The Cow’s Drama

1983
Country: UK
Duration: 38 mins
B&W,
Sound: Optical
Available Format/s: 16mm / SD Digital file

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‘Drama’ from the Greek: to do, act or perform . A composition in which a story is related by means of dialogue and action is represented with accompanying gesture, costume and scenery, as in real life, a play.
The simplest story, a cow in a field, a day passes, articulated by a sequence of simple actions. Another day passes and the actions only vary with the chance events that make one day different from another. Between the days three traditional songs about work, love and death are sung. These are stories too but of generalisation, metaphor and myth, whereas the cow’s drama follows only the surface pattern of events, the specific.
There is pleasure in the power of photography to reproduce objects of the real world, pleasure in cinema to reproduce moving objects, and pleasure in narrative at its most simple.
Is it possible to make a film with meaning but not one meaning, that is open to interpretation but cannot be misinterpreted, that is precise without using a language that only a few have access to? – P.B.

More works by Paul Bush

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