Recent discussions of why film-goers should hasten back to cinemas have emphasised the same basic selling points: the big screen, the excited hum of the audience. But something more vital than either is — on a good night — also easier to achieve far from your own living room. A film comes alive when you give it the whole of your attention. Hold your focus at the exact point you might usually check Twitter and that is when the movie is likely to overwhelm you. Eventually, a chewy question might present itself too: what am I really watching here?
With the astounding new film Gunda, what you are watching is a pig. Not lacking in star quality, the animal is the sow the movie is named after, a documentary shot in hyper-verité black and white by director Viktor Kossakovsky. The location is a free-range farm outside Oslo, Norway. Nothing unusual takes place. Quite the opposite. But the film is so patient as it holds up natural moments to the light, the result is that you end up really watching something else too — a minimalist epic, loaded with food for thought.
The tone is set from the start: piglets thronging their mother to be fed. A different film would elicit gooey sentiment and move on. Kossakovsky keeps the camera at Gunda’s level for seven minutes. The longer the scene plays — chance, panic and willpower each have a role — the more mesmeric and meaningful it gets, the Darwinian jostle of life laid bare. Some lessons transcend species. Many of us will be parents. Everyone has been a child.
It helps that the movie looks this good, classically cinematic, subtly inventive. In keeping with his film’s sense of honesty, Kossakovsky has since revealed trade secrets. You would never know it but the sty is a set, an artful replica of Gunda’s own, tweaked to accommodate film-making. The light was enhanced by a discoball. The effect is stunning. Modern black and white draws the eye most to inky, deep-space blacks. With Gunda, it is the whites that dazzle. Piglets glow. You might even see them as angelic, although the truth at the heart of the film is both simpler and more complex than that.
There is sweetness, of course. (At one point pigs gulp falling raindrops.) But survival can be a blunt business. The stars are not cutely anthropomorphised, stand-ins for our better selves.
Instead, they are animals. Self-evident as it sounds, it is a concept movies have always struggled with, Disney animations just the most obvious example. Not so with Gunda. Later other livestock enter, allowed to be themselves to the point of unfamiliarity. Cows charge and buck from a pen. Chickens fan hawklike across woodland, as if characters in a war movie. Finally they reach a strange intervention — fence wire.
Wherever you are, people are never far away. Landmarks such as the fence aside, humanity is like Kossakovsky’s discoball — key to the world but unseen. Still, inevitable questions loom. Watching Gunda, you ask yourself, are we really watching meat? If so, how that makes you feel will be your affair. How might Gunda feel about it? Well, another commonplace about movies is their gift for taking us inside the psyche of the characters. Empathy machines, the late critic Roger Ebert called them. But in Gunda, that much can still never be knowable — just one more unique selling point of this magical film.
★★★★★
In UK cinemas from June 4
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June 02, 2021 at 11:00PM
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Gunda — an astounding film shows life on a free-range farm - Financial Times
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