Shot on a dairy farm and conjuring extraordinary performances from the people who live and work there, The Udder is a magic-realist tale which considers the increasingly technical process of automated milk production as the site of an elemental struggle between the forces of purification and corruption.

Esther Leslie: You made The Udder four years ago. It was the first of a trilogy: The Udder, Blood, Blue Roses (2014-15). These works continued an ongoing interest in bodily procedures and the invasion of biological systems. How did you begin to work on The Udder?

Marianna Simnett: My process began by isolating the organ of the udder. I started with the severed part: touching and cutting it, opening it up. I studied its anatomy, made drawings, began to understand its internal system. Then came the farm and the people, and since an udder does not have its own mouth to speak with, I decided to tell the story through the labour that surrounds it, along with a psycho-sexual tale of corruption. The girl was the farmer’s daughter, and a gift. There was never an official casting process, it was about incorporating who and what was already there and transforming this into fiction. The set was built using theatrical scrim, which can be opaque or transparent, depending on how it is lit. This material is porous, but also hermetic. It becomes a world which the mother and brothers were stuck in, while the girl could escape from it. The herdsman is a spiritual character, able of passing fluidly between the interior and exterior. When editing The Udder, I intentionally disrupted a linear timeline, starting each day with a new beginning, so that I forced myself to think in a loop.

EL: The Udder takes us as far as film can into sensoria. It evokes smell, the nose that knows; taste, the bubbling milkshakes; hearing, and its absence, its presence as music or the overheard words of boys, its absence for the cows’ overseer, the herdsman; touch, the pull on the udders, the stickiness of mud, and there is vision, drawing the eye because of beauty, seeing disease, being seen or evading it. When the udder is cut apart, I always have to look away, block my vision, but I feel it too, as it catches the edges of my eyesight, and I feel the cutting as if on my own skin. Are moving images here peculiarly adept at conveying the array of sensuous entanglements in the world, rather than being, as they have often been conceived, a form for the eye above all? How do you think—or make—a film as something for all senses? Could you imagine these connections, these sights and sounds, all being laid out so effectively and suggestively in any other medium?

MS: Film and video do have a peculiar ability to elicit physical reactions in the viewer, which trouble the senses beyond merely the eyes. I think they get between the cracks of our consciousness. Joan Jonas’ performances might be the only exception to pure film, but her works combine music, drawing, film and magic. VR teases us with potential but it’s not there yet. Jordan Wolfson’s Real Violence (2017), a computer generated VR piece of the artist smashing a pedestrian’s head with a baseball bat, toys with excesses of violence and sadism often described as ‘too much’, and Colored Sculpture (2016) pulls us between all senses but smell, though I recall fairground metal.

Linda Williams describes how horror, porn and melodrama are popular genres because spectators are "caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of body on the screen along with the fact that the body displayed is female”. Spectators have fainted, cried and clutched their necks or genitals whilst watching my films, possibly because they feel themselves under attack. In The Udder, the body on screen is substituted with a bisexual organ without a body, which I think adds to the confusion of the senses.

Cinema has always been concerned with distorting perception through non-linear editing, extreme close-ups, cutting, splicing—there is a violence to film’s glossary which indicates a threat upon the body. The boy’s whispers, the girl’s beauty, the herdsman’s falsetto, are as important as, say, the narrative of self-mutilation or the formal display of wibbling teats. In The Udder, I wanted to muddy the receptors, to allow for a type of contaminated experience.

EL: You associate contamination with perception or reception—a kind of neurological contamination in which it is impossible to sort out categories, sights, meanings. In The Udder, contamination also figures as a physical-biological and a moral category—the mud on the knees and clothes, the impugned innocence of the girl, the possibility of disease in the dairy. Contamination renders a mode of perception, but it also spreads an infection across the whole. Is to be contaminated a description of what it means to be affected (infected) by an artwork?

MS: Perhaps I am describing a type of perceptual agnosia, an inability to recognise or distinguish between categories. Contamination comes from the Latin con- tangere “to touch together” or “to elicit an emotional response”. It doesn’t necessarily corrupt. Emily Wardill is the best artist dealing with these ideas. She talks about the inherent desire of “things that want to be other things”; images as words; words as images; and the impossibility of this desire: “the line can’t be invisible, the film can’t be music, and the word can’t be concrete”. Her films contaminate the imagination by burying themselves inside you, splicing your synapses and joining them back together in the wrong order. Everything feels dislocated and split open.

The thing about contamination is that not only you have a susceptibility to the spread of disease, but you can also contaminate others. I think the audience can become vampiric, can learn to grow and influence the infection and develop a contamination between bodies in space and bodies on screen.

