Last week I saw an amazing film that I should have known
about earlier, because it was issued in 2005, and won an award at a film
festival in Montreal, and an honorable mention at a Toronto festival.
The film is called Our
Daily Bread, and is the work of a cinematographer --- that is, a complete film-maker,
cameraman, director, writer, you name it --- Nikolaus Geyrhalter. It is a film
which purports to be about the industrial processes of growing and processing the
food we eat, but it is certainly more than that, for it involves questions
about our relationship with other species, about human cruelty and indifference
to the suffering of animals, about the unbearable work some humans are called
upon to perform, about our mastery (and some would say, abuse) of nature
through the imposition of mono-agriculture over fields as large as the eye can
stretch, and many other peripheral but important aspects of life. It is, in my
opinion, a work of absolute genius, this film, eschewing as it does any
commentary or hard information and depending entirely for its effects, its
story and its impact upon the images Geyrhalter has coaxed from his camera.
Most of these images are shown in long long holding shots
that emcompass whole huge fields of growing plants, immense conveyer belts
inside factories in which animals are processed into food, so that we are able
to follow the process from the enclosure of the animals, through the grim
process of their killing, and on to the even grimmer process of their
evisceration, dismemberment, and even packaging, and then to the clean-up. One
thing that amazed me is that all this requires huge quantities of water which
is used in every process from the growing of plants, of course, through to the
cleaning up of the immense quantities of blood and other messes that are
expelled by newly eviscerated animals.
The workmen involved are usually not many, and they seem
--- of course, I suppose one should add, since they are so accustomed to what
they are doing --- completely unconcerned, unemotional, even indifferent to the
results of their various actions.
For example, in one mind-blowing sequence, a man (or was
it a woman?) standing beside a moving conveyer belt that holds the corpses
of hundreds of animals moving along past
him (or her?) --- anyway, this person is operating a big machine that is,
essentially, a chainsaw, which he or she moves forward repeatedly into the
centre of the animal corpse, opening a slit through its entire torso, from
which, in every case a whole parcel of its innards flopout as the animal passes
on. The next sequence shows the innards falling on to a table on which a woman
straightens it up, cuts off certain inconsequential parts that she directs into
a chute while sending the innards on for further processing along the way.
One of the most extraordinary sequences is a long shot in
a room full of chickens which share it with a slowly but inexorably moving machine
that runs into them, picks them up one by one, sends them down a hatch and out
into a box where a worker straightens them up before closing the box off
(hopefully without catching their heads as she closes the box, which
unfortunately she did on one occasion. Never mind, it was treated as of no
consequence).
One woman was shown sitting at a table with a pair of
shears with which she cut off a certain part --- was it the head? --- of a
passing parade of chicken corpses, monotonously, hour after hour, probably for
eight hours a day, or possibly even more.
And then, for a finale, we were shown how a large animal,
a steer or a cow, was corralled into a huge drum, its head with nowhere to go
but into a space designed to hold it while a person with a stun gun of some
kind administered a shot that killed the animal stone dead on contact. It was
these animals which when eviscerated, emitted a veritable river of blood washed
away to the holding ponds, or wherever the blood is directed.
Not a word of commentary, not a smidgen of information, no
reference to the where, who or why, was offered from beginning to end of this
hour and a half film which made it, I have to say, all the more effective. No
one was being charged with cruelty or
indifference; no one was accused of anything: we were simply shown one
part of our vaunted industrialized culture, the culture that has enabled us to
feed billions more people than ever before.
I kept wondering how they got permission to film these
processes in their factories. My experience of private companies has been that
they are almost paranoid about cameras even approaching their plants, and I
felt sure no company in Canada, or probably in the United States, would ever
have agreed to such filming.
I had to go to the internet for information about this. The
film-maker, Geyrhalter, said some companies were proud of their plants and the
processes they used, and willingly agreed to their being shot. But others (as I
know they are in North America), were more suspicious and guarded.
The internet provides a list of 25 companies, all named, in which the filming
was performed, in eight separate countries of Europe.
I remember once being surprised when I was making a film
in mid-northern Quebec about a farming family half of whose members had
emigrated to northern Alberta. The subject of the film had nothing to do with
the huge barn in which the family kept its milking cows throughout most of the
year, certainly all through the winter, apart from its being their workplace.
Their animals were kept in stalls with a chain around
their necks, restricting their movement to just sitting down or standing up.
They were artificially impregnanted, and when ready to deliver a calf they were
taken to the end of the barn, from which, after delivery, they were returned to
their stall. The process struck me as totally inhumane, although I suppose one
might have argued that they were at least sheltered from the worst of the
winter.
When I got to Alberta, the other branch of the family, 25
years there, was still living in a small house but had half a million dollars
of farming equipment in their barn, which they used to pursue their
monocultural production of wheat. They
didn’t grow anything else on the farm, but bought their eggs, meat and other
food from the supermarket in the nearby town.
It raised the question in my mind whether we are not
setting ourseves up for a massive fall with our monocultural methods of abusing
nature. And this film, Our Daily Bread, certainly
poses that and many other questions as well.
Everyone should see it.
But I think the last word should go to Geyrhalter himself,
who said in an interview:
“There were some people at (some) companies who see the consumer’s
alienation from food production as a problem because consumers have no idea
about their concerns. On the other hand lots of companies are afraid of
publicity and what a film like this could show. After all, there are constant
scandals, and they might think: If it’s going to create a scandal, then they
should do their shooting at the
competition!
“But the point of this film isn’t to uncover scandals. I wanted to
collect and make accessible images from this branch, this world, in as objective a manner as possible. What makes
it fascinating are the machines and the sense of what’s doable, the human
spirit of invention and organization, even at close quarters with horror and
insensitivity.
“Plants and animals are treated just like any other goods, and smooth
functioning is extremely important. The most important thing is how the animals
can be born, raised and held as efficiently and inexpensively as possible, how
to treat them so they’re as fresh and undamaged as possible when they arrive at
the slaughterhouse, and that the levels of medications and stress hormones in
the meat are below the legal limits. No one thinks about whether they’re happy.
If you want to call that a scandal, which is more than justified, then you have
to take your thinking one step further. Then it becomes the scandal of how we
live, because this economic, ‘soulless’ efficiency is in a reciprocal
relationship with our society’s lifestyle. There’s nothing wrong with saying,
‘Buy organic products! Eat less meat!’ But at the same time it’s a kind of
excuse, because we all enjoy the fruits of automation and industrialization and
globalization every day, which affect much more than just food.
“The film’s title, OUR DAILY BREAD refers to our cultural history, and
because of the religious association the effect’s even more crass considering
how people treat their resources and fellow living beings. I always take the
thought further, and the next line would be: And forgive us our sins. But it
also refers to earning our daily bread, the normality of this life, the
question of how people do their jobs, and how this has changed. Who runs the
machines, who controls the processes - and who digs in the ground with their
bare hands or picks the cucumbers? How is our daily bread distributed in
contemporary Europe?”
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