NYFF 58 Review: Let ‘Gunda’ Lull You Into Life on the Farm
Minimalist in its approach, Viktor Kossakovsky’s documentary Gunda heads down to the farm and starts observing. No words. No narration. No interviews. Just observing. For ninety-three minutes, Gunda lulls you into a subliminal state of observation, but not towards the farmers who sow the fields and harvest the crop. No, the subjects here are the pigs and piglets, the cows and calfs, and the chickens and hens who roam fields, sleep in styes, and live in coops. And I repeat — because this is crucial — there are no spoken words nor even a single frame of informational text in the entire film. Just the sounds and visuals of animals doing animal things in their animal lives.
The titular Gunda is a newly minted mother pig. From the opening shot we are greeted to a litter of piglets oinking, squealing, and snorting as they discover the living world around them, nestling in hay, digging up dirt, and falling over one another in an effort to keep up with Mama Gunda as she carries her weight across pastures. Supplementing our pink friends are a flock of chickens and a herd of cows, who, like the pigs, carry out their daily animal routines. The chickens pluck around, pigeon-like in their movements, while the cows mull over some freshly chewed cud and graze the fields. This is life on the farm and we … we are here to watch.
Kossakovsky packages this with a fine tuned delicacy, avoiding any formal guide rails to direct the viewer. For more than an hour, you’re left exclusively to your own thoughts, influenced solely by long takes of the animals in tack-sharp black and white photography and the sounds they make. One moment you might elate at the image of a piglet discovering rain water, and the next your mind might slip into pondering how natural evolution reduced dinosaurs into the current composition of a chicken. As a primarily unimposing documentary, the take aways are largely ambiguous.
In fact, it’s not until about seventy minutes in that you pick up on the film’s intention. When a tractor breaks the frame and disturbs the natural image, an image that has been well maintained for over an hour at this point, you know full well that this industrious intervention is intentional. There for but a moment, the tractor comes and goes, taking with it Gunda’s piglets and leaving her frantic as she searches her stye for her children. Within these final moments Kossakovsky suggests a relationship between these farm animals and us humans. If any prescription is provided by Kossakovsky its that the industrial nature of animal farming is cruel and inhumane, but again, this notions only tracks so long as it does in your head. What you take away is a matter of engagement with the material as the film surely won’t do the heavy lifting for you, and in this sense, your mileage may vary with Gunda.
It may be reductive, but for the most part, the film plays like farm animal ASMR. Due in large part to the film’s visceral sound design, you can hear quite literally everything coming from these animals and nothing makes that point more readily apparent than listening to the suckling of baby pigs as they feed. In conjunction with the aforementioned cinematography, Gunda excels on technical fronts to transfix and engage, locking you in early and transporting you to an almost lucid state where you observe the routines of animals. I fear, however, for most that Gunda will be a passive experience — perhaps lulling you to sleep instead of subliminal observation — but if you’re willing for the endeavor, you’ll find beauty on this here farm.
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