I love a parade, and so does Los Angeles, though that’s not the view shared by the pioneering earth artist Michael Heizer, whose eponymous 2012 installation is the subject of Levitated Mass, a new documentary by Doug Pray. (He’s best known for the definitive grunge doc Hype!) And in fact, Heizer skips the 10-day nighttime procession as an elaborate truck armada brings his 340-ton granite boulder from a quarry to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. To backtrack a little, it was during the late ’60s and early ’70s that Heizer and guys including Robert Smithson (of Spiral Jetty) started using bulldozers and dynamite to create massive conceptual artworks far from galleries and museums. And Heizer’s signature work in Seattle is the wonderful 1976 Adjacent, Against, Upon in Myrtle Edwards Park; we see old footage and stills of that project’s construction in Levitated Mass, which describes Heizer’s long career during the course of the boulder parade. (He meets them at the end, supervises the installation, and maintains a friendly if gnomic silence about his art.) Pray lets museum curators and experts give their opinions, but what makes this doc so enjoyable are his man-on-the-street interviews. The boulder has avid fans staked out in lawn chairs; the boulder is on Twitter; the boulder is given a street fair in Long Beach. And by its sheer, ancient enormity, so incongruous on the streets of L.A., it forces people who might never visit the LACMA—where Levitated Mass is now a star attraction—to consider whether it’s art. Opinions are divided, as they should be. But how refreshing it is to be confronted with art (if only in transport) that you can’t ignore. SIFF Film Center (Seattle Center), 324-9996, siff.net. $6–$12. Runs Fri., Sept. 26–Sun., Sept. 28.

bmiller@seattleweekly.com