Thought for food
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By Daniel Nelson
Our Daily Bread opens with the camera tracking along racks of hanging carcasses. Inevitably, you think you are in for a harrowing documentary about the cruelty of modern farming practices. But the film is far subtler than that. Yes, there are scenes of chicks being poured off a conveyor belt and into boxes, a machine gutting salmon, and, later, the inevitable abattoir. But theres no glorying in gore, no preachiness about the morality of meat. Theres no direct preachiness about anything: theres no commentary, no music, no obvious viewpoint, no comments from the mostly blank-faced workers. Just the sound of machinery, and a succession of slow, short takes as the camera, literally, looks at farming. Its mostly quiet, clinical, sanitised which presumably is the point. The steely steadiness of the film-makers gaze is mesmeric, its smoothness ruffled occasionally by memorable images an olive tree suddenly shaken to a blur by a harvesting machine, a spraying vehicle in a field unfurling vast articulated wings, the surprise when a vista of yellow sunflowers is penetrated by an equally yellow biplane, a worker darting forward to catch the semen of mating bull. I left thinking, I was engrossed in the succession of images, but who would I recommend this film to? One reviewer said: deserves to find an audience of hungry cinephiles. But hungry cinephiles seem too small a categeory of potential viewers to make a film for. So I read the publicity material, which observed: "Our Daily Bread is a wide-screen tableau of a feast which isn't always easy to digest - and in which we all take part. It is an invitation to explore and get to the bottom of things, to look, listen and be amazed. Only after seeing can we then start believing. Im not sure what it is that we will all start believing, but its not a bad rationale. * Our Daily Bread shows at the ICA in London on 25 January-28 February |
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