Charlotte’s Web meets slow cinema in Gunda, a wordless, music-free, black-and-white documentary detailing a mother pig’s days on a farm in Norway.
Directed by Viktor Kosakovskiy, the movie consists of carefully composed, static shots of the sow as her piglets tumble about her, as well as moments when the camera roams among the animals a few inches above the ground. We also meet a group of wandering chickens—including a one-legged member of the flock—and a handful of cows who solemnly peer, portrait-like, into the camera. The sound design captures an astonishing array of grunts, squeals, and squeaks, as well as more perceptive details: buzzing flies, say, or the rustling of hay.
It’s all incredibly immersive, to the point that these everyday farm animals—the sort that usually only receive a passing glance—begin to seem fascinatingly alien. The chickens cautiously exploring the nearby forest floor are like interplanetary explorers; the piglets constantly sucking on the sow register as parasites. (Gunga is a meditative experience, but it’s not idyllic.)
For most of the film’s running time, Kosakovskiy resists the temptation to manipulate the footage in order to ascribe narratives to otherwise benign vignettes. But the final 10 minutes or so—which I won’t spoil—hit with a devastating force, partly due to the way Kosakovskiy lets the “scene” play out. E.B. White granted the reader small mercies in Charlotte’s Web; I can’t quite say the same of Gunda.
