Last week, MoMA presented the premier of Sharon Lockhart’s new film Double Tide (2009), a piece of endurance cinema meditating on labor, pace, and time. The 99-minute film, composed slowly of two long takes, is an intentional and contemplative portrait of a woman digging clams in Maine ocean mudflats. The film was made during a period in which a low tide occurs twice in daylight hours—once at dusk and once at dawn, and each half of the film focuses solely on the act of quiet clam digging at each of these times of day. Lockhart’s film is beautiful in its quiet and meditative depiction of backbreaking work. The sublime landscape contradicts the difficult labor of the clam digger who endlessly bends down and explores the mud with tired hands.
Double Tide also exists as a double-screen gallery installation, much like Lockhart’s previous effort Lunch Break (2008), a film which explored shipyard workers at their resting hour. Lockhart repeatedly returns to the rituals of labor and the way work framed by time. In Double Tide time is physically marked—both by the rising or setting sun, as well as by the physical marks made upon the mudflat by the clam digger as she searches for her catch.
The film opens with an uncomfortable spread of vast grayness. The empty expanse fades into mist and fog, and the landscape seems unpopulated, cold, even scary at first. The sea, sky, and land are all gray and white, though they come to be colored by the rising sun. Soon, a woman walks into the frame, bringing with her a clamming basket and the sole source of the film’s action. Throughout the next hour and a half, we watch the woman walk in circles across the mud, slowly edging toward the water’s edge and into the background. As soon as she’s nearly indecipherable from the edge of the sea and sky, she slowly begins to return to the foreground, lugging a heavy basket of catch behind her. The second half of the film is colored in reverse: instead of the sun rising and eliminating the gray mist, we watch the gorgeous warm colors of dusk become swallowed by dark night.
Double Tide is an endurance test: there is no character development, no story, music, or plot. All we see is physical labor colored by the changing light of day. The soundtrack is composed solely of the sound of hands clipping in and out of dense mud. If you are satiated by natural beauty and meditative acts of cinema, this is a monumental experience. But if you are coming to this film for escapism, look away: in unmitigated silence and still life, it’s impossible to not drift away from the purest state of observation.
