January 20: Kelly Reichardt’s Gastro-Aesthetics

This talk examines cinematic figurations of food, what I am calling the “gastro-aesthetics” of cinema, in Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow (2020). Taking its cue from the philosopher Simone Weil’s analogy between looking and eating, gastro-aesthetics thinks through cinema’s dual impulse to look and to eat, to preserve and devour the world within and beyond the frame.

Tensions between looking and eating emerge in Reichardt’s approach to farmed animals, whose agency is undermined, whose labour is largely invisible, and whose bodies or products are objects of consumption. In First Cow, aesthetic and gastronomic consumption converges in the figure of the cow as an image and as a source of milk. How should we think about the visual consumption of images of dairy consumption?

From River of Grass (1994) through Wendy and Lucy (2008) to First Cow, animals are ubiquitous in Reichardt’s films. Yet while dogs often display autonomy and agency, exemplifying Reichardt’s signature aesthetics of contingency, farmed animals remain—in film as in life—sources of value-extraction. The role of dairy in First Cow, I claim, conjoins the film’s culinary palate and its artistic palette. The gentle sociality at the heart of First Cow and the film’s stylistic and narrative openness are subtended by the agricultural practices that control and consume animals. In the face of Reichardt’s attentiveness to the nonhuman and to the subtleties of interspecies entanglements, this first cow (the first of an endless array of anonymous cows in America’s dairy industry) remains the film’s obscure source of violent extraction.