2 Instances of Cows as Expressions of Humanity in Cinema

Cattle. We've all seen them, pottering aimlessly in fields, making stupid noises, chewing grass. But do we take them for granted? Filing them in our heads next to green fields, barns, mooing and slightly intimidating farmers.

The opening shot to Bela Tarr's Satantango (1994) has to be one of the greatest in the history of film. It lasts nearly eight minutes, and its movements are dictated by cattle. A whole herd of cattle to be exact, who slowly exit from a dilapidated barn, in what looks like a large farm. The ground is a sea of mud, there are no leaves on the trees and an alien drone plays over the black and white images. For eight minutes we follow the cows as they migrate through the yard and out into a field, the camera slowly and patiently tracking along as they stumble and shunt each other forward in a grim tangle of hooves, drool and mud encrusted fur . Some attempt to copulate as they move, mooing and shoving. It's an utterly arresting shot, the farm yard seems changed into a primordial wasteland, home to this depraved huddle of beasts, wandering and confused, like a moment from a Cormac McCarthy novel. 

Satantango (1994)

The absolute lack of any humans push these cows to the forefront of the scene as characters; at one point a stray bovine trots in from camera right, braying after it's co-dwellers, trying to catch them up. The overriding feeling of the scene seems to be that of the human condition. Perhaps the very lack of people in this shot causes our minds to address them. It is such an overpoweringly hypnotic, grim tableau, that it takes on an aspect of something I can't quite find the right word for; Epic? Mythic? Monumental? None of these seem to fit such a dirty, miserable scene, but there is something sizeable happening which impresses itself upon me. The cattle themselves are such large beasts, and yet so common. We think of them as stupid, loud creatures, perhaps this is why they fit so well into this primeval setting, but their filthiness is also an attribute we, as humans, share with them. Bela Tarr's tour-de-force opening seems to be a short meditation on existence as a whole, a starkly honest portrait of life on this rock. Indeed the human characters of Satantango who enter soon after this broken down image of earth, are much of the time dishonest and cruel, not entirely unsympathetic (in fact Tarr shows a deep affection for his characters) but certainly world weary, selfish and physically mired in this harsh agrarian landscape.

In Terrence Malick's Badlands (1973), cows again take on this role as a sort of visual mouthpiece for what the characters fail to see in themselves or the world around them. In one short montage of Kit (Martin Sheen) working at the cattle ranch, which is over-layed with Holly's (Sissy Spacek) almost sociopathically naive voiceover, something intangible is expressed. We see cows heads poking out from between bars, looking down into their food troughs as Kit bounds along filling them up with hay. The cows eat, mulching the feed and staring forward, dead eyes and drool, while Holly tells us of the love Kit feels for her:

'He said I was grand though, that he wasn't interested in me for sex. He'd never met a fifteen year old girl who'd behaved more like a grown up and wasn't giggly. He didn't care what anybody else thought, I looked good to him and whatever I did was okay, and if I didn't have a lot to say, well, that was okay too'.

Badlands (1973)

At one point during this, Malick cuts to a cow on it's side in the mud, rolling around, eyes lolling, tongue hanging out it's mouth. It almost looks as if it's having fun. This utterly naive dialogue contrasted with these simple beasts, works contrapuntally, elevating the cows to become ciphers; their baseness seems to speak volumes about humanity, particularly the cow squirming around on the ground; Kit and Holly's delusions about love and life are ridiculous in the face of much more real afflictions such as hunger and madness. The cows become creatures of truth.

Terrence Malick always mangages to inject something 'of life' into his films; from the meditative stream of images that makes up his recent The Tree of Life (2011) right back to the much smaller scale Badlands. There is something in this moment with the cattle, something of life, of our existence, like in Satantango, that transmits something bleak and awful to us. So next time you're sallying past a field on a sunny day and looking down on those large stupid Freisians munching grass next to you...think again.