Cow

Upon watching this documentary I didin't really know what to expect. I saw a glowing score on Rotten Tomatoes and love a good documentary so I rented this film to see what it was about. All I can say is that its unlike any film I've ever seen and is something that will stick with me, forever.

I won't ever view cows in the same way, and I think that is a good thing. The film has almost zero dialogue, and really puts you into the life of a cow and everything they are put through, just to provide us meat and milk. Their lives are seen as pure commoditity, only useful until they can no longer give birth anymore.

The film is simple, elegant, and powerful. Its not an easy watch and is at times very painful to endure, but its very worth it. The films ending was so abrubt that I sat in silence for many minutes after pondering what I had just watched, and how I take for granted the many things that consume in my life because an animal endures torture for me.

If you watch "Cow", know that it won't be an easy film to sit through. It can be repetitive, but that is by design, becuase that's what a cows life is. An endless loop of miserable repitition all on the name of giving us the products that we consume every day. I for one am so glad I watched this film because tis forever given me a thankfullness for an animal that is far too often ignored when it should be put upon a pedestal for all they provide to us.

Greetings again from the darkness. Farming and ranching are about two main things: commerce and sourcing food and other items (wool, leather, cotton, etc). Director Andrea Arnold won an Oscar for her short film WASP (2003), and also directed a couple of narratives that I've seen, WUTHERING HEIGHTS (2011) and AMERICAN HONEY (2016). Her first feature documentary takes us to a dairy farm in rural England, and closely follows the daily life of the cows on the farm.

We open with the birth of a calf and the instant bonding with its mother, Luma. Then, as we've seen in other documentaries, the two are separated and we clearly see the anxiety this creates in the bovines. But this is a working dairy farm and cows exist for two reasons: to produce milk and to have babies. Ms. Arnold wisely keeps the focus on the cows, and the human workers are rarely seen or heard. It's not a pleasant existence for the cows. They spend time being milked by a metallic contraption or being impregnated by a local bull. Denied connection with their offspring, the cows seem to be allowed very little time to frolic or graze in the fields.

Cinematographer Magda Kowalczyk does get some creative shots, but there are a few times the closeness of the camera to the cows gives us a feeling of temporary motion sickness. We are also bounced between mother and calf quite often, and we 'feel' the mother's bellowing as she longs for her baby. The point is made that cows have feelings, especially as related to their offspring, but some of the attempts to drive that home stretch credulity a bit too far. Also responsible for a slight dulling of the film's impact is that it arrives so closely to last year's artistic masterpiece, GUNDA (2021) from Viktor Kosakovskiy, though director Arnold wins for the most abrupt ending (for us and the cow).

In theaters and On Demand beginning April 8, 2022.

One of the most illuminating documentaries in film history is called Titicut Follies (1967), one of the first and only times a director got under the skin of an institution, which Andrea Arnold manages again with Cow. Follies uncovers the horrendous maltreatment of people at an asylum in Massachusetts. It's remarkable because of the co-operation given to the filmmaker Frederick Wiseman. The medical staff at Titicut simply do not have the self awareness or empathy to know that they do wrong and give him the run of the place. In the most jawdropping moment a doctor smoking a cigarette over an anaesthetised patient, lets his fag ash fall into the man's open mouth, and no-one bats an eyelid. Exposés since that time have been rather subdued as most wrongdoers are informed enough to be a completely different person when they know a camera is nearby.

The farmers here simply feel that everything they do is justified (or maybe they crave judgement?), and so they have given Andrea Arnold and her crew the run of the place. Like Wiseman before her Arnold simply points her camera at stuff going on, there are no interviews, no explanatory notes, the camera eye does all the talking. They spend four years focussing mainly on one cow, Luma, her day-to-day experience, and those of her calf. When the calf is announced female I didn't know whether to be relieved or appalled, males are often shot straight away as rearing them to sell on as veal is not economical, whilst the female become part of the dairy herd; which is better, murder or slavery?

