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This is how Gunda sees the world

Mariken Lauvstad
Mariken Lauvstad
Mariken Lauvstad (b. 1983) is a freelance playwright, teacher, writer and critic. She has a degree in performance theater from the School of Stage Arts (Denmark), PPU in theater education from the Oslo Academy of the Arts and a master's degree in comparative dramaturgy from the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
ESSAY / In what way can the human narrative of oneself be challenged by, for one hour and thirty-three minutes, looking at the world through the gaze of a pig?




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

A low-key black-and-white documentary about the Norwegian sow Gunda from Grøstad farm is triumphant worldwide. The reviewers are full of praise, the audience excited, and after being shown at one prestigious film festival, the other was Gunda nominated for an Oscar. A sow from Vestfold was close to bringing home first Oscar for a Norwegian-produced documentary. But what is it really about Gunda who touches so strongly? How can a slow and lingering portrait of a breeding pig get such a huge appeal?

The film about Gunda starts with a precisely cut image section where we see her lying flat and heavy in the hay, with her head sticking out of the opening in the bin. Immediately one becomes aware of the animal's calmness and striking beauty where it lies, with the snout's beautifully curved nostrils, and the large ears. The pig apparently rests, breathes heavily and relaxed, but soon we understand that she has just been through the birth of a large litter of piglets. The fragile and stuttering crabs appear one by one behind her. The image composition, with static camera and high photographic quality, creates a kind of peek-a-boo effect. Overall, the film is experienced as a montage of secret windows into an unknown universe that gradually becomes visible to us.

The art of "seeing"

Why look at animals? That is the question posed by the legendary art critic John Berger in his 1977 essay of the same title, Why Look at Animals > (Penguin, 1980). The way we humans understand ourselves in relation to nature is reinforced and maintained by cultural narratives, Berger believed. An already existing distance is constituted through the way we look, and not least through what we never see because we have turned our eyes away for cultural reasons. Throughout his writing, Berger was concerned with promoting awareness of the many factors that affect us when a narrative is created. Above all, he was interested in the question: Can we see the world in a different way than we do?

The director behind Gunda, the Russian filmmaker Viktor Kossakovsky (b. 1961), grew up as a city boy in St. Petersburg. But in the winter, when he was four years old, he lived for a few months with relatives in the country. It was freezing cold, so cold that the little piglet on the farm would have frozen to death if it had to be outside. Thus, for a period, it had to move into the main house with the family. The piglet, Vasja, quickly became Viktor's best friend. They played all day. But when the New Year celebration came, the boy discovered to his great dismay that it was Vasja who was served for the gala dinner. He was crushed, and the experience was to change his view of the relationship between humans and animals for the rest of his life.

As an adult, Kossakovsky has made a large number of documentaries, but the dream of a film depicting the animals' perspective would be the most difficult to realize. Kossakovsky refused to make vegan propaganda or a sentimental film that humanized and romanticized animals. He also did not want to focus on animals that in human eyes are already cute and lovable, such as pandas and dolphins. What Kossakovsky wanted was to make a film about some of the creatures we share the earth with, but which we do not usually see, and thus do not care about. By bringing the film audience close to these animals, perhaps the reflections would come by themselves: Why is their life so foreign to us? How has it become like this? But funding was lacking. It took a full three decades before a production company understood Kossakovsky's project and finally took an interest.

What is a pig?

Verden huser 654 million pigs, yet they exist hidden from us. We are familiar with the pig as a stencil and idea, as if the animal were a kind of one-dimensional line drawing with a curly tail. But such an understanding exists without any connection to what a pig really is. For what is a pig before it becomes sausage with a pocket, a violin string, the skin of an American football or components in candles, colored pencils and linoleum floors?

We still live by them, but we no longer live with them

Pigs are considered to be among the world's most intelligent animals. They are social, learn from each other, have long-term memory, have a wide range of emotions and can sense whether a person wants them good or bad. Once upon a time, pigs were wild, but today very few of them are allowed to roam free like Gunda; rummage curiously in the ground with the nostrils, cool down the body in mud when they need it, or eat plants they find themselves. The best argument for taking care of a pig is, of course, the pig itself. But if the pig's life no longer has any independent value, if the pig is deprived of its intrinsic value as a consequence of cultural perceptions and is only interesting to us in terms of its usefulness, this argument is nevertheless invalidated. The absence of a physical and sensory connection to the food we eat can ultimately make animal welfare an abstract issue.

