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Mr. Coperthwaite: A Life in the Maine Woods

Produced by: Anna Grimshaw

237 min. Color. 2014.

Captioned: Yes

Catalog #: 9902

Price: $600.00

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Product Description

In 1960, Bill Coperthwaite bought 300 acres of forest wilderness in Machiasport, Maine. Influenced by the poetry of Emily Dickinson and by the back-to-the-land movement of Scott and Helen Nearing, he was committed to crafting what he called “a handmade life.” For more than 50 years until his death in 2013, Bill Coperthwaite lived and worked in the forest. He was a builder of yurts, and a maker of spoons, bowls, and chairs.

An eloquent and thought-provoking meditation on time and process, this “intense, revelatory” four-part series presents an unforgettable portrait of a remarkable life – one shaped by nature, work, poetry, and the rhythm of changing seasons. Coperthwaite emerges as a Thoreau-like figure for our time. He reminds us of the central, but often overlooked, place of nature in American life.

The four films chart Coperthwaite’s life as it unfolds over the course of a year. They explore the changing character of work through the seasons and the distinctive temporality of specific tasks. Spring in Dickinson’s Reach is the longest film and the starting point of the series. It establishes, literally and metaphorically, the scope of Bill Coperthwaite’s world. In contrast, A Summer Task is tightly focused and follows a single activity in painstaking detail. Autumn’s Work records the passage of time through a change in the seasons as Bill makes preparations for winter. Winter Days draws the viewer into the quiet space and routine of the year’s end.

At the heart of the series is Bill Coperthwaite himself. The films offer a biography of sorts – not in the conventional way of a recounting of a life but by asking us to attend closely to its living. Who is Bill Coperthwaite? How do we understand his life? What does it mean to dwell in nature?

Mr. Coperthwaite: A Life in the Maine Woods is filmed in what is called an “observational” style. Shooting with a handheld camera, noted ethnographic filmmaker Anna Grimshaw eschews the usual documentary conventions of interview or narration. Instead she seeks to hew close to the rhythm and texture of Bill Coperthwaite’s world, utilizing a “handmade” approach that mirrors the philosophy and practice of her subject’s life in the woods.

Each of the four films in the series stands alone and may be purchased separately. However, taken together, the four films are much more than the sum of their parts. In the words of one reviewer, Mr. Coperthwaite: A Life in the Maine Woods is an “ethnographic novel composed from four seasons. It raises crucial questions that go to the heart of contemporary society – questions about time, nature, aging, place, work, and solitude.”

The series will provoke thought and discussion in a wide range of courses in American studies, cultural anthropology, sociology, environmental studies, and philosophy. It was produced by Anna Grimshaw, Professor in the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts, Emory University.

Please use this page to order if you wish to purchase the entire series (four films) at the discounted price of $600, plus shipping. This series price represents a discount of 33% off the prices of the individual titles. However, if you wish to purchase individual titles from the series you may do so on this web site. Here are the links to the individual titles:

Spring in Dickinson’s Reach
A Summer Task
Autumn’s Work
Winter Days

Reviews

“In these four films Anna Grimshaw has produced a contemporary cinematic Walden – an intense, revelatory portrait of one man, celebrating a life of work, independence, and craftsmanship. Whereas Thoreau´s venture into solitude and self-sufficiency was a relatively short-term experiment, Mr. Coperthwaite has made his stay in the Maine woods a life-long vocation. What the two figures share is an aesthetic appreciation for nature and the perfection and utility of handmade objects. Filmed over the four seasons, these films demonstrate the filmmaker´s deep commitment to the power of visual media to convey not only the surfaces of life but the inner landscape of the human consciousness. They will provoke thought and discussion in a variety of courses in literature, philosophy, anthropology, material culture, and studies of the American psyche.” – David MacDougall, Filmmaker and Research Professor, Research School of Humanities and the Arts, Australian National University

