Documentary

dir: Andrea Arnold

2021

I think it’s kinda disingenuous to call this a documentary, but then I can’t think of what else you would call it. A woman called Magda Kowalczyk, the cinematographer, follows around a cow for about a year, from about the time she gives birth to one calf, and up to just after she gives birth to a second calf.

Of all that footage, the director Andrea Arnold in concert with 3 other editors, has fashioned a movie that aspires to give the viewer a sense of the experience of not what it’s like to work on a dairy farm in Kent, in England, but of what it’s like to be a cow on a dairy farm in Kent.

That’s a hard task to set oneself. There’s no voiceover, no narrator explaining to us what we’re seeing or what we should think about it. We overhear a bit of conversation between the vet and the workers on the farm about the cow, about how they’re recovering after the birth, that sort of stuff, but if we consider the cow herself to be the protagonist, we have to imagine what she’s thinking and feeling, because she’s not going to tell us.

This probably sounds quite dull. I actually found watching the film quite fascinating to watch. It seems like mighty hard work daily on a dairy farm, but the people working there, mostly young women, don’t seem to find it too onerous. It seems a bit hard on the cows, but we don’t see them being mishandled or mistreated.

We see the birth of the calf, from the beginning, a tremendously gross and sweet moment, where the mother licks the poor thing clean, until it can eventually walk enough to be separated from its mother. The mother moos quite loudly at the calf’s absence, or at the presence of the person with the camera in her stall, and we wonder (or at least I wondered) whether the mother feels the calf’s absence profoundly. She does seem quite upset.

Is that what we do? Do we project our thoughts and feelings onto these creatures, to try to make sense of their existence, but only in ways that are completely self-serving to us? I probably spent 90% of the movie doing exactly that and questioning it extensively.

dir: Lauren Greenfield

It takes a certain kind of character to handle being wealthy and powerful. Few people have the stones for it. It’s not for common mortals like us to be rich and famous, no. We would buckle under the tremendous weight of such awful responsibility. The rest of us peasants should be grateful that we don’t live under the dread of such burdens.

If you haven’t noticed, there’s a downside for these brave people. They have to develop heroic defence mechanisms to protect themselves from the harshness of reality and the envy of the lower orders. As an example, you might have noticed that whenever a celebrity or wealthy person does something obviously, demonstrably wrong, then any criticism levelled at them is dismissed as hate from the “haters”. Haters, you see, are the envious, poisonous masses who dream up all sorts of untrue perfidy in order to bring down their betters. It’s the only explanation.

It’s the only way to make sense of a reality that previously seemed to bend to your every whim. If things always seemed to go your way because you were powerful and top of your game, and that your self-directed wilful free ride somehow ends, it’s because of the haters. It can’t be because you did something wrong, ever. It can’t be that you were complicit in a corrupt system, never that.

dir: Ron Fricke

How do you even review something like this? It ends up saying more about the reviewer than the movie reviewed.

Samsara isn't a sequel to Baraka, the amazing, awe-inspiring 'documentary' from the 1990s that I've watched a billion times and whose soundtrack I've listened to even more. It's a continuation of Baraka, same director, same incredible 70mm film footage, same globe-trotting footage and same blissful lack of narration.

While I've seen Baraka so many times that it's become like the wallpaper of my skull, it exists in a pre-review time, before I was ever presumptuous enough to start thinking critically about films, about film as a medium, and, even worse, before I had the gall to start writing about them.

Samsara supplies me with a curious opportunity: How do you write about something that has no (obvious) narrative or story, which isn't really documenting anything other than how awesome-looking some bits of the world are, and which it's almost impossible to describe beyond saying stuff like "And then there's a shot of the Pope's arse, and then there's a narwhal, then there's a glacier, then there's a guy picking his nose at Roppongi Station, then there's a massive sand dune and then" which I could do for thousands of words and still get no closer to capturing its point or essence?

dir: Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost

2010

The lifeblood, the cornerstone, the fundamental currency of documentary filmmaking is credibility. The subjects, as in, the people being interviewed don’t have to necessarily be credible, since there are a lot of quality documentaries about dishonest or deeply delusional, misguided people (the Aileen Wuornos: Selling of a Serial Killer doco, Fog of War, Tyson, Mr Death: the Rise and Fall of Fred Leuchter Jr), so I have zero problems with unreliable interviewees.

The people who we have to trust as being credible are the ones making the documentary. Michael Moore squandered a lot of the goodwill his earlier documentaries engendered in the public once revelations as to the level of ‘creativity’ involved in putting together his various screeds, manipulating facts and the depiction of events to buttress his arguments, came out. Also, he's a bit of a hypocrite, but his documentaries have forcibly improved in the interim.

The people involved in this documentary don’t strike me as being very credible, honest or forthright in their depiction of events. It doesn’t completely torpedo the doco, because, after all, it’s about dishonesty. I just would prefer it if the makers could be a tad more honest than the fabulist at the core of this story.