{"id":764239,"date":"2021-07-11T07:43:15","date_gmt":"2021-07-11T11:43:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=764239"},"modified":"2021-07-11T08:31:43","modified_gmt":"2021-07-11T12:31:43","slug":"a-cow-on-cannes-plate-film-documentary-generates-empathy-for-animals-better-than-disney-ever-could","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=764239","title":{"rendered":"A ‘COW’ ON CANNES’ MENU: Film documentary generates empathy for animals better than Disney ever could"},"content":{"rendered":"\t
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At the end of the day, Luma is reduced a product, herded from pens to fields and back again, and exploited to her fullest potential until that time is done.<\/p>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/blockquote>\n\n

ERIC KOHN:<\/strong> \u201cCow\u201d opens with the closeup of a gooey calf yanked from the vaginal canal, and follows her all the way through her rough, solitary existence. The small miracle of director Andrea Arnold\u2019s experiential documentary is that it enacts its simple premise in straightforward terms, but assembles them into a profound big picture. Her subject, a dairy cow named Luma, grows up under the tutelage of farmers who seem, for all intents and purposes, looking out for her best interests.<\/p>\n

However, with Arnold centralizing her subject\u2019s gaze, even their kindly background roles come into question. As Luma endures the monotony of her routine, \u201cCow\u201d grows into a stirring, often sad contemplation of a life reduced to resources. Arnold apparently spent years filming Luma\u2019s life, as she grew from calf to dairy cow, mated with bulls, and roamed with her herd…<\/p>\n

It\u2019s impossible to fully conceive of the world through the eyes of one animal, but \u201cCow\u201d gets much closer than any anthropomorphized Disney character ever could, with the kind of sound and image deep dive that the term \u201cpure cinema\u201d was invented to describe…<\/p>\n

The gamble of \u201cCow\u201d isn\u2019t exactly uncharted terrain. As recently as last year, the black-and-white odyssey \u201cGunda\u201d delivered a wordless ode to the life of a pig and her ill-fated family… Arnold\u2019s work borrows some aspects of these works but feels more intimately tied to Luma\u2019s hardships, hinting at shades of a personality, even as it stops short of humanizing her. The cow is not a person. Instead, \u201cCow\u201d invites humans to see the world as a cow…<\/p>\n

Ultimately that takes the form of intricate details from her life. The unsteady slab of wood she\u2019s forced to stand on while plugging into a milking machine, staring out at the mechanical sameness around her, encapsulates the frightening boundaries of her claustrophobic environment…<\/p>\n

There are moments where \u201cCow\u201d is on the verge of some grander observation before it doubles back to the cycle of circumstances that define Luma\u2019s life… The experience settles into such an absorbing rhythm that its abrupt finale hits hard even if it\u2019s inevitable from the start. At the end of the day, Luma is reduced a product, herded from pens to fields and back again, and exploited to her fullest potential until that time is done.<\/p>\n

\u201cCow\u201d doesn\u2019t interrogate the motives behind that process \u2014 leave that to \u201cFast Food Nation\u201d and its ilk \u2014 but it does a fine job of generating empathy from one scene to the next, and using that power to craft a hypnotic spell rife with significance. After all, what is life but a series of milking sessions followed by the dark void that awaits us all? \u201cCow\u201d treats that question as a mission statement, stuns us into contemplation, and cuts to black. SOURCE…<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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