Kossakovsky, Viktor

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    At the Berlin Film Festival, Reconsidering the Power of Doubt

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    At a festival that is having an identity crisis, some of the best movies suggest that lacking certainty isn’t always a bad thing.Doubt gets a bad rap. Doubt is fussy and forgetful, whereas certainty strides around, all action and achievement. As a film critic, swift, declarative certainty is a quality I’ve learned to aspire to. And at times, to fake.But this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, which runs through Sunday, has been buffeted outside and in by political turbulence and organizational shake-ups. And so perhaps because the event itself is experiencing such uncertain times, the films made me reconsider — actually, doubt — my dismissive stance on doubt.Doubt is etched on Cillian Murphy’s hollow, striking features in Tim Mielants’s grave and moving “Small Things Like These,” which opened the festival last week. Based on a novella by Claire Keegan — whose “The Quiet Girl” was adapted into an Oscar-nominated feature in 2022 — the film is set in 1985 in the town of New Ross, Ireland, which is home to one of the Magdalene laundries, the infamously abusive church-run institutions to which pregnant, unwed women and girls were sent in shame to have their babies, who were then taken from them. In this case, the chief perpetrator of the abuse is Sister Mary (a frostbitten Emily Watson), who has clearly never had a doubt in her life. But the movie is really about Murphy’s quietly anguished coal deliveryman, Bill, and his deepening crisis of conscience.It takes considerable bravery for Bill to go against the unspoken rules of a community conspiring in silence. But as a man and a family patriarch, it is an avenue available to him. In Maryam Moghadam and Behtash Sanaeeha’s sweet and funny “My Favourite Cake,” the options are different for the Tehran-based widow Mahin (Lily Farhadpour), even if her spirit, too, is chafing against an oppressive religious social order. Her instantaneous love connection with a similarly lonely taxi driver challenges Iranian conventions in this glowingly performed rom-com that turns unnecessarily dark late on, when Mahin is punished for the act of gentle rebellion that the movie otherwise celebrates.Lily Farhadpour, left, in “My Favorite Cake,” directed by Maryam Moghadam and Behtash Sanaeeha.Hamid JanipourFor a more satisfying, if low-key, depiction of lonely social outcasts finding a spark of solace in each other, there is the Japanese director Sho Miyake’s lovely “All The Long Nights.” Mone Kamishiraishi plays Misa, whose debilitating, personality-altering PMS makes adhering to Japan’s rigid codes of politeness mortifyingly difficult. But the friendship she strikes up with a co-worker who is plagued with panic attacks becomes a source of mutual support: It will likely be one of the most touching platonic relationships of the moviegoing year.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Belovs’ Review: Another View of Farm Life

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘The Belovs’ Review: Another View of Farm LifeThe director of “Gunda” filmed two Russian siblings in the early 1990s.A scene from the documentary “The Belovs.”Credit…Film ForumDec. 17, 2020, 7:00 a.m. ETFor viewers charmed by the Russian documentarian Victor Kossakovsky’s “Gunda,” an immersion in the sights and sounds of farm life from something close to a pig’s-eye point of view, Film Forum is streaming an intriguing portrait of agrarian living that the director filmed in 1992.Likewise shot in black and white and just as hermetic in its purview, “The Belovs” retrospectively plays like a human-centered companion piece. It focuses on a sister and a brother — Anna, a double widow; Mikhail, left by his wife presumably long ago — who live together on a farm in western Russia. But it’s also a different kind of documentary. In “Gunda” and the preceding “Aquarela,” Kossakovsky turned his gaze on nature’s wonders. “The Belovs” finds him working closer to the direct-cinema tradition of the Maysles brothers (“Grey Gardens”), giving eccentric personalities the space to reveal themselves.“Why bother to film us?” Anna asks in “The Belovs.” “We are just ordinary people.” Initially, it’s tempting to agree. Kossakovsky shows Anna talking to her cows and even the wood she’s chopping. The film, periodically scored with eclectic, global song selections, delights in observing a dog run ahead of a tractor or torment a hedgehog.The human angle comes to the foreground when the siblings receive a visit from Vasily and Sergey, their brothers, and Mikhail’s ramblings about the Soviet system (which had just ended) threaten to derail a pleasant tea. Kossakovsky stations his camera in a corner, in a voyeur’s position. Later in the film, he cuts the sound during a nasty argument. As in “Gunda,” this is behavior to watch, not explain.The BelovsNot rated. In Russian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour. Watch through Film Forum’s Virtual Cinema.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      A New Breed of Animal Documentary

