![]() At times one thinks of Titian’s great paintings of the subject, except the hunters here are all in technical wear, survivalist designer-camo, right down to the triggers of their guns and the snoods about their necks. A retelling of Ovid’s mythological tale of Diana and Actaeon, with added complications, Redoubt, like all Barney’s films, is a complicated affair. There is no dialogue, and a lot going on that comes without explanation. ![]() Blotches bloom on the plates, as curdled as a river’s eddy of mud and snowmelt water, or the slush of animal blood seeping into the snow. Arcs and vectors smear the copper, the equivalent of wind, or animal cries, distant gunfire or the turn of the stars. The rough cross-hatchings of branches and tree trunks, the stark scratchy tangles of underbrush, the night spangled with stars and silhouetted trees. Pitted, foul-bitten rocks emerge from whiteness. The landscape itself looks like an etching. The moon’s phases and the whirling constellations have as much to do with astrology as astronomy, and the relationships of ranger and hunters to the wildlife have an animist streak. All this is alchemy as much as science or art. She has her own stuff to do too, constructing what looks like an orrery or astrolabe from copper swarf and cardboard. Performing all sorts of technical business, she lowers his engraved plates into vats of chemicals, constantly checking the bubblings and the fumes, adding patina and passing an electrical current through the liquid to electroplate his images, affecting all kinds of transformations. Everyone and everything, both human and animal, does a great deal of watching, waiting and tracking.īack at the trailer, the engraver reworks his copper plates, drawing and scraping at the metal with his burin, spotting the plate with acid, then passing the heavy plates to the electroplater. A custodian of the wild, he is also watched, pursued, and shot at by Diana, played by NRA champion sharpshooter Anette Wachter, and her two female companions, a Watching Virgin and a Tracking Virgin. Lost in his observations, and recording what he sees on cumbersome copper plates, he’s a plein-air artist in the snowy landscape. ![]() In the film, Barney plays The Engraver, a grizzled ranger for the Forestry Department, staying in the trailer workshop and home of his collaborator, electroplater KJ Holmes, in the Sawtooth Mountains in the Idaho Rockies. ![]()
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