Luma's Labor

While the emergence of the multispecies documentary has created new possibilities for representing animal consciousness on-screen, this article argues that these global developments must be understood within specific national contexts. Andrea Arnold's documentary Cow (UK, 2021) demonstrates how new realist techniques—evolved from Britain's social realist tradition and transformed by female filmmakers in the twenty-first century—offer distinctive approaches to documenting nonhuman experiences. Through analysis of Arnold's observational strategies, including handheld camerawork, intimate sound design, and embodied cinematography, the authors contend that the film adapts new realism's concern with class consciousness and gender dynamics to examine industrial agriculture's interconnected forms of exploitation. By following Luma, a dairy cow, through four years of repeated pregnancies, calf separations, and routine milking on a Kent farm, Arnold reveals the systematic commodification of maternal bonds and reproductive labor within contemporary British agriculture. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from animal studies, feminist film theory, and British cinema, the article argues that Cow's engagement with domestic traditions—including irreverent humor, pastoral imagery, and working-class sensibilities—demonstrates how national cinematic forms can illuminate international systems of biopower and commodification while maintaining their cultural specificity. This article reveals how Arnold's phenomenological approach creates unprecedented intimacy with nonhuman subjects while preserving the political critique that defines both British social realism and its evolution into new realism

Biopower · Commodification · Embodied cognition · Feminism · Politics · Realism · Social realism · Undoing · Wonder · Cinema and Media Studies · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions