A matter-of-fact, nearly wordless documentary, Our Daily Bread's spare presentation of slaughterhouses and human consumption serves up food for thought.
A matter-of-fact, nearly wordless documentary, Our Daily Bread's spare presentation of slaughterhouses and human consumption serves up food for thought.
In the tradition of such acclaimed cinéma direct works as Jean Eustache's Le Cochon (1970) and Frederick Wiseman's Meat (1976) comes Nikolaus Geyrhalter's 92-minute documentary Our Daily Bread -- an ironic, detached cinematic glimpse of how the food we eat on a daily basis is picked, killed, mechanically processed, and packaged for human consumption. Geyrhalter resists having an overtly political or muckraking agenda; instead, his sequence of images acts as an extended visual meditation, a
plunge into the poetic mundanity of everyday existence. By singling out processes that we would otherwise take for granted or overlook, Geyrhalter calls our attention to the more absurd and surreal aspects of the food chain -- with the graceful and rhythmic, yet thoroughly strange and haunting, processes of automatization in the foreground. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi
The camera simply looks, with unflinching interest, as plants and animals are processed (in European industrial settings) into the food we eat. It's up to the viewer to distinguish tastes of horror, compassion, and awe at the efficiency involved.
Pic offers a tabula rasa in which some auds will see a horrifying indictment of the industry's cruelties, others a realistic depiction of mechanized farming, and some a soft-spoken tribute to manual labor.
While there's a sober beauty to much of the film, it does drag on a little and you find yourself wondering what exactly is the point that Geyrhalter is trying to make.
This isn't a film which tells you what to think, and it doesn't propose any alternatives to the status-quo, yet it has the gift of making you look at reality anew.
Compelling, distressing documentary about the weirdly mechanized world of industrial farms, slaughterhouses and other sources of mass-produced food has a surrealist edge that gives the film a dreamlike ambience.
It's as much conceptual art as dispassionate survey of the bloodless assembly line nature of the modern food industry, all process and work, automation and repetition.
"Our Daily Bread" is still a haunting and worthy effort that finds beauty in the ugliest of places and leaves us to dwell on the paradox, especially over our next meal.
Its great political function is its seeming objectivity, a silence in the face of the hypertechnologized food industry that is itself thoroughly interrogatory and demanding.
This is a documentary in the purest sense of the word. No narration, no interviews, just an unblinking camera watching how our food is produced. Probably not a good idea to watch it while you're eating. I actually felt shades of "The Matrix" while watching chicks being shot through conveyor belts and the assembly
line slaughter of pigs and cows. A very cold, impersonal process. And while the scenes of the slaughterhouses are certainly more visceral, even some of the scenes of vegetable farming gives one pause, especially the scene showing guys dressed up in what amounts to radiation suits as they spray chemicals on tomatoes that will eventually be consumed by humans not wearing radiation suits. Definitely an eye-opening look into exactly how our food makes it to our table.
December 20, 2007
J Dean
This is the best documentary I've seen on the production of food. The lack of any narrative enhances the film's visual impact and demands the viewer come up with his or her own conclusions.
While it may not be for everyone, 'Our Daily Bread' is an objective look at modern day agriculture that is an important
historical record and an eye-opener for anyone adventurous enough to watch.
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