ALMA As Visual Rhetoric

ALMA (Patrick Rouxel, 2011), a documentary close to maintaining a direct cinema approach like that of Our Daily Bread (2005) and Zoo (1993), provides a strong argument against deforestation and its accompanying environmental disasters: loss of old-growth forest, jungle habitat for multiple animal and plant species, and industrialization of cattle and soy industries. With its reliance on a primarily non-diegetic soundtrack and observational cinematography, the film provides a strong argument against environmental degradation for human gain. Despite its sometimes off-putting insertion of non-diegetic music, in Alma, visual representations of eco-disasters gain force as they come close to capturing the truth, offering fragmented observations that closely replicate the segmented process of industrial food production, effectively revealing its consequences to human and non-human nature because the intermediary veil of direct cinema has been lifted.

ALMA opens in what looks and sounds like a pristine jungle with insect and bird calls accompanying an alligator sunning itself and playful monkeys in trees above a stream. A hawk swoops over the trees where colorful tropical birds collect food. A close-up of ants pans out to reveal an untarnished landscape. More close shots reveal the various forms of life thriving here: bright-colored flowers, leaves, a bird’s eye, spider’s web with spider, grasshoppers, a lizard feeding. And then the shot pans out to show a crane beside a pond, a large hamster, butterflies, a heron, an alligator, an egret feeding on fish, and trees reflected in the pond.

This pristine world is broken by the sound of saws, cattle in stalls, and their race to death through more and more narrow chutes. This death of beeves is juxtaposed with visions of forests destroyed both for wood and cattle pampas. Images of workers in the slaughterhouse are paired with those of lumberjacks dragging logs through the jungle. Slaughterhouse hides are collected while forests are burned. A turtle tries to escape the flames set to burn underbrush and create a field. The smoke streams for miles with the roar of fire and red flares seeming to cover the moon.

After the fire, the forest is lost, and music replaces the sounds of nature as felled logs smoke. Insects, the turtle, and a parrot are now silent, their death providing read earth to grow only grass for cattle. In the context of this direct cinema film, cattle seem indigenous, since they have so quickly and readily replaced the jungle and its life. The flute songs emphasize loss, but the manmade pampas grows quickly, a huge plain still surrounded by sparse forests.

School children draw animals lost in the jungle eco-disaster. A cow gives birth as birds fly overhead, and the music stops. The process of raising these cattle for milk and beef is emphasized in scenes showing the calf first feeding on mother’s milk in the pasture that now looks permanent. Other animals forage in the pasture while the calf plays and a macaw calls. But then a rancher separates the calf from its mother, so he can milk her.

A PRIMO truck illustrates how industrialized this milking process has become, as milk is processed in a dairy factory. Music accompanies workers skimming cream for butter and ice cream. City people eat the ice cream and prepare for a rodeo. Cattle are prodded down chutes like those found in the slaughterhouse, but this time they are forced into a ring where cowboys rope and wrangle them. Non-diegetic music comes and goes between announcements.

In contrast to the rodeo, cattle groom each other in the pasture with sounds of birds and insects in the background instead of music or microphones. The cattle and their calves look free on the pampas, running together and playfully butting heads. An overhead shot shows the huge size of this pasture that once was a massive jungle. On a road cut through the grass, trucks loaded with huge stacks of logs roll by as a reminder of the lost woods and enter a humungous sawmill.

These images of the sawmill are again juxtaposed with views of the slaughterhouse where carcasses are cut and hides are cured in the adjoining tannery. A scene of old growth tree trunks in the sawmill is matched with shots of the slaughterhouse and tannery. Hides are cleaned in large tumblers, and beeves are cut for parts while lumber is sawed and prepared. This cutting is accompanied by non-diegetic voice and guitar. Cowboys herd cattle into a feedlot where cattle are prepared for auction. The process is intricate and includes multiple chutes to vaccinate and separate cattle.

A rodeo is paired with the auction, complete with dancing and bull and roping competitions. Scenes of celebrating people are contrasted with shots of cattle crowded in feedlots where they can no longer play. They lie in the dirt and try to nudge each other before prodded into trucks that roll by green pampas and more cattle. Some cattle die on the way to the final feedlot where beeves feed on soy pods, another destructive food source.

The final scenes of the film show the environmental degradation caused by soy planting and harvesting, which includes spraying of toxic chemicals that poison water, as well as further de-forestation and destruction of jungle habitat. The industrial nature of soy is emphasized by the name on a truck—Agro-Sojo—just as the milk industry is illustrated by its company name. Truck loads of soy drive by dead jungle animals to a town and its factory on the coast. Soy is dumped in huge grain bins before being loaded onto Brazilian cargo ships.

Here the process is dramatized by non-diegetic guitar music. This same soy is used to feed cattle on a dairy farm where a milking machines rhythm aligns with the non-diegetic synthesizer. Even calves feed from artificial nipples in this industrial complex where cheese, milk, and ice cream are prepared for market. Beef cattle products are also shown—a McDonalds sign and beef packages in a grocery store, as well as leather products, which, the film makes clear, are harvested from the cattle on display at an exhibition. A tourist audience watches indigenous dancers before the film ends with a pan out to the over-size figure of a Christ figure that looks over the city of Rio de Janeiro, an ironic image contradicted by the singing insects and sunset that end the film in a fade to black.

This stark image is disrupted, however, by the ending credit message to Save the Planet and particular advice to cut down on meat consumption, leather, milk, and exotic woods. In spite of this post-film ending, however, ALMA serves as a powerful visual argument, as it eschews any voice-over narration or commentary from experts, relying on the sounds and images of factory farming to make its point, a minimalist unveiling that effectively reveals the horrors of the factory food chain. The film makes both the reality and the myth of the pastoral transparent without diluting the powerful visible rhetoric on display.

Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann