Hen­ry Glassie: Field Work

Shiv­ers are rou­tine­ly sent down the spine while watch­ing Pat Collins’ fas­ci­nat­ing, low-tem­po pro­file of Hen­ry Glassie, an itin­er­ant ethno­g­ra­ph­er who trav­els the world look­ing at how peo­ple live. He has par­layed his con­sid­er­able knowl­edge base into a num­ber of books, lec­tures and curat­ed exhibits over the past 50 years, and this film adopts Glassie’s own objec­tive­ly obser­va­tion­al mode and watch­es the man while he watches.

With his white, wispy facial hair and poet­i­cal­ly artic­u­late man­ner of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, he wears his intel­lect light­ly, com­ing across as a mix­ture of Mark Twain and some­one who lives alone in a wood­land shack and sus­tains him­self off of the local fau­na. We begin by exam­in­ing the fine hand­i­work of a Brazil­ian sculp­tor as he pro­duces a stat­uette of a woman in a flow­ing, ruf­fled dress. Collins’ cam­era lingers on the way that this man cre­ates every indi­vid­ual ruf­fle, and then painstak­ing­ly attach­es it to the main figure.

There is at once a deeply relax­ing qual­i­ty to watch­ing such del­i­cate crafts­man­ship in action, but also a ten­sion too, as it’s clear that the stakes are high and any small slip-up could set the artist back days if not weeks. Glassie is fas­ci­nat­ed by the process, but also the tra­di­tion of that process, and his job is to doc­u­ment not just how these items are made, but also why they’re made, and whether there’s a chance they might not be made in the near future should a fam­i­ly blood­line die out.

Aside from a more tra­di­tion­al­ly fly-on-the-wall seg­ment about a Turk­ish ceram­ic artist and the won­der­ful dec­o­ra­tive bowls he pro­duced by hand, the major­i­ty of the film is just shots of pot­ters pot­ting, sculp­tors sculpt­ing and arti­sans being arti­sans. One woman whips up a vase on her potter’s wheel like it’s no big thing. Anoth­er guy makes a giant pot that he could fit inside of. All this art and skill is being pre­served on film, while Glassie sends us off with his own mov­ing and invig­o­rat­ing def­i­n­i­tion of art’s val­ue and usage in the world.

It’s a dis­cur­sive and slight­ly mis­shapen film, but it’s also easy to see why Glassie com­mands such respect with­in the ethnog­ra­phy com­mu­ni­ty – he gath­ers up these tiny frag­ments of process, but is able to see and vivid­ly describe the big­ger edi­fice from which they came.

Hen­ry Glassie: Field Work is released 16 April via New Wave Films.