“Anna Grimshaw´s four films are both an essay on labor and a labor of love. As her hand-held camera steadfastly documents Bill Coperthwaite´s seasonal tasks – making a metal spatula, sawing a fallen birch tree, building a wheelbarrow, whittling a spoon, honing a knife, using a spokeshave to make a handle – we, the viewers, are slowed down and made conscious of the rhythms and rounds once typical of rural life in America. Watching Coperthwaite at work in the woods or in his house, we glimpse not only what he means when he speaks of a ´handmade life´ but what it might mean for us to follow his example, exercising care, improvising with whatever comes to hand rather than wishing we could only have more, paring our lives down to the bare essentials, and learning the virtues of craft, self-sufficiency and patience in whatever our minds and hands move us to make or do.” – Michael Jackson, Visiting Professor of World Religions, Harvard University

“This series captures, in a way that is enormously difficult to convey, the deep complexities that lie beneath a life of seeming simplicity. Woven into this intimate portrayal of the life of homesteader and craftsman William Coperthwaite are insights into living in synchronicity with the rhythms of the seasons, finding an existence in harmony with the earth, and creating a philosophy of experience grounded in principles but always unfolding. With great care and sensitivity, the film lifts the veil from Coperthwaite´s philosophical commitment to non-violence to reveal what it means to practice a life of non-violence. If an ethnographer could have given us a film of Thoreau at Walden Pond, this is what it might have looked like. This will be an invaluable film for classes on American life, environmental ethics, spirituality, education, economics, politics, and philosophy.” – John Saltmarsh, Dir., New England Resource Center for Higher Education, College of Education and Human Development, University of Massachusetts, Boston

“In Mr. Coperthwaite´s ordinary world, saws stick, logs jam, flies bite, socks develop holes, sticks don´t quite fit in the stove, straps snap, and a body grows weary. Nature is an unruly and sometimes obstinate companion. One has to make and mend. In this series of four films, Anna Grimshaw reveals how, in this daily improvisation, is marked the passage of time. It is a passage so subtly and unobtrusively spun that you do not notice it until afterwards: it is there in the alternation of the seasons, in the ageing of a man and the trees that surround him, in the striking of an axe, in the companionship of generations, in lighting a fire and sawing wood, in carving and darning, in the reuse of leftovers, and sprinkled through all of that, in words that fall from the well-thumbed pages of heavy books. At once works of anthropology, philosophy and art, these films offer a practical way of thinking through making, not so much about the world around us as with it. They teach the value of attention and of patience, and remind us of the supreme value of the hands as instruments of knowing. For educators wishing to inculcate these values in their students, there could be no better resource.” – Tim Ingold, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Aberdeen

“The poet, Ted Hughes, once wrote that some people have an uncanny ability to see a whole biography in a walk or gesture. Anna Grimshaw has that talent. Skillfully drawing us into the world of Bill Coperthwaite through the patient documentation of daily work – cutting down trees, giving order to wood piles, filling his stove, reciting poetry – she reveals an entire life through actions and tasks. Each cut of Coperthwaite´s axe seems inconsequential, a fleeting moment, and yet it reverberates, richly resonant of his past, his hard-won skills and knowledge. When Coperthwaite counts the rings on a recently felled tree stump, remarking that he and the tree are the same age, the filmmaker pauses, drawing our attention to a poignant juxtaposition of person and landscape through the recording of time. We come to know Coperthwaite through Grimshaw´s intimate camera work. It quietly probes at depth and history, while remaining committed to the present. Her technique makes demands of the viewer but, at the same time, it serves to catalyze our imaginative capacities. The result is unusual, an ethnographic novel composed from four seasons. Mr. Coperthwaite: A life in the Maine Woods raises crucial questions that go to the heart of contemporary society – questions about time, nature, aging, place, work, and solitude. It promises to speak to those working in the fields of American Studies, Environmental Studies, Cultural Anthropology, among many others.” – Mark Harris, Reader in Social Anthropology, University of St. Andrews

Awards

Days of Ethnographic Film (Moscow) honoree
Ethnofest (Athens) Opening Night Selection
Ethnocineca (Vienna) honoree
Worldfilm (Tartu, Estonia) honoree
Slovenian Ethnographic Film Festival (Ljubljana) honoree