OUR DAILY BREAD by Nikolaus Geyrhalter
2007 Appeared in the journal Sequences
Four years after its passage on the festival circuit, the documentary Our Daily Bread makes its way to Quebec, where the ravages of Agribusiness ravage a little more our soil, our air and our waterways every day. Challenging the monopoly of the Union des producteurs agricoles (UPA) and the sacrosanct Food Guide - the beef lobbies West Prairie wheat and dairy farms in the East have for too long dictated the content - no longer take place in the indifference then consumers are conscientized the benefits of local food and biodiversity in recent years. The film essay of aesthetic Nikolaus Geyrhalter, schizophrenic series of pictures on the exploitation of the land mass and resources first, would it be so far out of date four years later?
Difficult nevertheless remain unaffected by such a demonstration front and without dialogue, where the accumulation of images and rituals form a speech falsely industrial liabilities on the underside of our appetite. In alternating scenes of harvesting coffee breaks of the workers, the Austrian filmmaker launches a simplistic message, but no less compelling: if we are what we eat, we'd better know how comes the feast.
Obviously Geyrhalter is as interested in what he observes - several practices and hardware are definitely unknown to the general public - to make objects of cinema. In this sense, our daily bread has more to do with Kubrick, Andersson or Farocki's films that left denouncing the poisoning of the planet and the cartel of multinationals. Symmetrical plans begin here at the service of a real stage, a planned use and ingenious the background - the sequence of operations saline is eloquent in this respect - and even if human acts appearing more often than not.
What to remember when this film halfway between the Museum of Horrors and the Hall of agricultural machinery: the industrial revolution that eventually we all eat or, in the words of Asterix, "the old proverb is changed; we do not eat to live, he must live to eat?
© 2009 Charles-Stéphane Roy
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