Giv'em a Half Turn
1979 · 10m · Canada
Directed by Reevan Dolgoy
Genres: documentary
Saskatchewan sculptor Russ Yuristy's three-ton wooden buffalo travels 240 kilometres from studio to a Swift Current park. Bystanders react to one of the Prairies' most unusual artworks along the way.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A three-ton wooden buffalo road trip sounds like it should be absurdist gold, but Dolgoy plays it straight—which is actually the smarter subversion, letting the Prairie's indifference to the artwork do all the comedy for you.
Dolgoy's 1979 piece sits perfectly in the lineage of structural documentary and land-art cinema, where the journey itself becomes the exhibition; the formal restraint of watching strangers encounter scale and strangeness feels like early Errol Morris meets Robert Smithson.
The genius move is letting the bystanders' genuine, unscripted reactions—not the sculpture, not the landscape—carry the entire film; that choice turns a logistical document into something about how we actually see art when it shows up uninvited.