Movie Treatment for a Spiral Jetty

Extending into the red waters of the Great Salt Lake, Utah, Robert Smithson’s iconic earthwork Spiral Jetty (1970) is composed of 1,500 feet of local basalt rock and earth built up into a 15-foot-wide swirling mound. Smithson intentionally situated this work within an unpredictable environment; climate and other ecological changes associated with the lake’s fluctuating water levels—including erosion, and sand and silt deposits—have interacted with the work in various ways over the past decades.

In addition to the Jetty itself, Smithson created a film and text (each also titled Spiral Jetty), that document the sculpture’s construction and completed site. These two drawings chart Robert Smithson's plans for climatic sections of his film: in one he maps out a sequence of images showing the dark maw of a bulldozer moving towards the camera during construction. In the second, a close aerial shot track shows Smithson jogging along the jetty; when he reaches the end, the camera pulls back sharply to reveal the entire, massive spiral form amidst the sun-dappled waters of the Great Salt Lake. In this drawing, Smithson represents himself as the eye-like form in the center of the image, near the notation “Running Figure Keep in Frame.” He wrote: I took my chances on a perilous path, along which my steps zigzagged, resembling a spiral lightning bolt . . . For my film (a film is a spiral made up of frames) I would have myself filmed from a helicopter (from the Greek helix, helikos, meaning spiral) directly overhead in order to get the scale in terms of erratic steps.”