The
American Honey director details the life of dairy cows with unflinching and empathetic precision
With this documentary, Andrea Arnold has created a kind of agribusiness pastoral about the daily life of cows on a working dairy farm. Her camera simply gets up close and personal with cows as they moo and trot around and give birth and stare with mysterious placidity into the camera – sometimes thumping up against her sound mic with an almighty bang.
Arnold immerses herself in the bovine world as far as she is able, getting alongside the cows in the farm during the calving process, with the shots of ropes pulling on little hooves emerging from the mother, an image which hasn’t changed too much since the days of James Herriot and All Creatures Great and Small. We see the cows out in the field on a bright summer day, and sometimes we see them out there at night, in an exotically conceived long shot: cows silhouetted against trees under a stark
moon. We hear human voices from the very beginning, often cheerfully calling the cows “girlies!” – no word could be less suitable for these mighty beasts. But we don’t see any people until the very end.