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Movie Review | 'Our Daily Bread'
Late in his indispensable book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” Michael Pollan suggests that one way to change America’s lamentable eating habits is to build slaughterhouses and egg factories with glass walls. “If there’s any new right we need to establish,” he writes, “maybe this is the one: The right, I mean, to look.”
Embedded in this elegant, seemingly simple statement is a curious notion: that Americans, though increasingly bombarded with streaming images, are missing the picture. The sheer visual overload of everyday life, after all, can make you feel a lot like Malcolm McDowell’s character in Stanley Kubrick’s “Clockwork Orange,” who is forced to watch a cascade of images, including those of atrocities, with his eyelids pried open. But while we may feel visually overwhelmed, much in everyday life, as Mr. Pollan notes, remains strategically out of view, including how our food winds its slow way to the dinner table. If we could see the living animal and not just the supermarket package, see the labor and the waste, we might change how and what we eat.
In his superb documentary “Our Daily Bread” the Austrian filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter does exactly what Mr. Pollan proposes: he looks. Much like “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” and much like Eric Schlosser’s book and Richard Linklater’s film of “Fast Food Nation,” this documentary is an unblinking, often disturbing look at industrial food production from field to factory. Mr. Geyrhalter has said that he is fascinated by “zones and areas people normally don’t see.” His fascination is our gain. “Our Daily Bread” can be extremely difficult to watch, but the film’s formal elegance, moral underpinning and intellectually stimulating point of view also make it essential. You are what you eat; as it happens, you are also what you dare to watch.
Mr. Geyrhalter, who shot the film himself in high-definition digital video (since transferred to 35 mm film), takes us inside worlds of wonder and of terror in “Our Daily Bread.” Between October 2003 and October 2005, he and his crew traveled across Europe recording scenes from what Mr. Pollan terms the industrial food chain. We can only guess where we are on the continent at any given point, however, since Mr. Geyrhalter has dispensed with many of the familiar tropes of documentary filmmaking, including naming the locations. Just as radically, he doesn’t supply a narration that steers us in any obvious direction; nor does he even translate the snatches of German and Arabic we hear, probably because these voices soon melt into the pervasive mechanized whir.
Considering the homogeneity of industrial agricultural practices, these strategies make sense. The opening scene of a uniformed man hosing down a floor flanked by two rows of gutted pigs could have been shot just about anywhere in the modern world, as could the image of live chickens being scooped up by a machine and then loaded by hand into small processing trays. The man slamming one of those trays closed on the head of a chicken frantically bobbing its head could be French or Austrian; nationality here is as irrelevant to the animals as to the consumers who will later buy that chicken after it has been killed, plucked and cleaned, all of which Mr. Geyrhalter shows us through one precisely framed shot after another.
The scenes on the killing floor are predictably brutal, though not for all the obvious reasons. Mr. Geyrhalter doesn’t flinch from showing us the panic of the animals as they head toward the killing floor or the barbarism of their deaths. There’s a haunting scene of a woman, seated seemingly alone and cutting the necks of the chickens that survived the initial kill room. Hers is actually an act of mercy. If she does her job properly, the birds will be dead by the time they are cleaned and butchered, which isn’t always the case in industrial slaughterhouses. The image of this woman with these dead creatures and her knife, her apron covered in blood that flows onto the floor where it forms a watery pool, makes any narration superfluous.
We aren’t introduced to this woman, but her humanity and the dreadfulness of her job are transparently visible. There is something incredibly pitiful about her aloneness, which is accentuated by the sterility of her work environment, with its queasy lighting, metal surfaces and mechanical droning. Equally stirring is an image recorded far from the killing floor, in a dusty field in which a handful of enormous combines relentlessly advance toward the camera. As he does throughout the film, Mr. Geyrhalter holds the image for a relatively long while, which gives you ample opportunity to scrutinize everything inside the frame in real time, including the surprising revelation of the small human figure seated inside the combine cab, a speck of life encased in machinery.
It’s hard to imagine what a voiceover could possibly add. Part of the film’s brilliance is how it lays out the images and their wells of meaning with such cool deliberation, showing rather than telling through the long tracking shots of which Mr. Geyrhalter is a master and which underscore the ongoing, mechanized flow of work. Much like his scrupulous use of perspective, which directs your gaze toward the center of each image, the tracking shots reveal the filmmaker’s artistry as well as a deliberate ethics. In “Our Daily Bread” Mr. Geyrhalter wants us not only to look at the world we have made with care and with consideration, but also to contemplate a reality newly visible that is all too easy to ignore and just as impossible to look away from.
OUR DAILY BREAD
Opens today in Manhattan.
Directed by Nikolaus Geyrhalter; written by Wolfgang Widerhofer and Mr. Geyrhalter; director of photography, Mr. Geyrhalter; edited by Mr. Widerhofer; produced by Nikolaus Geyrhalter Filmproduktion GmbH; released by First Run/Icarus Films. At the Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue at Second Street, East Village. Running time: 92 minutes. This film is not rated.
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