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Our Daily Bread

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by Phil Moore
We are the bastard children that shall inherit the earth. Divorced from the land and alienated from the hymn of Mother Nature’s seasons, food and its origins is something we rarely give a thought to.

Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s extraordinary documentary is both a formally bold and politically subtle film about contemporary Europe’s vast agricultural/industrial achievement. No talking heads, no voiceover, no music. A document in perhaps the strictest sense, Our Daily Bread is a portrait of the industrial scale of food production - a terrific and terrifying achievement; a reality both necessary and little known.

The film sweeps over the various stages of food production in the space of a working day. Beginning and ending with workers cleaning, Our Daily Bread guides us through some of man’s modern labours. Various agricultural practices – cabbage picking, wheat harvesting, and crop fertilisation – are all technically exacted and clinically executed, as the film returns to sequences of the day’s activities. Moved along by the images and actual sound alone, the drone of a machine, the slice of an automated cutter, and the roar of a tractor emphasise this brave new world in which the landscape – and man – is but part of a big machine. In this sense, the film is reminiscent of Jennifer Baichwal’s Manufactured Landscapes (2006); a similar film in a sense, although its subject matter – the vast, photographic portrayal of China’s booming industry – is slightly different. Humans seem to be merely perfunctory, as do the animals in Geyrhalter’s film. Massive structures and machines dominate a landscape that is all about the coercion and management of the natural world. The bull mating scene is absolutely extraordinary, as is the scene of the sunflowers being fertilised by a low flying plane. The slaughter scenes reminded me of Richard Linklater’s documentary-inspired feature Fast Food Nation (2006) in which we see the claustrophobic confines of the meat packing industry, but Geyrhalter’s images, for their frankness and ‘distance’, are in a way much more powerful, as we are asked to continue looking.

Geyrhalter’s film purposely keeps the human element as part of a bigger system. The voices of the workers in the busier scenes are barely audible: a criticism perhaps, as these are the voices of the voiceless from an industry which depends on cheap labour, often from economic migrants. However, Geyrhalter’s dispassionate camera takes us into the home of a group of black workers. Although we know nothing of them, we know the film is set in Europe. These images convey a sense of the complex dynamic of the food industry and labour.
Geyrhalter composes the film almost entirely of long shots. No close-ups are used. Again perhaps a criticism, but the largeness of some of these filmed operations requires a steady, unmovable camera to display the vastness of the modern agricultural project. The radical approach brings us uninterrupted images, which although not giving voice to the workers, allows viewers, by simply observing, space for thought that is not normally present in more journalistic films.

There is no natural cycle. It has been broken by man’s technical mastery of the natural world. There is just repetition. Efficient. Functional. Pig after pig after pig, pepper after pepper, fish after fish are carried along clean, and symmetrical lines evoking the conveyer belt existence of this artificial world, responsible for bring us our food. This is actually reflected in the camera work. Long takes, slow tracking shots, precision and symmetry all encased within Geyrhalter’s clean framing. Such an approach allows Geyrhalter to illustrate these strange and often bizarre working practices, at the expense of a more enquiring and intimate vision.

Ostensibly non-judgemental, Geyrhalter shows us a world that is rarely seen although people may be familiar with some of these images. Taking on its own reality, the workings of these worlds captured by Geyrhalter are revelatory in one sense, but lack the wider social, cultural and political aspects that would be articulated by narration, interviewees or on-screen titles.  An impressive and bold film, which is as thought-provoking as it is stimulating visually, Our Daily Bread is a documentary worthy of viewing on the big screen.
Dir. Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Austria, 2005, 92mins
Our Daily Bread is released at the ICA in London on 25th February

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