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyA New Breed of Animal Documentary“Gunda” and “My Octopus Teacher” present creatures as distinct beings with qualities that have nothing to do with humans.Victor Kossakovsky’s “Gunda,” one of a number of films that avoids presenting animals as objects of wonder or scientific curiosity.Credit…NeonDec. 15, 2020, 1:19 p.m. ETThere’s a moment in “Gunda,” an artful documentary about barnyard animals, that could take its place in a list of the year’s best scenes. The star, a sow with a bustling litter of piglets, has just experienced an unmistakable trauma. Pacing around the farm, she conveys a palpable agitation and emotion, before turning to look at the camera, pointedly.This isn’t the sort of thing we’re accustomed to seeing in nature films. It feels as if we’re getting a glimpse into Gunda’s inner life, and there’s no narrator telling us what the animal might be thinking. It’s emotionally engaging and feels distinctive to Gunda, instead of an illustration of the species or the planet as a whole.More frequently, a voice-over and a crystal-clear story guide our attention and define our understanding of what we’re seeing in a nature documentary. There’s no shortage of drama, to be sure, but usually it’s spectacular: tales of survival or mass migration. Even when we’re not looking at a panorama on the scale of “Planet Earth,” the greater context seems to overshadow the individual animal.But there are signs of new directions in how animals are portrayed in nature films. “Gunda,” which opened Friday via virtual cinema, feels like part of this movement, along with a different but also unusual film, “My Octopus Teacher” on Netflix. Both present animals as beings apart from us, not just objects of wonder or scientific study, and with qualities that are all their own, not shadows of human emotions.“Let’s film animals the same way we film humans,” Victor Kossakovsky, the director of “Gunda,” said he told his cameraman. “If you feel like they need space, let them be. If you feel they are comfortable, you come closer.”You’ve probably already had “My Octopus Teacher” recommended to you by friends or family: Over the course of a year, a South African naturalist, Craig Foster, becomes fascinated by and (let’s just say it) emotionally involved with a small octopus. We observe the vicissitudes of her life and moments of contact with Foster, who explains his experience in interview segments that have the candor of a therapy session.What makes the film stand out is that this is most definitely not a god’s-eye account of an octopus’s life. Foster’s ardent curiosity reflects a different approach to animals than that of the traditionally authoritative conservationist or guide.“They’re more or less letting the animals live, and they’re trusting the viewers more to make their own conclusions,” said Dennis Aig, a film professor at Montana State University, where he runs a program on nature filmmaking. “Even in larger blue-chip movies, this kind of sensitivity is starting to emerge.”Craig Foster and the cephalopod he’s drawn to in “My Octopus Teacher.”Credit…Netflix, via Associated PressBlue-chip documentaries like the dazzling “Planet Earth” series loom large in the minds of many viewers. But nature films have had an evolving lineage. Early 20th-century accounts of safaris and exploration gave way to Disney’s anthropomorphic appreciations of the animal kingdom. Eventually, a conservationist ethos and sense of scientific discovery took hold, with a perceived desire for spectacular shots (no doubt given a boost by the arrival of HD television and ever larger screens in the 2000s).Popular interest in these films has only grown — especially against the urgent backdrop of climate change — with viewership increasing and more nature shows than ever before. But a particular strand of filmmaking has persisted among the explorations and explications of nature’s mysteries, and its likely origins arose decades ago.