‘Gunda’ Is An Unparalleled Vehicle For Empathy Towards Animals, And Ourselves

Viktor Kosakovskiy’s existentialist, meditative masterpiece Gunda reminds a great deal of the contemplative works of Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas. Using only diegetic sound and stark, expressive high definition black-and-white cinematography, Kosakovskiy follows a series of farm animals around, giving their performance of farm animal things the weight of a Bergman protagonist, or a Bresson or a Dreyer. It’s Au Hasard Balthazar without any human characters at all. Even the camera seems disembodied, moving in and through the grass in slow company of a one-legged chicken, or in close to a sow’s nipples as her newborn litter jockey for access and one, a runt, gets summarily dispatched by its mother. I wasn’t expecting that. Gunda is full of unexpected things.

In Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (is it a documentary? Is there such a thing as an anti-documentary documentary?), he says that while looking into the faces of bears he sees no “kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food.” Gunda, in so-centering its animal subjects, challenges its audience to similarly resist anthropomorphizing them. Does the sow feel sadness after murdering a half-formed offspring in so callow a way? Kosakovskiy takes pains to show how careful she is around the others, preserving their safety and providing for their needs. Later, when they are separated, he spends an unbearable amount of time with her distress. It’s maybe the saddest moment in a year of full of sad moments, and one that I’ll never stop thinking about it (or be able to watch again).

But is the sow sad, or is it just my projection of the prospect of losing my children making me feel sad and thinking that the pig feels the same things? Doesn’t she feel the same things? How to quantify the quality of grieving? How is my experience of loss different than a pig’s – aren’t they both rooted at some place in a biological imperative? Grief is a function of an evolved biological response — just as pain is, as love is. The only thing that purports to separate us from “animals” is our recognition of mortality, it is said, but just like all other previous measures of our exceptionalism as a species (the use of tools, the use of language), I feel like that’s just another difference without a distinction. Gunda is extraordinary for any number of reasons, but the main one is its ability to existentially scar. If there is no real distinction between what we have elevated into high poetry and art, the ineffable expressed or at least attempts to do the same, then we need to consider the interior lives of all living things as of the same delicate, exquisite value.

This is not to say that Gunda is a screed. There aren’t messages about veganism here, or cruelty towards animals (if those impulses are not already endemic to one’s makeup). But as a vehicle for empathy, it’s almost unparalleled. At some point it becomes a tantric piece where the flies plaguing a herd of cows becomes a statement about bearing up under seas of troubles and arrows of outrageous fortune. They don’t shoo them away, they just stand there and endure them because a moment’s relief is all one can ever hope for and shouldn’t you just save the angst for something more pressing? A chicken’s foot pressing dancer-delicate on the soft earth, one rock protruding, allows contemplation not just of the beauty of the mechanics behind its construction, but of the connection to the ground that humans have lost in their pursuit of the sky. Gunda plays like a drama, and a horror film, and a tragedy at the end, but a story throughout of what it means to be a sentient being in a cold, insensible universe. There’s so much pain here, but they’re balanced by so many little moments of warmth and experience that make it —and life itself— worth it. They have to. It’s all we got.

You can now watch Gunda during its exclusive one-week run (12/11/20-12/17/20) on virtual cinema at Laemmle Theatres and Film Forum.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2020. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

Where to watch Gunda