all. “There are a lot of contradictions in what I make, in a sense,” Goldsworthy states at one point in the film. He’s averse to describing himself as an artist who works with nature, because nature is something that one can’t really escape. “His whole idea about nature is very much shaped by his experience with farmers, farming, people working with the land,” Riedelsheimer said in an interview. “I think he does not like this idea of nature being a place where you go to on weekends; you have your time in the city and do your work there and then relax in nature and find it a beautiful place. He always tries to emphasize the idea that nature is brutal — that things happen like the trees that fall in the river or are overgrown, and the cycles of life that happen. In that respect, I think he came to see nature as being everywhere, even in a city. But in a city it’s more sealed — it’s a little bit below the tar and concrete, but it’s still nature, of course.”
Riedelsheimer didn’t want to return to Goldsworthy’s art in quite the same vein as he did in his first film. Although there are many analogous moments of the artist working in his element, the director broadened the subject matter to include more of the working methods and planning that goes into Goldsworthy’s large-scale projects. The intent, partly, was to address a concern of Goldsworthy’s. “It was kind of a weird thing,” Riedelsheimer said. “He had some issues with the first film: too much emphasizing the idea of a romantic nature, that he’s kind of a nature guy, just going out in the woods.” Some of Goldsworthy’s projects take a lot of back-breaking work — cutting stone, working with chainsaws, lifting, and hauling objects into place — and must be well thought-out beforehand.
A period of about 10 years passed between the first film and the meeting that would culminate with the artist and director collaborating on Leaning Into the Wind. “As you might expect, he’s not so much a person that socializes a lot. So he’s very much on his own — with family — but not someone you would call now and then and just have a chat with. For another project, I went to Scotland and took the chance to call him. He was around and we met. It was a strange but also touching experience. It felt like we just said goodbye the other day, almost as though no time had passed in between. We immediately got on the same wavelength. He talked about his projects, and I immediately understood that I am not finished with this person. It’s just too interesting, what he does. Later on, he confessed that he felt the same thing, that he would love to do another project. And we had a great time for the four years we’ve been working on it.”
Goldsworthy works almost exclusively with organic materials. While layering a path of cut stones with golden leaves, for instance, he uses no adhesive, but fashions his colorful, alluring designs with what’s on hand. Whether crawling slowly along the upper branches of an orchard, laying down in the rain to create a rain shadow, its form delineated by the contrast of wet and dry land, or literally leaning into the wind, buffeted on a cliffside as though in suspended animation, he seems engaged not just in creating art but in acts of performance. One suspects he does such things even if no one is looking, no camera recording his movements. He seems attuned to his surroundings, noticing things that most of us take for granted. It’s practically a dance, or a form of play.
“That’s totally true,” said Riedelsheimer, “but I think a child would not use the term ‘play,’ because you use that term when you’re an adult and you compare what you do. For a child, I think, it’s just coloring the world, and this is what he does. He relates to that, but he does not like the term ‘play,’ because we always use it to describe something useless, in a way. He’s discovering the world with everything he does. And you’re right, even if he does not have a camera at hand, he would still lay down in the rain and do the rain shadows. It’s not for the film or for the photograph that he’s doing that. He’s documenting it because he’s making a living out of it, but he does it for himself.”
Capturing such moments on film meant that Riedelsheimer, who is also the film’s cinematographer, had to be ready to work instinctively and to watch for moments when a sudden interest would take hold of his subject. “It helped that we did Rivers and Tides together, because in that film I learned how to work with him,” he said. “Because he’s so much tuned into nature and it’s clear that he cannot control what happens, he works very intuitively most of the time. Of course, he has these big projects that need planning and all kinds of that stuff. But with most of his work, he’s going somewhere and you need to be ready wherever he is. This is one of the things he likes in working with me. I adapted to this way of working. We have a very small crew. I have only a sound person with me, and sometimes a camera assistant. And sometimes the camera assistant is doing sound as well. Sometimes we are two; sometimes we are three. So it’s a very small group and we use very light equipment. He hates anything that is bulky and needs a lot of planning, and so do I.”
In Leaning Into the Wind, Riedelsheimer eschews exposition, background, and biographical information unless it happens to come up in conversation. The emphasis is on Goldsworthy being himself. “As with the first film, I’m never interested in a biopic. I’m not so much interested in where did he go to school, things like that. I’m interested in the way someone uses art to understand about our life. It’s about the work itself, but it’s more the person behind it — what drives him, what makes him tick in this respect. So I was never interested in a complete biography of Andy Goldsworthy, but to try to feel and understand how his brain works. He’s so aware of what’s around him. He might be working with leaves or with sticks or something and he realizes how the weather is changing, how the winds are changing, the direction of the sunlight. He’s a great teacher in that respect.”
While the audience gets some idea of how Goldsworthy approaches whatever environment he’s in, and gets treated to rare creative acts that could never be duplicated in exactly the same way (watch for the scene when he climbs into the trees in France and shakes out the pollen), there’s another layer between what he does and how it’s presented on film, and that’s the aesthetic of the filmmaker. “The things you see in the film are already different than they are as they happen because it’s filtered through my eye, if you wish,” Riedelsheimer said. “I always say you can never record realities. The moment you record something, you bring in your own life; so that’s another level of reality that you’re giving to the audience. But that’s a good thing. I kind of like that. Then comes the audience, and everyone goes to the cinema with their own feelings, with their own history, and everything they bear in their minds. Then they see these images and relate to them and make new stories out of them.” ◀
