Documentary Food Films continued

 

Bill Nichols’ Introduction to Documentary and Jack C. Ellis and Betsy A. McLane’s A New History of Documentary Film expand documentary categories to embrace different modes and genres, all of which are applied in food documentaries. Nichols illustrates his explanation for reflexive documentaries, for example, with an overview of Luis Bunuel’s Land Without Bread (1933), a portrait of a remote region of Spain where local peasants fight to survive. His expository category lines up well with interview or talking head documentaries, and his observational documentary aligns with the direct-cinema work. Poetic documentaries, on the other hand, move away from "objective" reality to approach an inner "truth" that can only be grasped by poetical manipulation, as in Flaherty’s Man of Aran (1934). According to Nichols, other documentaries are performative, like Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me (2004), and stress subjective experience and emotional responses to the world. Nichols last type, the participatory documentary, was first defined as Kinopravda by Dziga Vertov, who emulated the approach of anthropologists in silent films like Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Russian for “cinema truth,” the approach translated into “cinema verite” once both lighter camera and sound equipment were available to capture an encounter between filmmaker and subject. 

Television food documentaries tend to take a synthetic approach, as do the UK’s Channel 4 screened films, The End of the Line (2009, Dir. Rupert Murray) and The Cove (2009, Dir. Louie Psihoyos). PBS Point of View Documentaries (POV) such as Sweetgrass (2009, Dir. Ilisa Barbash), a portrait of the last traditional sheep ranch in the U.S., and Farmingville (2004, Dir. Carlos Sandoval), an expose of the unfair treatment of immigrant farm workers, also take this synthetic approach. Documentaries on the U.S. Food Network and BBC series, including The History of Ready Meals (2011), provide an historical overview of certain foods and traditions using a variety of documentary approaches, as well. 

 Contemporary food documentaries adhere to a variety of these documentary types or modes. Our Daily Bread, for example, may align more closely with a categorical rather than a rhetorical documentary form. This documentary reveals each step in the production process for each of the food products examined through an indirect but fragmented direct-cinema approach that combines the nonlinear form of an avant-garde cinema calling for social action with the ultra-realism of Georges Franju’s Blood of the Beasts (1949) and the observational approach of films like Wiseman’s Meat. Like Our Daily Bread, both Blood of the Beasts and Meat documented the modernization of food production. Blood of the Beasts was released a year after Red River (1948), a Western examining changes to the post-Civil War cattle drive system after the expansion of the railroad, and juxtaposes portraits of idyllic Paris life with images of slaughter that suggest humans can accept and institutionalize acts of almost surreal cruelty. Meat turns the Old West into a factory where cattle are prodded, vaccinated, and then fattened up for slaughter in enormous feedlots that are overseen by modern-day cowboys with electric cattle prods. Because of the film’s observational approach, we witness the efficient slaughterhouse and the salesmen taking orders for the product from all over the country.

Food and Documentary Types

 

Food and Documentary Types

Food as a basic need has played a central role in documentary films as early as the Lumiere Brothers’ 1895 view, Repas de bebe (Baby’s Breakfast), but Cricks and Martin’s 1906 nonfiction film, A Visit to Peek Frean and Co.’s Biscuit Works, an industrial process piece that documents tinned biscuit baking, packing, and distribution from start to finish may arguably be the first food documentary. The film provides a glimpse of each step of the process of biscuit making in a British factory, showing workers completing each task with help from bright indoor arc lighting. The film even includes a scene in which workers clean the tins for reuse before a transition to a packing sequence. 

 Later documentaries take a more ethnographic approach to food acquisition and preparation, as in Robert J. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), Moana (1926), and Man of Aran (1934). As Jack Ellis and Betsy McLane note in their book, A New History of Documentary Film, in Nanook of the North, we see Nanook “spearing fish, catching and rendering walrus, [and] hunting seals” (16). In Moana, Moana and his family are seen “snaring a wild boar, collecting giant clams, gathering coconuts, capturing a huge tortoise, making custard, scraping breadfruit, and baking little fish” (16). In Man of Aran, too, food takes the fore in multiple fishing scenes, even though the controversial shark hunt is meant to capture shark livers for fuel instead of food. 

 Each of these Flaherty films also aligns with Karl G. Heider’s definition of ethnographic film as “film, which reflects ethnographic understanding” (8). As in Nanook of the North (1922) in which archaic Inuit hunting practices are re-enacted to highlight a romanticized more natural state and Cooper and Schoedsack’s Grass (1925) and Chang (1927) which show us how civilization has corrupted the native, Flaherty’s films reconstruct (both literally and figuratively) the stories his subjects tell, providing viewers with a romantic narrative that foregrounds progress. Heider argues that Flaherty and Cooper and Schoedsack’s works “reflect the romanticism of the period” (26). 

