Alex Lockwood’s 73 Cows is a beautiful portrait of a close love between a man and his cows, in which the director uses POV and composition to give each sequence of shots both a literal and metaphorical meaning.
He starts the piece with a match action sequence of Jay, the main character, making his way from his farm into his home. These shots move from wide, to medium, to close within the first minute – starting at a distance with Jay as a speck on his large farm plot, and finally zooming in on a photograph of his father in the kitchen window beside him. This sequence instructs the audience how to take in the rest of the story: Jay’s farm, this big plot of land that surrounds Jay, closely impacts him on a personal level.
The next few minutes introduce us to the primary conflict of the piece – Jay is in the business of beef farming, which harms the very animals he loves. Lockwood cuts back and forth between medium shots of Jay lovingly nuzzling his cows and close ups of the cows’ eyes. They say the eyes are the windows to the soul, and Lockwood uses these closeups to show us the humanity that Jay sees in these cows, making the audience empathize with Jay’s resistance toward killing them. Lockwood includes a wonderful wide shot at 1:50 to visualize the moment Jay says he can’t disconnect his feelings for the cows from his work. In the shot, Jay and the cows stand on opposite sides of a fence, Jay speaking to them lovingly despite the divide. This divide acts as both a physical and figurative one – despite Jay being human, and them animals, their love transcends the species divide, and endures the harm he causes them.
At 3:30, Jay talks about the guilt he feels for betraying the cows on the day he sends them off to be slaughtered. While he speaks, Lockwood shows us match-action shots of Jay preparing the transport wagon, oscillating back and forth between shots of Jay from inside the cage and from outside the cage. Visually, Lockwood tells us the story of Jay’s struggle between his need to make a living (outside the cage shot), and the feelings of the cows (inside shot). He also introduces close-up shots of Jay’s eyes as the story digs into the effects this is having on him, paralleling the earlier close-ups of the cows’ eyes, and again bringing to life this connection.
At 2:20, Jay uses composition to visualize the role of a new character, Katja. She has come to the farm to help Jay find a path out of this work and into something less emotionally challenging. Lockwood introduces her with a simple wide shot as she rounds a building and walks in the direction of two arrows that sit on signs by the building’s exterior. Not only is the shot gorgeous, but the movement toward these arrows acts as a nice metaphor for Katja’s purpose in helping Jay find his path.
Minute 6 marks a clear transition in the piece. The screen fades to black, after the two have decided to sell their cattle and start fresh. Beneath this narration, a crack of light appears on the screen, the door to Jay’s shed being cracked open. Lockwood was uniquely creative with this transition in a moment when many directors might just fade back into the next scene. I loved inching back into the next chapter as the door opened to reveal the next frame.
Finally, in the last chapter of the piece, Lockwood introduces mounting movements and camera movements for what feels like the first time. The shots at the beginning of the piece were simple, letting the characters move within them. Now, the camera makes motivated movements, in many cases utilizing drone footage (e.g. tracking Jay as he walks across an empty field looking for answers, moving past the two from overhead as they get to work on a new garden). Again, Lockwood does this with intention: as Jay and Katja begin moving forward along a new path, Lockwood moves with them.