Cast

Jen Casad

Film description

Twice a day at low tide, Jen Casad hits Maine’s shoreline to pick oysters. Each 45-minute session involves monotonous physical labor, knee-deep in mud, moving a few steps at a time, bending over, picking an oyster, throwing it in the basket, moving on, and starting all over again. Sharon Lockhart’s fixed camera records the lonely female figure moving in space betwixt the sea and land. There is no voiceover, no music, just the sound of pulling oysters from the water, hum of insects, splashes, and distant chirping of birds. Suddenly, there is a cut, black screen, and the afternoon version of the 45-minute labor begins. Images are completely different now, with warmer colors, clearer air, and the oyster picker seems bigger against a smaller world.

Lockhart makes films, but is also a photographer – she skillfully builds dramatic tension by setting moving images against stills. Double Tide is her fourth film about work (after No, Exit, and Lunch Break screened at ENH in 2009). The dialectics of labor and nature, light and space, lack of dialogues with delicate natural sounds recalls the 19^th century painting of Realists such as Millet or Courbet, where the sensual presence of people in space is equally important to the work they are performing.

Ewa Szabłowska