Our Daily
Bread
by Nikolaus
Geyrhalter, Director
First Run / Icarus Films, Brooklyn NY,
2006
VHS/DVD. 92 mins., col.
Sales: $440; rental/VHS: $150
Distributors website: http://www.frif.com.
The
Gleaners and I
by Agnes
Varda, Director
Zeitgeist Films, NY, NY, 2000
DVD. 82 mins., color. French and English
Distributors website: http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com.
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens
Department of Art, University of Northern
Iowa
Website: www.bobolinkbooks.com
ballast@netins.net
The release dates for these films are
almost six years apart, but, by fortunate
coincidence, I saw both of them for the
first time only recently. As films, they
are undoubtedly different works, but viewed
together, it is apparent that both are
concerned with the same social phenomena:
Each is a powerful statement about the
consequences of the Industrial Revolution
(reports about the death of which have
been greatly exaggerated), and, more specifically,
about the increasing prevalent use of
mechanical, high yield methods of growing,
controlling and harvesting food, both
plants and animals.
Our Daily Bread, which is in certain
ways the more comprehensive of the two,
provides us with an overview of a broad
range of factory methods applied to food
cultivation, harvesting and packaging
products for market, including the mechanized
"processing" of chickens, pigs
and cattle. The style of filming is appropriately
factory-likethe camera is an anonymous
eye, a quiet, robotic observernor
is there any narration. One reviewer said
of this effect that it is "Koyaanisqatsi-like,"
and while I too concluded that, I was
even more strongly reminded of the classic
book (shocking when I first saw it) Mechanization
Takes Command by Siegfried Gideon
(circa 1948), and, in recent decades,
the sometimes shocking exposés
of Frederick Wiseman (Titticut Follies
in particular). Certain scenes in
this film will surely be disturbing, because
we are forced to be witnesses to the seemingly
uncaring methods that reliably provide
us with fresh and affordable food.
In contrast to Our Daily Bread,
the hand-held camera of French filmmaker
Agnes Varda takes on an impassioned, visible
role in The Gleaners and I, a film
in which she herself is portrayed as a
cinematic gleaner. Like Our Daily Bread,
Vardas film is largely about the
results of using factory methods in food
production. Yet, in an interesting twist,
it works by shifting attention away from
the efficiency of such methods, and turning
instead to the fragments that are left
over from mechanized harvests. These remnants
are also harvested (within French state
regulations), not by machines, but by
human scavengers or "gleaners"people
who stand on the sidelines then scour
the fields when the harvest is done, gathering
the perfectly edible parts that the machines
have missed or rejected. For many people,
whether rural or urban, gleaning (as a
metaphor) is a critical means of survival.
But Vardas thesis is broader than
thatwe are all gleaners, in the
sense that much of what we do comes from
rescuing, recycling and newly defining
the fragments leftover from of other events.
(Reprinted by permission from Ballast
Quarterly Review, Volume 21 Number
1, Autumn 2007.)