 Bill Nichols’ Introduction to Documentary and Jack C. Ellis and Betsy A. McLane’s A New History of Documentary Film expand documentary categories to embrace different modes and genres, all of which are applied in food documentaries. Nichols illustrates his explanation for reflexive documentaries, for example, with an overview of Luis Bunuel’s Land Without Bread (1933), a portrait of a remote region of Spain where local peasants fight to survive. His expository category lines up well with interview or talking head documentaries, and his observational documentary aligns with the direct-cinema work. 

Poetic documentaries, on the other hand, move away from "objective" reality to approach an inner "truth" that can only be grasped by poetical manipulation, as in Flaherty’s Man of Aran (1934). According to Nichols, other documentaries are performative, like Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me (2004), and stress subjective experience and emotional responses to the world. Nichols last type, the participatory documentary, was first defined as Kinopravda by Dziga Vertov, who emulated the approach of anthropologists in silent films like Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Russian for “cinema truth,” the approach translated into “cinema verite” once both lighter camera and sound equipment were available to capture an encounter between filmmaker and subject.

The Rhetoric of Our Daily Bread (2005)

German director Nikolaus Gehrhalter’s Our Daily Bread (2005) argues effectively against the move to industrial farming by eliminating verbal explanation altogether. With only background sounds and voices to support its visual rhetoric, the avant-garde rhetorical documentary Our Daily Bread conveys its message differently than do Food, Inc. (2008), King Corn (2007), or We Feed The World (2005). 

 By relying exclusively on visual rhetoric, Our Daily Bread works as a powerful rhetorical tool, undiluted by ambivalent multiple viewpoints, a voiceover that sometimes disguises the consequences of industrial farming on display, or nostalgia for a better, cleaner world. Whereas Food, Inc., King Corn, and We Feed the World draw on environmental nostalgia, a nostalgia as in The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936) or An Inconvenient Truth (2006), Our Daily Bread invokes an avant-garde and direct-cinema influenced rhetoric, a powerful nonlinear visual rhetoric without the limits possible when nostalgia underpins a film’s rhetoric. 

Environmental nostalgia is by definition limited, since a pure, untouched, and unpolluted past projected onto a now lost wilderness cannot recover its history. Only King Corn gains rhetorical force when an environmental nostalgia with emotional appeal is evoked within a comparison and contrast mode that argues powerfully for sustainable environmental policies by invoking both personal and universal ecological memories. But its arguments may lose strength because they too are subject to the limits of nostalgia, despite the film’s more synthetic approach. 

 Documentaries like Our Daily Bread take a direct-cinema approach in which filmmakers record an ongoing event as it happens with minimal interference from the filmmaker. Frederick Wiseman’s Meat (1976) and Our Daily Bread employ this documentary option. Nature documentaries magnify and explore the worlds of nature, as do the Disney Earth Day epics, Earth (2007, Dir. Alastair Fothergill, Mark Linfield), a full-length version of the television series, Planet Earth, and Ocean (2009, Dir. Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud), an ecological drama/documentary that meditates on the vanishing wonders of the sub-aquatic world. 

Portrait documentaries center on scenes from the life of a compelling person, as does The Real Dirt on Farmer John (2005, Dir. Taggart Siegel), but most documentaries pursue several options at once, mixing archival footage, interviews, and material on the fly as synthetic documentaries, as do Food, Inc., We Feed the World, and Bacon, The Film. Because Our Daily Bread takes a direct cinema approach, its message resonates with viewers without sounding like pedantic preaching and a biased presentation of the farming industry.

Notable Films Watched in 2020, Continued

 

 May

An Elephant Sitting Still (2018): 

Written and directed by the late Hu Bo, An Elephant Sitting Still offers a bleak view of Northern China's industrial Heibei province from perspectives of multiple ages, ranging from pre-teen to old age but all in hopeless and nearly homeless circumstances. This last and only film by Bo offers the elephant as a possible symbol of hope in this forbidding world, an elephant only heard roaring in the distance while kicking a ball at a bus stop. As the film summary states, "In virtuoso musical compositions, the film tells the story of one single suspenseful day from dawn to dusk," as intersecting characters seek respite in the elephant sitting still. 

The Night of the Hunter (1955):

The summary for The Night of the Hunter, directed by Charles Laughton, claims the film revolves around a religious fanatic who marries a gullible widow whose young children where their real father hid the $10,000.00 he'd stolen in a robbery. What this description fails to note is that the fanatic is actually a con man and recently released prisoner Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) and their late father Ben's (Peter Graves) cellmate. When son John (Billy Chapin) finds his mother's body at the bottom of a lake, he and sister Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce) escape into the protective arms of Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish). Mitchum and Gish's performances alone would make this surreal film noir great. The dreamlike fairytale expressionist set design, compositions, and cinematography, however, transform greatness into triumph.