Gun­da

From Cey­da Torun’s Kedi, about stray cats in Istan­bul, to Eliz­a­beth Lo’s Stray, which fol­lows dogs roam­ing the same city, doc­u­men­taries fea­tur­ing ani­mals filmed at their own eye-lev­el have proven pop­u­lar enough in recent years as to con­sti­tute a mini-wave.

With Gun­da, Russ­ian film­mak­er Vic­tor Kos­sakovsky jumps on this trend, train­ing his cam­era on a lit­ter of pigs on a live­stock farm in Nor­way. A pas­sion project for the Russ­ian doc­u­men­tar­i­an, Gun­da recalls the sim­plic­i­ty of his ear­ly fea­tures Hush! and Rus­sia from My Win­dow, both filmed from the van­tage of his St Peters­burg apart­ment. Here, the cam­era is again used as a win­dow into a world, but this time not a human one.

The film’s pri­ma­ry focus is Gun­da, a fat, for­mi­da­ble sow who, at the start of the film, has just giv­en birth. In vivid, high con­trast black-and-white, she is seen pok­ing a nose out of her pen as dozens of her new­borns scrab­ble man­i­cal­ly around her. It is a gor­geous image, soured quick­ly when one of the piglets is tram­pled under her hoof.

For the film’s remain­der, the cam­era rarely leaves Gunda’s side, stray­ing only peri­od­i­cal­ly to gaze upon a herd of cows and a clutch of chick­ens, scenes which pro­vide a reprieve from the rep­e­ti­tious­ness that comes with obses­sive­ly observ­ing the lim­it­ed activ­i­ties of farm­yard life. The rest of the time, Kos­sakovsky fix­ates on the pigs alone, observ­ing them – most­ly in beau­ti­ful, shal­low focus close-ups – as they scrap with each oth­er, scuf­fle vicious­ly for their mother’s milk, and sniff, squeak, and squeal around the fields sur­round­ing their pen.

Instead of dri­ving for any­thing par­tic­u­lar­ly dra­mat­ic, Kos­sakovsky hopes to uncov­er some­thing more rarely observed: nature’s rou­tine beau­ty and bru­tal­i­ty. His inspi­ra­tion for Gun­da is not so much David Atten­bor­ough then, though he does have equip­ment capa­ble of pro­duc­ing images that match the qual­i­ty of a series such as the BBC’s just­ly fet­ed Plan­et Earth.

Instead, he is look­ing more to imi­tate the visu­al mode of the Har­vard Sen­so­ry Ethnog­ra­phy Lab, redi­rect­ing the slow, almost empir­i­cal­ly tac­tile style of obser­va­tion found in films such as 2012’s Leviathan and 2013’s Man­aka­mana towards a wider audi­ence. What he accom­plish­es is some­thing that sits in the mid­dle of these two planes of nature documentary.

The film is tech­ni­cal­ly impres­sive, with an array of lus­cious, care­ful­ly com­posed images, yet some­how the over­all glossi­ness of the result feels under­whelm­ing; Kossakovsky’s refusal to com­mit to some­thing more uncom­pro­mis­ing­ly exper­i­men­tal is a missed opportunity.

Word­less, plot­less, and free of any form of musi­cal score, Gun­da descends into the muck with the pigs and emu­lates their expe­ri­ence. Whether this ges­ture feels enough will vary based on per­son­al sen­si­bil­i­ty, but styl­is­ti­cal­ly, it is not exact­ly new. In 2009, Ilisa Bar­bash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s Sweet­grass did the same thing for sheep, while also skip­ping over the moral­is­ing that is implic­it to Kossakovsky’s project.

He may eschew overt com­men­tary, but the direc­tor makes his mes­sage clear enough by com­mit­ting most of the film’s run­time towards demon­strat­ing the beau­ty of ani­mals liv­ing unin­ter­rupt­ed, before reveal­ing the dis­tress­ing effects of human intervention.