Cow is the nightmare of Fritz Lang's Metropolis come true, where persons literally become part of machines. On the farm placid and majestic creatures are cruelly exploited, and then when the economics of keeping them enslaved stops making sense, abruptly murdered. There are indeed Wisemanian moments here, where a farmhand comments that Luma is bad for being protective. "Bad" here meaning that she doesn't do exactly what her enslavers want when they want it ("Fair is foul and foul is fair"); the second farmhand knows a faux pas has been made on camera. The farmers are of that chilling breed of individuals who know what they do is wrong but do it anyway, because there are no repercussions. We can at least say of them that they are not sadists, no-one deliberately harms an animal here for entertainment (although things like this have been videoed on other farms).

Numerous unpleasant scenes include debudding without anaesthetic (to make the slaves more manageable the tissue that grows horns is burned away), Luma refusing to eat after her latest child is abducted and industrial milking apparatus dangling in slurry.

Arnold's treatment feels occasionally tone deaf, Luma is corralled into a pen with a bull to get made pregnant yet again (cows are essentially kept permanently pregnant and have no agency whatsoever), and Arnold feels it's appropriate to edit this in with a firework display, as if something remotely romantic is happening when breeding of slaves occurs. In interviews Arnold has talked about the service that the cows have given us, the problem is that cows have their free will removed, they are not giving us service, everything they give is being taken. I gave the film a 6 because for all its revelations I do still feel that Arnold doesn't fully get it.

It is sobering to remind oneself that of all the lurid horrors of Cow, this is likely the best a farm gets, and the best simply isn't good enough. We can stop the suffering, end deforestation and end climate change if we stop enslaving animals, but we enjoy the taste of these easily substituted products too much. The childishly absurd "bacon tho" and "cheese tho" arguments win out. Humanity had better hope that no wrathful judge exists.

I'm not actually sure why this didn't get a Oscar nod this year because it was fantastic.

It's completely Cinéma vérité. No dialogue or set up scenes, just showing the life of this cow, Luma.

The shots are amazing. The way the camera will linger on something at just the right moment. It maybe me anthropomorphising her but Jesus Christ I could like feel Luma's pain. It was screaming out the TV at me. The sadness in her eyes and the way she walked especially when you juxtapose it to her baby running around the field. It was just heartbreaking.

She was used like a factory, and then the ending. Wow. That's what she got after giving her life and body for their profit. It was crushing.

I read that the director wanted to the audience to really see the cows and I think she achieved this perfectly. You see that they are alive, they cry for their children just like we would if ours were taken away. They care for their children just like us.

Im so mad it didn't get an Oscar nomination!

The documentary "Cow" of Andrea Arnold shows every day's endeavors of a cow on a dairy farm. It brings us closer to the dark truth behind human exploitation of other species, where our desire of drinking milk makes millions of creatures suffer and live in fear.

This straightforward approach of showing us one specific cow and her way from giving a birth to death, allows us to empathize and understand what is hidden and invisible to a consumer of a milk product. It reminds us that we have no right to use other forms of life just to increase our own comfort. It manages to immerse us into a mind of a cow, living in fear and with no understanding of her own fate.

A method of no narration or dialogue is successful in providing us with tools that help us to distinguish emotions from cold thoughts. The documentary has a simple form, yet still, it manages to be rich in its effectiveness. It succeeds in being immersive, thought-provoking, moving and leaves us with questions that we need to answer ourselves.

I believe that the film's memo and the statement that it makes are on the same pathway of delivering similar messages related to discovering the incomprehensible human sense of superiority over everything else.

While the eponymous cow's way of thinking is less complex and abstract than the potential of the human brain, assuming it is therefore inferior due to that is a result of a rather shallow thinking. The document shows us that cows' greatest dreams and desires are not all that different from human ones. As equal to us, cows just want to be happy. Their way of being happy is to be close to others, surrounded by their family, and by grazing grass in beautiful clearings amidst nature and good weather. What prevents them from being happy in this way is a human system based on taking advantage of others and getting rid of them when they are no longer useful. As long as the destructive and harmful system continues, the suffering of the livestock will continue. However, not only theirs, because the system in which we operate ultimately hurts us, humans, as well.