Andrea Arnold’s Movie Cow and Its Autoetnographic Evocations

Abstract

In this study, I try to understand the film Cow (2021) by British director Andrea Arnold from the director's perspective and evaluate it from an ecologist's perspective. In Arnold's films, which bear traces of her own life, there is an effort to make visible the efforts of women, non-human females and the invisible. For this reason, animals also become characters in her films, and Luma, the main character of Cow, was specially chosen for this. The Cow movie has strong messages in terms of animal rights and women's studies. The film also has innovative and exemplary features for ethnography. In the film, which has a documentary quality, the camera becomes the eye of the cow, and while this allows the cow to show itself, it also invites the audience to understand the world through the eyes of the cow. Instead of talking about it, as new ethnography tries to do today, the film shows that a collaborative production process is possible by standing side by side with it.In my article, I mainly try to understand the film, but the evocations of it also made me think about the cow-human relations of my own world. Thus, the article developed on two main axes: In the first, I focused on who the director was, the Cow movie, and what the main character Luma in the movie was talking about, while in the second, I looked for answers about how all of these things related to me. In the first part, I try to understand the movie through the expansion of multispecies ethnography or posthumanist (auto)ethnography. In the second part, I tried to examine the movie's relevance  to me with an autoethnographic approach through the movie's evocative images, while also deepening my thoughts on the relationship between humans and cows.Ultimately, the movie allows us to see and appreciate Luma's efforts in all their reality. Just as it made me think about my own human-animal relationships, I must say that the movie gave me the opportunity to reconsider these relationships for a better world.