Like Gunda, the most eerie moments come when we look directly into the cow’s eyes, as she is perhaps directly looking into ours – or at any rate, the camera lens – and mooing, repeatedly, intently or even meaningfully. Cows and pigs in the UK don’t usually get the kind of David Attenborough treatment reserved for lions and tigers. Richard Mabey talked about unofficial countryside this kind of movie is unofficial natural history. Just as with Viktor Kosakovskiy’s recent film Gunda, about a pig, the aim is to try to see, or guess at, what it is like to be a farm animal, or simply any sort of animal. But of course, we all know what violent event is coming, and the question is: how much time and space is this film going to devote to it? But we don’t see any people until the very end.Īs for the calves, we watch them suckling from artificial milk teats and getting dehorned with a cauterising iron, a violent moment which had everyone in the audience covering their eyes. We hear human voices from the very beginning, often cheerfully calling the cows “girlies!” – no word could be less suitable for these mighty beasts. We see the cows out in the field on a bright summer day, and sometimes we see them out there at night, in an exotically conceived long shot: cows silhouetted against trees under a stark moon. Arnold immerses herself in the bovine world as far as she is able, getting alongside the cows in the farm during the calving process, with the shots of ropes pulling on little hooves emerging from the mother, an image which hasn’t changed too much since the days of James Herriot and All Creatures Great and Small.
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