Educational Media Reviews Online

A long corridor lined with pig carcasses provides an architectural starting point to the formal compositions in Our Daily Bread, a documentary shot in and around industrial high tech farms, slaughterhouses and greenhouses in Europe between October 2003 and October 2005. Filmed in 35mm and HD, each shot is meticulously composed to provide the necessary information on its subject without the requirement of an obtrusive voice-over narration. The film obviously has a specific point of view about the current state of mass food production and its relationship with employment indicated by the title which could easily apply to both. However, Nikolaus Geyrhalter sides more with the tradition of documentarist Frederick Wiseman’s eye for objective exposition than with the now-standard Ken Burns approach of visual support for a predetermined text. It is this detachment that allows for a more personal reaction to what is seen on the screen. For instance, there is a shot in the film of a beautiful field of yellow sunflowers against a clear blue sky. Then suddenly the pastoral beauty of the image is disrupted by the rise on the horizon of an airplane coming closer towards the viewer/camera while spraying insecticide. The effect of the plane is much like the scare tactic in Hitchcock’s thriller North by Northwest, yet in this case it is even more frightening. The meaning of the image completely changes within this one shot, as does the viewer’s reaction to it. The image is thus worth a thousand words.

It is impossible to view this film without citing Georges Franju’s 1949 documentary, Le Sang des bêtes (Blood of the Beasts). Franju found beauty in truth, no matter how violent, which he sought to provide as a lyrical counterpoint to the slaughter of animals in Parisian slaughterhouses. He chose black and white stock to create an aesthetic reaction to the subject matter rather than provoking an emotional one with the use of color. Geyrhalter manages to achieve the same reactions as Franju with the spectacular color saturation in many of his shots. His distancing effect lies in the framing and camera position which allow viewers to both look at the subject and look beyond it. Just as Franju’s barge cuts through the landscape, slicing it horizontally, Geyrhalter’s wagon of crates containing mass market vegetables cuts through a gigantic greenhouse in the same way. Just like Franju inserted beautiful shots of Paris between scenes of evisceration and bloodletting, Geyrhalter cuts in scenes of workers on meal breaks, eating sandwiches containing most likely the food they help process. Additionally, the pace of Our Daily Bread allows for the creation of individual narratives and subtexts in ways that Le Sang des bêtes does not, perhaps because it is a short while Our Daily Bread is a feature. I would suspect that these two films will be intentionally paired in the future as complementary views on food processing.

This film is highly recommended for library collections specializing in social and environmental issues as well as those supporting film studies/documentary curricula.