Although there has probably always been a degree of dualism in the relationship between man and nature, the connection was once much closer. In early cultures, animals and animal symbols were ubiquitous in mythology, language and thinking. According to Berger, four thousand years ago the Hindus imagined the earth carried on the back of an elephant and the elephant balancing on a giant turtle. Today, both turtles and elephants are among the world's most endangered species; the elephants due to habitat destruction and the ivory industry, the turtles due to human desire for their eggs, meat, skin and shell. Thus, the anthropocene was to add a new meaning to the image of the Hindus: the weight of the human world on the backs of animals became one day too heavy.

I Why look at animals Berger describes how man, the moment he rose above nature, became a threat to animals' ability to exist freely and independently of us. Measured in biomass, humans today make up a third of all mammals, while our agricultural animals fill the last two. 96 percent of all biological life on the planet thus consists of either humans or the animals we have bred. At the same time, most of us have moved away from the animals and into the cities. We're still alive av them, but we no longer live with them, on the contrary, they are brought to us as ready-made resources from a periphery with which we have in many ways lost contact. This distance between nature and culture socializes us out of the ecological context we are actually part of. We have made the animals slaves, Berger claims. Many people will probably oppose such strong claims: An animal cannot be a slave. But if we look at the definition of the word slave – which means to be owned by another, forced to obey the person and only recognized by virtue of its instrumental function – then the term is perhaps not so misleading after all.

What does an animal see when it looks at humanity?

In the film about Gunda, Kossakovsky gives the pig her unreserved focus and films her at eye level. Purka's gaze wanders the camera lens several times. She's looking at us. A lingering, focused gaze. It is impossible to know what she is thinking, of course, but a focused look reveals inner life. Behind the eyes are themselves the secret Gunda.

One of John Berger's main points is that, by meeting the gaze of the animal and dwelling on it, we not only potentially re-establish a forgotten and structurally broken connection between man and animal, but become conscious of ourselves in the eyes of the animal, and consequently also what we do against the.

Kossakovsky refused to make vegan propaganda or a sentimental film about man-made and romanticized animals.

Kossakovsky's own view as a filmmaker is also interesting in this context. Even without any clear narrative, narrator's voice or music, there is one noe Kossakovsky wants us to see in the film about Gunda, and this noe is rooted in what he himself has seen and experienced. Without his childhood friendship with the piglet Vasya, would Kossakovsky have been able to look at Gunda in the way the film testifies? Or perhaps more precisely: Would he even get the idea for such a film, and in addition stuck to it for three decades with rejections from production companies?

Victor kossakovsky
photo: Ainara_Vera

In both the field of science and the field of art, more and more professionals are arguing that humans' culturally produced narratives about themselves are an obstacle to a necessary change in the interests of nature and biological diversity. The myth of man as almost independent of and elevated above the global diversity of species has proved fascinatingly tenacious. On the one hand, we know that man cannot exist independently of nature, on the other hand, the notion that we can still have, has remained virtually unchallenged since industrialism in the 1800th century. The way we treat nature has not changed, rather it has gotten worse. The Swedish physicist, author and critic of civilization Helena Granström describes in What it once was > (Nature & Culture, 2016) human predation on natural resources can be regarded as structural violence in two stages: first in the form of the destruction itself, and then through our massive indifference to having committed it. Historical and economic structures give rise to specific cultural narratives, which in turn lead to political decisions, which in turn maintain the same structures – and this whole loop constitutes the defining narrative of civilization. Civilization is thus an intricate web in which man himself is trapped, since all aspects of it are created by us. That the notion of human superiority still exists may be due to the fact that the moment of realization is blocked by the project of civilization and all that we have built up. The truth has too high a cost, even when it is our only hope.

The paradox of civilized man is that he defines himself as the opposite of the barbarian, while civilization, seen from a natural perspective, is in many ways built on structural barbarism. But how we relate to the narrative of our own conduct on earth will be crucial to the outcome of history. The only challenge is that people also have full control over the presentation of history. Since the victims of the story, ie the animals and nature, are deprived of all agents (from Latin aged, to act), our story stands unchallenged. Thus, we are free to undermine the ethical problems of our actions, and by all accounts we are very prone to beauty painting and story rewriting. In this sense, the climate and nature crisis is just as much a crisis of cognition. In our own eyes, we are still the heroes of the story. Belief in human superiority and creativity still dominates as so limitless that it will be able to save us from any misfortune we ourselves have caused. But not even humanity can push the boundaries of the outer edges of its own world.

