This documentary on the temporary art work Andy Goldsworthy is like watching one of the rivers he builds near, sometimes it enthralls you and other times it bores you depending on your mood. I've tried this film two or three times now and I can not get into it. While I find the film extremely beautiful and well made, its wandering nature dulls my senses to the point of sleep and I find that just about the time we go home with him I turn off the DVD and swear I'll pick it up again later, though I never do. The problem for me is that for a good portion of the first part of the film, the part I've watched repeatedly, we don't really get to see anything other than Andy creating. This is all well and good, but it doesn't explain why anyone would commission this guy to go onto the shores of Nova Scotia and build things no one will ever see since time and tide will destroy them. I know the answers come later and I know that much of what comes later is quite beautiful, having jumped ahead, but the pacing seems completely off and twenty minutes in I'm ready for a nap. I'm probably no judge of this, but I think its worth a try, even if I'm not sure that I really have gotten anything out of this film. Ah well, maybe next time.

Andy Goldsworthy is a taoist master of the first order, expressing the Way through his sublime ephemeral art. Indeed, time and change is what his work is fundamentally about. I bought his first book several years ago and my family has marveled at it many times. So it was a treat to get to know the artist personally through this film, he is just as patient and gentle as you would expect, and has some wonderful things to say about the natural world, the deepest of which are expressed in his occasional inability to say it in words at all. He is like most children who play in the great outdoors alone (if they do anymore),creating things from sticks and sand and mud and snow before they outgrow it. Mr. Goldsworthy was given the gift and the mission to extend that sort of play to create profound visions of nature, and to open our often weary eyes to it in brilliant new ways. And always with the utmost respect, gratitude and humor of a wandering, and wondering monk.

On one level, this film can bring out the child in us that just wants to build sandcastles and throw stuff in the air just for the sake of seeing it fall down again. On a deeper level though, it explores a profound desire to reconnect with the land. I thoroughly empathized with the artist when he said, "when I'm not out here (alone) for any length of time, I feel unrooted."

I considered Andy Goldsworthy one of the great contemporary artists. I'm familiar with his works mainly through his coffee-table books and a couple art gallery installations. But to see his work in motion, captured perfectly through Riedelsheimer's lens, was a revelation. Unfrozen in time, Goldsworthy's creations come alive, swirling, flying, dissolving, crumbling, crashing.

And that's precisely what he's all about: Time. The process of creation and destruction. Of emergence and disappearing. Of coming out of the Void and becoming the Universe, and back again. There's a shamanic quality about him, verging on madness. You get the feeling, watching him at work, that his art is a lifeforce for him, that if he didn't do it, he would whither and perish.

Luckily for us, Goldsworthy is able to share his vision through the communication medium of photography. Otherwise, with the exception of a few cairns and walls, they would only exist for one person.