Documentary Week: Our Daily Bread (2005)

2 years ago

Documentary Week: Our Daily Bread (2005)

by Sarah Malone

No narration. No David Attenborough voice, its breathless hush hinting that we should be excited, no Will Lyman (the Frontline narrator) sonorously underscoring that this is some serious shit. No establishing shots of landmarks, orienting shots of maps, or subtitled place names. No beginning or end or sense of one segment necessarily following another.

Instead, long tracking shots. Fields. Feeding pens. Conveyor belts. Cows, chickens, pigs, fish, row crops and nut trees, so numerous that individuals become impossible to distinguish.

No music guiding our emotions. Instead the sounds of animals—at times terrified, at times content, at times cryptic—and the indecipherably low voices of occasional workers who never acknowledge the camera, and the clunk and whir of combines, fans, and disassembly lines. Chicken, cattle, and pigs are trundled along conveyor belts. There is little size variation among them. Fish are sucked translucently though some kind of tube. Animals are conveyed towards enclosed metal chambers uneasily but docilely. They leave the chambers as carcasses, are needled open and sliced. Their shapes become steadily less recognizable as those of animals. Supermarket steaks, sausages and cutlets become apparent.

Our Daily Bread (Unser täglich Brot), Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s 2005 documentary tour of industrialized food production around Europe, might seem excruciating and unnecessary to watch. No one likes slaughter. Isn’t it a commonplace that the scale of contemporary society and industrialization is difficult to reconcile with?

But most of the time, in real life and in media, we are reconciled with it, through familiarity and habit. Initially navigating the New York subway or shopping in a hypermarket or working in a corporation with thousands of employees is bewildering, dizzying, but we soon find landmarks; a preferred end of the subway platform to stand on; brands that have not disappointed us, and the aisles where they are stocked; people in far-flung departments who return our calls or emails across continents. Homey emotions, affection, gratitude, loyalty, make what was strange familiar, even extend some kind of identification: my subway stop, my store, my office, my contact. I live here, work here; yesterday so-and-so returned my email and can probably be counted on to do so next week, too. Perhaps I will Facebook-friend him or her.

Even in many supposedly wrenching films, documentary and fictitious, the familiar device of a narrative gives us something to fasten on to, the comfort of time or geography.

Our Daily Bread offers so little beyond the image at any give moment that, as with few other films, I don’t feel able to say what it means. I can only tell you how it was for me watching it; how it stripped all familiarity away. I had no idea, during most scenes, what would be shown next, or why. I was acutely aware, in the dark, of having only my reason and empathy to make sense of it—and the knowledge that everything I watching being tended, except the milk cows, would be killed, sold and eaten. Which felt at times very distant. Watching a technician enter an antiseptic room lined with closed panels, one has no guide, no sense what to make of it. Familiar dismissals would be possible—technology is dehumanizing! And bad! And weird! The technician opens the panels. Egg-sized chicks, yellow and almost weightless, are about to be sorted by hand onto a conveyor belt that drops them into green plastic bins. Why? The film does not tell us. Of course, we know the ultimate reason.

The lack of narration and music, cool and dispassionate, doesn’t mean Our Daily Bread is without a point of view. The shots of mother pigs suckling in spaces barely big enough for them to lie down in, of walnut trees being seized and shaken by a tractor equipped with enormous pincers, of workers silently riding a green bus out to the fields, are all so perfectly composed, similarly paced, crisply focused and evenly lit that I was never lost in the film as I can be in a good story. The experience was obviously being judiciously selected.

It was not unlike visiting an eye doctor, peering into the holes into which different lenses are slid. “Is this clearer? How about now?” After a disorienting moment, one adjusts.

Oh. This is how things look. How it is to see.