From Eyes Open to Eyes Closed

A Conversation with Andrea Arnold

Abstract

This interview with writer and director Andrea Arnold reflects on her documentary Cow (2021) in the wider context of Arnold’s distinctive body of work. Although Cow is her only documentary so far, it engages many of Arnold’s recurring themes and aesthetic sensibility. We discussed Arnold’s deep attachment to animals, in life and in art, dating back to her childhood; the importance of place and environment in her filmography; and the role animals play in her imagination as beings at once vulnerable and courageously yearning for freedom. Arnold resists theorizing her own work and described filmmaking as an instinctive, forward-moving process. We spoke about the tensions in her films between tenderness and toughness, beauty and cruelty, and between the commitment to not look away and the violence that such looking invariably yields. For Arnold, Cow is not an exposé or an animal rights film. Still, in its unflinching depiction of dairy’s repetitive cycles of calving, lactation, separation, impregnation and, eventually, death, Cow becomes a searing portrait of industrial animal agriculture.