Spiral Jetty

Dir. Robert Smithson, 32 min., U.S.A., 1970
Friday 11, 9:00 PM · Monday 14, 4:00 PM.

This film, made by the artist, Robert Smithson is a poetic and process minded film depicting a “portrait” of his renowned earth work–SPIRAL JETTY–as it juts into the shallows off the shore of Utah’s Great Salt Lake. A voice-over by Smithson reveals the evolution of his monumental work. “This site was a rotary that enclosed itself in an immense roundness. From that gyrating space emerged the possibility of the Spiral Jetty. No ideas, no concepts, no systems, no structures, no abstractions could hold themselves together in the actuality of that evidence. My dialectics of site and non-site whirled into an indeterminate state, where solid and liquid lost themselves in each other. It was as if the lake became the edge of the sun, a boiling curve, an explosion rising into a fiery prominence. Matter collapsing into the lake mirrored in the shape of a spiral. No sense wondering about classifications and categories, there were none.”
–Smithson, from his article, “Spiral Jetty,” 1970

Distributor: Department of Film of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, film and video rented or bought. Telephone number (212) 708-9530
Contact: www.robertsmithson.com/films/films.htm