“I think Jane Goodall started this work with her first early work on chimps,” Pippa Ehrlich, one of the two directors of “My Octopus Teacher,” said. “I think it’s been a slow change over time.”The nature programs that followed Goodall’s immersive research shared her perceptive evaluation of the chimpanzees’ personalities, emotional states and interpersonal relationships. It’s scientific in approach, but her open-minded point of view and profound insights into emotional intelligence inform the filmmaking. That paved the way for forms of engagement that do not mean solely to elicit sympathy but rather open up a new kind of space for the animals and their individuality, as in “My Octopus Teacher” and “Gunda.”“Hopefully the lesson is that, actually, everywhere you turn there are complex personalities in nature that just haven’t been documented yet,” James Reed, Ehrlich’s co-director, said.Films like “Gunda” and “My Octopus Teacher” join predecessors like “My Life as a Turkey,” a 2011 TV documentary in which a man raises a group of turkeys and susses out their traits and habits. “Kedi” (2017) might also be a recent influence, partly for its popularity, but also for its detailed accounts of Istanbul’s street cats. On the more conventional side “The Elephant Queen” (2019) seeks out an emotional intimacy that feels fresh and similar in spirit.In “Gunda,” we can learn about the particular cautious intelligence of a chicken picking its way into the grass, or spot personality traits among piglets in Gunda’s brood. “My Octopus Teacher” surprises many with the strangeness of its subject: a mollusk with barely distinguishable eyes, that demonstrates a kind of light-footed moxie and reserves of iron will.The filmmakers avoided giving the octopus a name (though they do refer to the animal as a female), specifically to sidestep the impulse to humanize her behavior — long a point of tension in nature documentary.“There’s no question that drawing comparisons with people has been a great convenience and sometimes very educational storytelling strategy,” Aig said. “But it is limited in many ways, because as our knowledge of science increases, we also realize that there are differences in why certain species do what they do.”The tendency toward portraying animals with nuanced, individual depth is driven by this growing knowledge and interest in animal intelligence, often across disciplines. New understandings of the planet recognize the coexistence of all animals, and, Aig said, younger audiences seem driven by an urge to relate to nature rather than exert a kind of mastery through knowledge.The moment opens up the possibility of seeking out and identifying thought processes particular to animals. Reed emphasized the importance of the feature-length focus on a single animal (or two, counting Foster) in “My Octopus Teacher,” and the camerawork that allowed them to show “how she felt the world, how she perceived it.”It’s a close encounter of a sort that’s becoming more apparent in nature documentaries — both physical and emotional.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Gunda’ Review: A Remarkable Pig’s-Eye View of the World

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s Pick‘Gunda’ Review: A Remarkable Pig’s-Eye View of the WorldThis astonishing documentary offers an intimate look at the lives of a sow, her rambunctious piglets, a one-legged chicken and a herd of cows.Gunda with one of her piglets in Victor Kossakovsky’s documentary.Credit…NeonDec. 10, 2020GundaNYT Critic’s PickDirected by Viktor KosakovskiyDocumentaryG1h 33mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.What do filmmakers see when they look at animals? Not much, apparently: For the most part, animals in movies are atmospheric background — a solitary cat in a window, a horse in a field glimpsed from a car. Occasionally they are symbols, like the many sacrificed bunnies of cinema (“The Rules of the Game” et al.). At other times, animals are cast as favorite companions, and plenty of dogs have played good boy onscreen. Yet even in films as distinct as “Old Yeller” and “Best in Show,” animals are usually in service to the human story, to our feelings and tears.The astonishing documentary “Gunda” offers another way of looking at animals. Sublimely beautiful and profoundly moving, it offers you the opportunity to look — at animals, yes, but also at qualities that are often subordinated in narratively driven movies, at textures, shapes and light. It’s outwardly simple: For most of its 93 minutes, the movie focuses on a sow and her piglets. In a short section we roam with chickens, including an impressively agile one-legged bird. In another, cows gallop into a misty field to graze, an interlude of pastoral dreaminess that invokes other representations — in novels and landscape paintings — yet is itself visually transfixing.