Cow

Andrea Arnold​’s films are nev­er an easy ride. She has said that, ​“peo­ple have quite a phys­i­cal expe­ri­ence with them”. A mas­ter of kitchen-sink real­ism, her uncom­pro­mis­ing and explorato­ry style focus­es on expe­ri­ences of women in aus­tere sce­nar­ios fight­ing for con­trol over their lives. Engag­ing, painful and beau­ti­ful, her work tends to have a vis­cer­al after-effect, and such is the case with her first doc­u­men­tary, Cow – a self-pro­fessed labour of love.

The meat and dairy indus­try is a sys­tem that tears fam­i­lies apart, strip­ping mater­ni­ty away from its most docile vic­tims. It’s under these cir­cum­stances that sin­gle moth­er Luma sees her new­born tak­en away from her, mere­ly a few hours after giv­ing birth. The cam­era fol­lows Luma from behind, gaz­ing on as an umbil­i­cal cord sways back and forth while her cries grow increas­ing­ly louder.

Her pain is as inef­fa­ble as it is expres­sive, gauged through a series of looks and cries that appear to con­vey anguish. There is no com­men­tary, no nar­ra­tion, and farm work­ers are (ever so briefly) shown in a neu­tral light, get­ting on with their jobs which involve var­i­ous bod­i­ly intru­sions, horn burn­ings, forced impreg­na­tions and milk extrac­tions. The hyper­spe­cif­ic pop sound of Kali Uchis, Jor­ja Smith and Mabel rever­ber­ates from the farm radio speak­ers – a jar­ring sound­track to the cows’ every­day exis­tence with­in the cramped indus­tri­al space.

Shot in Arnold’s char­ac­ter­is­tic hand­held style, which evokes a sense of imme­di­a­cy, we rest on Luma’s eye lev­el and sel­dom break away from her per­spec­tive. The camera’s pres­ence is nei­ther inva­sive nor benign, while the jit­tery shaky­cam tech­nique height­ens a feel­ing of nau­sea and dis­ori­en­ta­tion that sets in ear­ly on.

Time, space and mobil­i­ty are sig­ni­fied by occa­sion­al shots of air­planes and birds fly­ing in the sky, while the restrict­ed and rou­tine move­ments of the cows in the over­crowd­ed milk­ing par­lour and cat­tle cor­ral are caught in a state of iner­tia. Vio­lat­ed and abused for her milk, Luma is ulti­mate­ly con­fined and teth­ered to a world to which she doesn’t belong.

Cow won’t be for every­one, but it’s by no means a film that tells you what to make of it. It’s a silent por­trait of life in cap­tiv­i­ty that’s rad­i­cal in its sim­plic­i­ty as it sober­ly invites view­ers to reck­on with the feel­ings of a sen­tient, non-human oth­er. Its obser­va­tion­al mode keeps it from being didac­tic or manip­u­la­tive in any way, and it adopts an inti­ma­cy that evokes the deep­est empa­thy. Luma’s pain is nev­er spectacle.

Of course, the pol­i­tics of Arnold’s films are nev­er explored con­ven­tion­al­ly or explic­it­ly. They lie in her sen­so­ry tech­niques, the murky counter-nar­ra­tives and affec­tive capac­i­ties of her mar­gin­alised sub­jects. It’s not news to any­one that cows are com­modi­ties abused for prof­it, and you know from the get-go how Luma’s sto­ry ends, but that doesn’t make the end­ing any less impact­ful, and that feel­ing stays with you for a while.