Baby Goat Movies

 

There is a certain type of art film -- quaint, rural, picturesque, mostly wordless, ponderous -- that will almost certainly get me mocked for liking, even among my most intellectual and erudite friends. These are little film-festival nuggets that rarely gain a wide audience. They can be a challenge to watch, at times, but the rewards can be sublime.

We have dubbed these films Baby Goat Movies, so named after our experience with a Santa Fe Film Festival entry from about a decade ago, "Le Quattro Volte," which prominently features a baby goat as central to its artistic aspirations, notably a fateful result for the little critter. That film has a kinship with the "Qatsi" trilogy of films by Godfrey Reggio, starting in 1982 with "Koyaanisqatsi" -- commonly referred to as a contemplative tone poem with a powerful visual flair. 

We followed up the Santa Fe viewing of "Le Quattro Volte" by dragging a friend to a screening at the University of New Mexico Film Center, and she shook her head, mystified, through most of it, and felt the need to flee halfway through for an extended oxygen break, missing the pivotal "baby goat" scene that shall long live in film infamy. I watched it again recently on the smaller screen, and our date this time appreciated the narrative. I was struck this time by how funny it is at times, especially that damn mischievous little goat. The film truly is a special experience.

Then, we made a triumphant return to an actual movie theater -- the venerable Guild Cinema -- to view this year's version of the Baby Goat Movie, this one starring a hog named Gunda.  Let's review both.

LE QUATTRO VOLTE (2010) (A) - We don't throw around the word profound too often, but this dramatized documentary about a remote rural Italian village drills down into the essence of life -- by analyzing the cycles of existence, from human to animal to vegetable to mineral and back to the start. (The title roughly translates to "the four times" or "the four turns.")

This unique brainchild of Michelangelo Frammartino follows the travails of a goat-herder who is old as dirt, which is an apt metaphor, because his secret to longevity is apparently a concoction he drinks every night, a mix of water and sacred sweepings from the local church. It is not clear if this elixir is meant to cure his hacking cough or cause it. 

Eventually the old man succumbs, and phase two begins with a start -- a goat falling out of the womb and splashing into the dirt. Now we follow the journey of the adorable baby goat, a little rascal among the spring class of upstarts. But a goat doesn't live forever, and if you thought this was a light-hearted animal romp, you will be mistaken. In a truly sorrowful and moving scene, our little hero will eventually end up, as we all do, feeding the tree -- in particular a mighty fir that will be felled, celebrated in a ceremony by villagers, and then converted to charcoal in time for winter so that it can heat the residents' homes.

This all sounds so dull and routine -- and you may find it tedious and pointless -- but Frammartino not only celebrates the natural elegance of the countryside, but he homes in on the fascinating details and rituals of daily life, both human and animal. There is hardly any dialogue, pretty much all of it incidental. It might be trite to say that a movie represents the true purpose of cinema, but I can't think of a better representative of the raison d'etre of the art form. 

GUNDA (A-minus) - I grew up with Arnold Ziffel, the boy-like pig who was treated like a son by Fred Ziffel on TV's "Green Acres." Now a half century later comes Gunda the wunda-pig, a sow burdened by a litter of cute little piglets, all the stars of an intimate black-and-white art documentary about farm life. It is shot by Victor Kossakovsky almost entirely from the pigs' ground level. After 90 minutes you can sense something resembling human emotion from Gunda, just like with clever little Arnold.

The opening scene focuses on the notched opening to the pigs' fenced-in pen, Gunda's exhausted face eventually overrun by the newborns clamoring and clambering over her and spilling out into the open space, perhaps for the first time. Much of the rest of the movie shows the mom either suckling the piglets (it nearly made my own nipples ache in empathy) or modeling the classic behavior of snuffling through the dirt.

At one point Gunda jams a heavy hoof onto the runt of the litter, and Kossakovsky lingers long enough to convey the peril but cuts away before we find out if the baby dies or whether it turns into the slow piglet hobbled by a paralyzed foreleg. About a third of the way in, the filmmaker suddenly cuts away to an extended scene of chickens -- including a one-legged clucker -- emerging from a cage and warily exploring their surroundings. The up-close camerawork reveals the birds' physical details, reminding us just how positively prehistoric they can seem. A later scene spends time with a herd of cows, who are constantly besieged by flying pests. I guess I never realized how cows tend to stand in pairs, facing in opposite directions, presumably so they can swat the flies away from the other's face with their tails. 

But then it's back to Gunda, still shot from snout level, whose piglets are gradually reaching maturity. We never see a human in the entire movie, but in the penultimate scene, a large tractor arrives to decide the family's fate and to engender an ending that wells with emotion. It dawned on me that the names of the animals featured in this film are used as pejoratives for humans -- pig, hog, chicken, cow -- but "Gunda" instead humanizes these beasts in an earthy way. I'm hoping that doesn't insult the animals.