OUR DAILY BREAD (Unser taglich brot)

Reviewed by Harvey S. Karten
First Run/Icarus Films
Grade: B-
Directed by: Nikolaus Geyrhalter
Written By: Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Wolfgang Widerhofer
Screened at: Critics' DVD
Opens: November 24, 2006

Imagine what life would be like if people did not have to eat; if for the past two million years of human existence there was simply no need for nourishment. What would we do with our sixteen waking hours each day? We would not have the joy of spending an hour over a delicious dinner or refreshing the palate after a night of sleep, but more important, what would we do to earn a living? No restaurants, coffee houses, bars. No work on farms, on which ninety percent of people of even the richer nations spent until the industrial revolution gradually shed their need.

By now, however, food has become as second nature to us as breathing, so much so that most of us think that chickens are born into packages and ceci beans are created in cans by spontaneous generation. To enlighten us to the origin of our nutrition, Nickolaus Geyrhalter, together with co-writer and editor Wolfgang Widerhofer, have spent a couple of years filming the genesis of food with the friendly help of several Austrian corporations who are proud of what they are doing to feed not only their countrymen but all who trade with that relatively small, central European country. There is no attempt to make judgments: don’t look for pro-vegetarian messages or subliminal Luddite commentary. This film shows off some of the most incredible machinery, devices by which, in one example, a single human being can control the lives and transportation of thousands of chicks. In America, only two percent of the population make their pay by farm work. In the near future, we can expect human beings to be virtually unseen in the growing of plants and the raising of animals for slaughter. Ultimately “Our Daily Bread” serves to educate us about agribusiness, the huge farms that create most of our food and yet remain unseen by dwellers in cities and suburbs alike.

What is particular singular about the film is that unlike Fred Wiseman’s documentary “Meat,” there exists neither narration nor music. We do hear the whirring and clicking of machinery and some of the Germanic conversation of the workers, when they choose to talk to one another at all. But if this were not filmed with such clarity and sparkling color, the film could have been a product of the pre-1927 generation of movies.

Director Geyrhalter uses many repetitive scenes, but tries to break up the monotony by photographing one unit of production, e.g. chickens, then switching to another type of food, e.g. tomatoes, then reverting to the chicks once again. While there is some intensive human labor involved, as with the hand-picking of tomatoes from trees and peaches from the ground with the help of a moving conveyer belt. Two individuals with gas masks are able to handle the pest control over a large acreage of produce. One individual can roam about a mammoth number of hen cages where the squabbling animals are packed like sardines, ejecting the dead birds from the flimsy houses. Geyrhalter often contrasts the large-scale activities of production with the silent consuming of workers, in two or three instances taking long shots of individual employees munching on sandwiches and drinking coffee.

The most interesting and indeed stomach-churning sections of the film involve the slaughter and slicing of cows and pigs. A large bovine animal peeks out of what looks like an iron lung, is stunned by a worker and is immediately hoisted by a rear leg, sliced open by an assortment of machines, the guts dropping out on the ground while blood spills from the body like a scene from a horror movie. Within minutes, the animals become virtually unrecognizable, just skin and bones, the remainder presumably sent off to be made into hamburgers and steaks.

The silence of the soundtrack is both a striking bit of originality and a problem. We long to see some subtitles explaining what is done, as in some cases, the production lines are cryptic. Are those logs being sliced to bits, and if so, to what end?

We’re left with the realization that everything we eat is a gift of nature. The water used to quench the thirst of vegetation and to wash the floors filled with blood and guts. The animals themselves, who breed with the help of human beings who in some cases use artificial insemination–a process that we’re made privy to in this film. What remains, then, is to transmit these gifts of nature into economically useful products.

The film, however enlightening, often tires our patience through its silent and repetitions. “Our Daily Bread” has been chosen to appear in the New York Film Festival of 2006.

Not Rated. 92 minutes 2006 by Harvey Karten
harveycritic@cs.com Member: NY Film Critics Online