“Gunda” is a passion project of the Russian director Victor Kossakovsky (“Aquarela”), who wanted to make it for years. (Funding movies is always difficult; doing so for documentaries like this is heroic.) His approach was straightforward yet ingenious. Shooting in black-and-white digital, with no music, voice-over or onscreen text or people, he opens an intimate window onto the lives of animals. His star, as it were, is Gunda, a prodigious sow of uncertain age who, when the movie opens, has just given birth to a litter of a dozen or so piglets. Although there’s a tag fixed to her ear, the roomy enclosure suggests that they’re not being factory farmed — a relief.Kossakovsky found Gunda on a Norwegian farm not far from Oslo, on what he has called the first day of casting. Once she was in place, he and his team constructed a replica of her enclosure that allowed them to shoot inside while remaining outside. As you soon discover, this setup gave them an intimate vantage point without, presumably, bothering the inhabitants too much. (Kossakovsky has said that he used a stationary disco ball — never seen, alas — to light the interior.) The filmmakers also laid down dolly tracks outside the pen so they could follow Gunda and her litter as they rooted, played, wandered and sunned outdoors.The film was shot in black-and-white digital, with no music, voice-over or onscreen text or people.Credit…NeonThe results are spellbinding. The movie opens with Gunda lounging (a preferred pastime) on a bed of hay, her body inside the enclosure and her head framed in the doorway. It’s pig heaven. Kossakovsky — who shared cinematography duties with Egil Haskjold Larsen — holds on the still shot long enough for you to admire its lapidary detail and compositional symmetry. And then: Action! As the camera pushes in, a piglet about the size of one of Gunda’s ears scrambles over her head with piping squeals and slides onto the hay outside. And then, as big mama rhythmically grunts, another piglet and then another scales her epic head and tumbles into the world.Not much seems to happen beyond squeals and adorableness. Yet the scene’s spareness is deceptive, which is true of the entire movie. Newborns of any species tend to be delightful, and the piglets — in their tininess and charming ungainliness — prove natural-born scene stealers. Their size helps draw you toward them and even causes you to fret. They’re so small and their mother is so very, very big. Kossakovsky may not be telling an obvious story but he is communicating oceans of meaning cinematically, using images to create cascading associations, starting with the shot of the piglets emerging from the dark door, a visual echo of birth itself.You stay with Gunda and her piglets for a while, during moments of quiet drama, blissful play and nail-biting tension. Kossakovsky shot the movie over a number of months, so the piglets grow by spurts, though never — meaningfully, as you discover — very large. Throughout the scenes of the pigs, and also those of the free-ranging chickens, Kossakovsky mostly keeps the camera at their height, rather than staring down. As Gunda plows her snout in the earth, you see how different the world, the dirt itself, looks from the Lilliputian angle of these beings. These images testify that to see, really see, through the eyes of others, four-legged or otherwise, is to be fully human.Kossakovsky isn’t waving any flags, but “Gunda” is a reminder that the resistance to showing animals in most movies reflects how we no longer look at them, to borrow a thought from the critic John Berger. It also speaks to our unwillingness to acknowledge our abuse of other creatures and, by extension, the natural world. It is, for instance, awfully easy to eat meat; in the developed world, it requires little thought, effort or money. It’s more difficult and certainly more inconvenient to think about the violence inherent in its production, including the environmental devastation. And so, cut off from the natural world, we largely classify animals as pets or meat.In his moving, prophetic 1977 essay “Why Look at Animals?,” Berger considered the tragic costs of humanity’s putative march toward progress and away from the natural world. “To suppose that animals first entered the human imagination as meat or leather or horn is to project a 19th-century attitude backwards across the millennia,” Berger writes. “Animals first entered the imagination as messengers and promises.”Animals were companions in our caves. We looked them in the eye and they looked back. Over time, we put animals — nature itself — at a greater remove. We stopped looking. Yet as Kossakovsky reminds us, even as he spares us the ghastliness of the slaughterhouse, we need to look at animals to honestly see what we have done.GundaRated G for gentle scenes and one very ominous truck. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. Watch through virtual cinemas.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More