The great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky called the art of cinema the art of sculpting time. “What is the essence of the director’s work?” Tarkovsky wrote. “Just as a sculptor takes a lump of marble, and, inwardly conscious of the features of his finished piece, removes everything that is not part of it—so the filmmaker, from a ‘lump of time’ made up of an enormous, solid cluster of living facts, cuts off and discards whatever he does not need, leaving only what is to be an element of the finished film.” With that thought in mind, we can turn to a fascinating film directed by Alex and Andrew Smith, Winter in the Blood.
Based on the 1974 novel by James Welch, the film of Winter is both remarkable and challenging because it is fully committed to a structure and feeling of time that is not at all European. The film has no real beginning or end, and even begins where it ends, and ends where it begins, on a Native American reservation in Montana. Throughout the film, we are constantly circling a young man named Virgil First Raise (Chaske Spencer, an actor famous for his role in the Twilight series). He, like his father and all the other men in his family, is an alcoholic, and will likely die like his father, who drank too, too, too much one sad and cold night, fell into a ditch, and froze to death.
The film begins with Virgil waking up in a ditch. He stands, looks up at the sky, and then loops back to his boyhood, to a warm moment with his father and brother. It’s morning, the boys are eating breakfast, and the father is spiking his coffee. Then we are in the clouds, then Virgil’s face appears in the clouds, and then we are back in the ditch. Later, at his house, we learn that his wife left him and took the only possession he cares about, a rifle. Then he is in a bar speaking with a white stranger called “Airplane Man.” Then he is having sex with a pretty but aging white bartender. Then he is being kicked and punched by other Native American boys (the fight is dispersed by an old, standard-issue white racist: “You prairie niggers”).
The film, which is gorgeously photographed by Paula Huidobro, is edited to make these transitions in time as smooth as possible. These are not flashbacks or dreams—they are visions conducted by another and maybe older kind of time flow. It’s a time that moves forward by not really moving at all. A cow finds itself stuck in a muddy ditch. The father dies in a ditch. The son passes out in a ditch. There is also the drinking, which has differences and repetitions. The drinks change—beer, whiskey, wine—but the drinking is the same: heavy. Birds circle the sky. An old American car swerves on an empty road. The rifle is sold for a drink. The rifle is broken. An old man fixes the rifle. The old man lives in a hut. In the hut, a weak tree grows. When Virgil visits the old man, he is offered coffee. Virgil leaves without drinking the coffee. He is in the woods. He is on a white horse. He is a child again. He is shooting a hawk in the sky.
Near the end of the film, we begin to feel that the movie will never end, precisely because the film does not want an ending. Indeed, what the directors attempted with Winter in the Blood is nothing less than to give birth to a whole new way of sculpting the time of cinema. 