EL: There seems to be a heightened attention to language in this film, as in others of yours. We witness misunderstanding, translation and mistranslation, the languages of science, practical work, myth, magic, children. What seems to happen is that each language contaminates or meddles with the others and there is a collapse of registers—mastitis becomes chastity; moral impurity becomes physical dirt; nose becomes knowing, a metaphor cut off my nose to spite my face, threatens to become actualised, as it also finds an origin point in customary practices. Language forms a dark compact, as if it is at the centre of things and we are only glimpsing bigger alliances and forces here and there in our fractured tongues. As you build up a film, do the languages accrete, do you gather them willy-nilly and let them collide, or do you move through from one to the other quite systematically, seeking echoes and refractions?

MS: I start by honing an image or phrase and then it is a process of tending the mishaps and maturing disjunctions. When researching for The Udder, I discovered extraordinary links between John Milton’s Comus (1634), a masque on chastity, and an instructional book on mastitis in dairy farming. I also rely on memory and visions of childhood, phrases like “she said I was too beautiful to play outside” switch bacterial science into childhood psycho-drama. Everything gets noted along the way. “And then we are going to cut her up into a million bits” is verbatim from the herdsman’s terrifying four-year-old conspiring about me with her brother in the backseat of the car, unheard by her deaf father driving next to me. Then I am often thinking about fractures, foreignness, eras spilling into each other so that we jump cavalierly through centuries, re-incorporating antiquated words like chastity to perhaps repair them or offer up the chance for language to move beyond meaning. Idioms, hiccups, slurps and throbs rub together, alongside crisp scientific descriptions. I am by no means systematic, but I do become very receptive: I am in service of something bigger.

EL: There are strong affirmations of viscerality in your work. Here we have the udder, the cow’s body, the four teats, their vulnerability. There is also a certain abstraction, in that we do not see the whole cow in much of a meaningful sense, rather its udder, teats, and we learn that its life is enmeshed in computer systems, ones which meet its own desire, apparently, as it self-seeks the robotic milking pipes. But still The Udder foregrounds a physicality, even perhaps a strong sense too of the existence of labouring human bodies and minds, as well as the suggestion of female socially reproductive labour, as in breastfeeding. Is all this motivated by any sense of sympathy for the cow’s body and its performances, or is the slide from cow udder to human breast, cow work to human work, a kind of absurdity that should disrupt our anthropomorphic fantasies?

MS: I never intended to allegorise cows as women, or simply link farming with fucking. But I was motivated to fight against gender binarism and The Udder helped me communicate things I could not in words at the time. Maybe it was a disguise or a mask. There is a strange melancholy to my feelings towards the udder and its severance from the cow’s body. It reminds me of Balthazar, the donkey without the pathos, if that is possible.

I was all the time thinking about apathy and re/productive labour when making The Udder, and about Bartleby’s “I prefer not to”, and indifference. I was thinking about good health in service of labour and whether we are even capable of noticing when we are crawling with disease.

EL: There are other forms of labour on display in the film. The woman who oversees the scientific management of the farm, the herdsman, and the robotic plant—multiple types of labour, from managerial, to manual to automated. These modes seem to mesh together without friction. There is something very intimate about the film—the robotics are not as alienating as one might expect. Robot work co-exists with other types of labour rather than supplanting them. Children play—if sometimes sinisterly—amongst this world of work and it is a short move from the dairy to the kitchen, almost as if the old cottage farm were revived in a new form, against the mass combines of modernity. Is there also a contamination here of our dreams and nightmares of the world to come—our futures being multiple, intermeshed, manifold, pointing in as many directions as an overfull udder?

MS: It is not impossible to imagine the bleak quietude of everything existing all together at once. Real-time, junk-time, past and future time. Play collapsing into work, friendship as emotional labour. Sometimes the most tender aspects of life can feel contractual, or blended with the financial gains of capitalism. Ian Cheng is making important work about the nature of mutation, which can be linked to contamination, inventing simulated scenarios which ‘play themselves’. Simulation, he says, “is best applied when a system has too many possible dimensions for the human mind to create a narrative”. It will be interesting to know what happens to language if everything becomes intermeshed. Non-binary pronouns have resulted in pluralisation, from he and she, to they. I am also reminded of Martha Rosler’s haunting 1960/70s photomontage series “House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home”, where she brings images of the Vietnam War into proximity with idealised domestic interiors. A kitchen next to a mortuary, or a robot as a lover are not such wild thoughts.

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