Pine Barrens is an immersion in a place seen through its inhabitants’ eyes, studying landscape, language, and ways of looking—concerns threading their way throughout Nancy Holt’s work. The film starts looking through a car window, Holt filming from the passenger window, rolled down to meet the exact point of the horizon line. It follows her view as she proceeds to walk through the landscape, the camera looking from all angles—up, down, side to side.

For Pine Barrens, Holt recorded seven hours of interviews with several “Pineys,” editing these down to fifteen minutes for the film. Through these voices we learn that “a Piney is a person who’s lived in the Pines all their life and seldom ever goes to a city, because we don’t care for the city. […] I’m not cutting the city down or nothin’ like that, but here you got open spaces, you got a tree to go to if you know what I mean, and stuff like that.” In her chosen sites, she endeavored to observe with respect for those who knew the local land and resources.

As the Pineys relate their struggles to make a living and describe supernatural encounters with the “Jersey Devil,” Holt’s 16mm camera reveals the desolate beauty of this overlooked land. She films on the move, first pointing her camera through a car window, then continuing on foot, tracking the ground to trace footprints and hoofprints before herself crashing through the undergrowth. Holt moves to focus her camera on the water, using a circular framing device to show reflections of the Pines; the camera steps back to show portraits of individual trees, each subject shown twice.

The Pine Barrens was an important location for Nancy Holt. This was a place familiar since childhood, “a wilderness of sand and pine trees. It’s the forgotten land of the northeastern urban belt: New York is an hour and forty-five minutes away to the north, Philadelphia to the west, Atlantic City to the south.” Pine Barrens is a cartography of the area. The writings of John McPhee, particularly his 1967 articles “The Pine Barrens” published in The New Yorker, were an important guide for her as she set about their own explorations of the area. Holt started the Pine Barrens in the late 1960s with artist friends. In 1968 she made the photoworks Over the Hill and Down Hill, compositions depicting serial frames of Joan Jonas walking in the dunes of northern New Jersey, her steps exerting temporary changes in the surface of the earth.