‘In a way, it’s my apology to animals’: Victor Kossakovsky on his pig family portrait Gunda
Filmmakers normally go to slaughterhouses and show how we kill animals and what horrible conditions they live in, but that shifts the focus from animals to what we are doing, and my goal was to show how they are – that animals are not something but someone.
NICK BRADSHAW: From Bambi (1942) to Babe (1995), Animal Farm (1954) to Zootropolis (2016), our films focused on animals have largely been a cinema of fabulist anthropomorphism – stories of humans in sheep’s (and wolves’) clothing, as it were.
Yet lately, moved by a mix of curiosity, guilt, greater technological prowess and creativity, there has been a renewed effort to explore the world through non-human lenses – to perceive outside our skin, and by extension our worldview, with its presumptions and entitlement… Other films have sought to dispense with human language entirely and to inspire and provoke us purely through the direct-cinema tools of vérité sound and vision, inviting us to interpret…
The latest filmmaker to attempt to doorstep our fellow animals is the Russian Victor Kossakovsky, and there can be few more qualified. A master of fluid, sometimes ecstatic camerawork, evocative sound and acute, roving, interrogative perception, Kossakovsky says that he first took up photography as a child to document the animal life he adored…
Conceived side by side with that giantist project, Gunda appears miniature: a black-and-white study of semi-free-range animals in five chapters, three of them close up on the titular pig and her litter, with two punctuating chapters studying a one-legged hen as it explores what seems to be newfound freedom, then a herd of cows who pose and dance for their portraits with remarkably un-herd-like individuality…
Having interviewed Kossakovsky about Aquarela in person during the 2018 BFI London Film Festival, during which time he appeared to plug the film’s subject matter by pouring water down his shirt, a Zoom interview about Gunda felt sadly caged in. That didn’t stop him holding forth at some length, less on the film’s onscreen poetry than on its offscreen, pro-vegan conceptual underpinnings…
Victor Kossakovsky: When you make a film like ¡Vivan las antípodas! or Aquarela or especially Gunda, you question if we really are the most important creatures in the world; if we really have a right to dominate this planet, to kill billions of animals every year.
In 2020 we killed 1.5 billion pigs, 66 billion chickens, almost half a billion cows and goats and sheep and two billion rabbits and ducks and… a trillion fish. We allow ourselves not to think about it, but we are killers. And not only do we kill them, we freeze them, package them in plastic, transport them… and before that, we cut forest and grow cornfields to feed them. So when we speak about climate change and saving the world, I think we are hypocrites…
Filmmakers normally go to slaughterhouses and show how we kill animals and what horrible conditions they live in, but that shifts the focus from animals to what we are doing, and my goal was to show how they are – that animals are not something but someone.
That’s why I didn’t use voiceover or even music, to keep it clear and just illuminate. Cinema and animals, nothing else. Long shots, no editing, no voice or text, no music and no other emotional pressure, so you finally see animals as they are – suffering, enjoying life; intelligent, with all the emotions we have. They feel, experience freedom as we would do, but they are not human; not better than us, just different. They have a right to be here, to be free, happy, just like we do…
When you make such a film, you have no chance to turn back – you cannot forget. Because you know this is real. I mean… I didn’t eat meat since I was four, when I lost my piglet – he was my childhood best friend and my relatives ate him. But making this film, I saw how making it changed the young people on my team, one by one; in a restaurant they would ask: “Do you have any vegetarian food?”, “Do you have any vegan food today?” Young people write to me or come up at screenings and say, “Why did no one explain this?”
Normally I do not believe cinema can change something, but with Gunda I have to admit surprise. Maybe my generation of people, or maybe your generation, are already in a way hopeless, and for them it will be difficult to stop eating meat. But for young people, maybe they have a chance to change their life, and this why Gunda works beautifully…
It was really important not to use music – to eliminate humans and human emotion from the film and give the audience the chance just to listen to the sound of animals, just as the camera is always at their eye-level. That’s why we did Dolby Atmos, to get all this variety of complex sound. And of course it’s risky to make a 90-minute film without words or music, but [sound recorder and designer] Alexander Dudarev is exceptional, and I’m so happy we did it.
As for the structure of the film, we did plan it differently, as three 30-minute stories. But when we filmed Gunda we already had 60 minutes. Obviously it would have been a pity to make her scenes shorter – but it would also have been different if it were just Gunda. I wanted a trinity – not a mythological trinity but a real trinity of chickens, cows and pigs, the animals people eat every day. In a way it’s my apology to animals, because I know I cannot change anything, but at least I made it, and at least one pig will survive until her natural death. Gunda is still alive. SOURCE…
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