Gunda

Victor Kossakovsky’s documentary captures the daily rhythms of its porcine star’s life on the farm.

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.

Published 2 Jun 2021

Tags: Gunda Viktor Kosakovskiy