Why a Documentary About a Cow Reveals the Limits of an Art Form

The poignant and heartfelt documentary “Cow,” directed by Andrea Arnold, is a displaced movie. For all its virtues, its most interesting action isn’t onscreen but only hinted at. This lacuna reflects a widespread documentary practice that’s also a conventional lapse in aesthetic judgment. Arnold and her crew followed a single dairy cow named Luma, at a cattle farm in Park Farm, in Kent, England, for an intermittent four-year period.

“Cow” filters out the basic personal element. It doesn’t show the crew’s interactions with the farm workers, who seemingly pretend that the crew and equipment aren’t there; the efforts of the crew to stay close to Luma; or the conspicuous intrusion of Arnold and her colleagues setting up shop, with their equipment, at the farm and in the nearby fields where the animals graze.

In “Cow,” the drama is thin and the ideas are distant. Closeups of Luma are the film’s emotional engine. These images have a soulfulness that’s then, at times, amplified into majesty by compositions in which sky, terrain, and other animals fill the frame with a sense of united, grand-scale, wide-ranging power. They’re the exception—and they merely punctuate the film’s sense of observational, reportorial information delivery.

The paradox of “Cow” is the paradox of modern documentary filmmaking, an aesthetic revolution that was born—in the United States and in France—on the basis of technological innovation, the ability to film while recording synchronized sound with lightweight and portable equipment. In 1960, Robert Drew produced “

tnyfrontrow 👎for the film school lecture and critique. Try including the words DitchDairy vegan CrueltyFree. Luma speaks directly to the filmmaker. Incomprehensible that your analysis claims the opposite. In Cow, the drama is utterly poignant and the ideas are immediately intense.

tnyfrontrow You could write this about any documentary in which the director chooses - and it is an aesthetic choice - to film in an observational style, keeping the filmmaking out of sight. Seems strange to me to pine for a completely different approach on such a public platform.

tnyfrontrow they are people who grew up feeding on cow milk, passed 60% of their diners on steak and get excited only by lions, tigers, pumas for their power force energy speed... even by cats the 'indoors lions'... there is nothing to blame of course for personal preferences.

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