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.