Kelly Reichardt's First Cow (2019), a settler-colonial story, opens with the William Blake quote, "The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship," setting the tone for a narrative exploring the relationships between humans, animals, and the natural world. Against the backdrop of settler precarity on the Oregon Trail in the 19th century, human and animal lives are interconnected by the necessities of life. The film's cinematography emphasizes an ethics and aesthetics of seeing linked to notions of embodiment, materiality, and mediality. Inner-filmic constituents like characters, their bodies, and landscapes communicate through textual and visual qualities. These constituents engage in an intertextual dialogue that promotes an aesthetic reception that is haptic, visceral, and experiential, favoring non-binary notions of corporeality and subjectivity, thus preventing standard anthropological projections. First Cow’s cinematography ultimately reveals a film form that pays attention to the creature, as described by Anat Pick (Pick, 2011), a form that imagines cinematic worlds as organic or zoomorphic (Pick, 2015), rendering them non-anthropocentric. Moreover, Reichardt's aesthetics address the posthumanist critique of human exceptionalism (Braidotti, 2016) and reflect recent philosophical writing on anthropological difference—between humans, animals, and nature (Wild, 2015)—also advanced in recent ecofeminist gender studies within art discourse (Lettow & Nessel, 2022).

      This is apparent in the film's opening scenes, where a contemporary industrial container ship drifts slowly down the Columbia River in Oregon (fig. 1). Set against an idyllic landscape, the minute-long scene introduces us to the rhythmic inner life of the story, unfolding at a contemplative and decelerated pace. The cargo ship is framed by the visceral acoustic image of waves lapping against the shore and the vessel's engine. This uneventful scene offers time to (re)focus our attention on the interplay between the soft sound of water and the mechanical sound of the barge, which carries into the next scene; a long shot of a dog sniffing the riverbank. Reichardt's camera, always at ground level, captures the dog's owner, a modern woman in a nylon jacket, as she studies the soil, unearthing seeds and sticks. In a subsequent shot, we see the dog discover a skull. Although ordered away, he remains within sight and sound as she continues digging, revealing two human skeletons buried closely together, echoing a chthonic story of intertwined lives (fig. 2 and 3). This chthonic logic transitions us back to the film's colonial past, introducing the main character, Cookie, a mild-mannered man in his thirties, as he wades through a dense forest, a Western imaginary of what colonists expected to be paradise: fertile soil and crystal-clear water. The camera focuses on Cookie's worn mittens and fabric, absorbing the passage of time, as earthy sepia tones of green, brown, and red encapsulate him, blending his features with the ecology, emphasizing symbiotic kinship (fig. 4). He carefully picks chanterelles, placing them in his scarf before tasting one. A gentle piano melody adds nostalgia, transforming the scene into a spatial stage extending beyond the canvas. The idea of creatureliness finds full expression when Cookie’s hand rescues a lizard, heightening the connection between human and non-human lives, illustrating an embodied understanding of mutual survival (fig. 5). Through its visual language, First Cow compels the audience to engage with the entangled lives that form the backdrop of settler-colonial narratives, subtly critiquing anthropocentrism and advocating an inclusive understanding of agency across species.

      First Cow's privileging of a storytelling inspired by the immediate, visceral interactions between people, animals, nature, sounds, and their textures speaks to an organic cinematic language, a narrative that "is crying out from the soil" (Shoemaker, 2020). Such an aesthetic is tied to a medium-specific understanding of corporeality, inviting viewers to experience humans and non-humans through their material connections to their environment. These interactions are related to their practical actions in specific contexts in which time, place, and matter in the film are perceived as organic and geological, inspiring a narrative of "material-semiotic worlds, gone, here, and yet to come" (Haraway, 2016). In light of Pick's concept of creatureliness, thus, an important question to ask is how First Cow contributes to the growing body of posthumanist films. This body of work includes Ildikó Enyedi’s On Body and Soul (Teströl és Lélekröl, 2017), Elizabeth Lo’s Stray (2020), and Andrea Arnold’s Cow (2021). These films are interested in a non-dualistic cinematic gaze and favor physical over philosophical notions of embodiment. They unite the material with the aesthetic and ethical by dissolving the perceived boundaries between humans and nonhumans, re-centering our understanding of existence within the vital forces of the natural world.

Ina Karkani is a film studies lecturer at the Film Department at Freie Universität Berlin, where she received her Ph.D. in cinema for her thesis, "Animalizing Film Form: A Creaturely Approach to Film Aesthetics" (2025). Her research focuses on posthuman and decolonial film aesthetics, Native and Indigenous studies, film animal studies, feminist eco-critical studies, and affect studies. 'Ina Karkani works as a film curator at the Berlinale Film Festival's section Generation.

Bibliography

R. Braidotti, «Jenseits des Menschen. Posthumanismus», übers. v. K. E. Lehmann, in: Aus Politik und Geschichte. Der Neue Mensch, 37-38 (2016), S. 33-38.

Donna J. Haraway, Staying With The Trouble. Making Kin In the Chthulucene, Durhan / London 2016.

S. Lettow, S. Nessel (ed.), Ecologies of Gender. Contemporary Nature Relations and the Nonhuman Turn, London 2022.

A. Pick, Creaturely Poetics. Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film, New York 2011.

A. Pick, «Animal Life in the Cinematic Umwelt», in: M. Lawrence, L. McMahon (ed.), Animal Life and the Moving Image, London 2015, pp. 221-237.

A. Shoemaker, «First Cow», 2020, Retrieved November 18, 2024 from https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/first-cow-movie-review-2020.

M. Wild, «Tierphilosophie», in: A. Ferrari,  K. Petrus (ed.), Lexikon der Mensch-Tier-Beziehungen, Bielefeld 2015, pp. 355-357.

Filmography

Arnold, A. (Director). (2021). Cow [Motion Picture]. Halcyon Pictures / Doc Society / BBC Films.

Enyedi, I. (Director). (2017) Testről és lélekről [On Body and Soul] [Motion Picture]. Inforg-M&M Film KFT.

Lo, E. (Director). (2020). Stray [Motion Picture]. Magnolia Pictures.

Reichardt, K. (Director). (2008) Wendy and Lucy. [Motion Picture]. Glass Eye Pix / Film Science; (2010) Meek’s Cutoff. [Motion Picture]. Oscilloscope / Cinetic Media; (2019). First Cow [Motion Picture]. A24 / IAC Films / Film Science.