An encounter with the lost

In order for us to bring about a social upheaval in the interest of nature, there is more and more evidence that it is the way we understand ourselves in relation to nature that must be changed first. This shift is in many ways an impossibility, since man cannot leave his own starting point as a human being. Nevertheless, it is an impossibility we should strive for. Both biologists, climate scientists, artists and art theorists are now arguing for it the non-anthropocentric perspective. This view has been promoted by art theorists Donna Haraway, among others in Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene (Open Humanities Press, 2015) and Una Paul-Choudhury in Face to face in the Arctic with a terrifying new sublime (Sumit, 2016). They demand that our human starting point be anchored in a more holistic understanding of biological coexistence. Both Haraway and Paul-Choudhury argue that a shift in perspective towards non-human interests is necessary in order to carry out an ecological shift that, in the end, will be in our own interest as well. This may, for example, involve dramaturgical measures in which one tries to take the perspective or position of animals or organisms, or that one removes man as the premise for the narrative. IN Gunda Kossakovsky uses both of these techniques. Gunda is the undisputed subject of the film. By virtue of her individuality, not only she but also her special perspective on the surroundings is recognized. It's a lot because of this that Gunda becomes so alive for us. But not only that, because we adjust to the animals' own pace, is obviously a conscious choice: The camera dwells on small events and details, things have to take the time it takes, we have to adapt. Since the film insists on slowness and demands our acceptance of it, we gradually adjust the way we look. This brings us to the third and most important measure Kossakovsky uses, namely to linger.*

Can we see the world in a different way than we do?

I Building, dwelling, living. How animals and people make themselves at home in the world (Routledge, 2000) The British professor of social anthropology Timothy Ingold discusses the relationship between lingering and creating or constructing. The title refers to Martin Heidegger's legendary text Build, Home & Living, Think (1967, English Building, Dwelling, Thinking 1971) – where Ingold builds on Heidegger's critical analysis of the shadowy sides of modernism. The term "dwelling", translated from English dwelling, must here be understood as a state of attentive observation and reflection, a precursor to the creation of something. Originally, the process took place with nature as a starting point. It was nature's formations, logics, materials and textures that man once studied before we drew new conclusions, got new ideas or made new discoveries. But when humans today transform and construct our world, we no longer do so with nature as a starting point, but based on what we already have has built and shaped, that is, our own complex societies, technologies and infrastructures. Thus we move further and further away from the premises of nature. This division is in a sense an inevitable ripple effect of modernism, yet it has fundamental consequences. The gap between nature and culture has led to man now almost existing in a time we ourselves have produced, an ever-increasing pace of construction and production that accelerates steadily – at the expense of nature's need to heal and restore itself. The question is whether we, since we no longer take the time to dwell or reflect on the costs of what we produce, are at all able to take on the consequences of this production.

To linger, and to look again

Berger, Ingold and Kossakovsky meet in that all three consider the connection between consideration and value to be absolutely essential. We humans are first and foremost curious about what we attach value to, but what we attach value to is at the same time culturally conditioned. For example, it is very likely that most of us do not walk around and are terribly curious about pigs. We humans are seldom curious about what we do not consider culturally particularly valuable, but we can easily become curious by dwelling on what we see. There is thus a high probability of being both fascinated and filled with a new form of respect and recognition of the pig's being if you take the time to linger with it for one hour and thirty-three minutes. Perhaps this process, which reformulates the value of nature, is an alternative to the prevailing? Maybe this is where we need to go?

We live in a world created by man. But higher and higher the earth cries out to us: I'm not theirs. The need to reintegrate man as part of nature's cycle, and not as a body elevated above it, is precarious. The story of people must change, and the foundation of the new story must be that we are as at the mercy of the earth as the earth is of us. Thus, we return to John Berger's question: Can we see the world in a different way than we do?

The relationship between what we to be and the we know, has never been clarified, Berger claimed. There may be a touch of hope in that wording. The film about Gunda has, for example, due to its cinematic and artistic qualities, become a bridge that extends over the high wall we have had built between civilization and nature. After the film, we see the world a little differently. But for how long? With all its qualities, it is nevertheless only one film against the great narrative that is the market liberal narrative that permeates our societies. In that adventure we dream of the material wealth – not the wealth of nature. Here it is skyscrapers, not mountains, that are magnificent. Here, a beautiful and vibrant pig has been transformed into a vacuum pack of chops in a freezer counter – among hundreds of other identical chops.

But if we begin to challenge the conditions that shape our gaze to a greater extent, how will this be overtime could change the way we look? According to Berger and Ingold, we humans have not created our world as it is by virtue of our nature as a species, but by virtue of our notions of what is possible. How much is it not then, in the world of nature, we humans can look at in a completely different way and from completely different premises? Our view of nature can change, and such a changed view can again change the world. But we need more stories like Gunda, many more. So many that we will never be able to look away again.

 

* The concept of dwelling (delusion) is difficult to translate precisely, since Ingold is based on both Heidegger's concepts good (to linger) and Jakob von Uexkülls Environment (introduced in the text Wanderings through the environments of animals and humans.

See also: A linguistically dumb description

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