 This food chain is hard to stomach
Austrian filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter serves
up a scathingly dispassionate vision of the mechanized
systems employed to bring meat, fish, eggs and
produce to our table. 1:32 (graphic and intensely
disturbing images of violence to animals). Anthology
Film Archives, Manhattan.
The mating and migratory rituals depicted in
the documentary "March of the Penguins"
proved to be so irresistible to moviegoers that
we now have a smash hit animated musical, a veritable
"Arctic Idol" showcasing chorus lines
of penguins shaking their booties to Stevie Wonder.
Don't expect a happy-footed trajectory for the
animals featured in the Austrian documentary "Our
Daily Bread," in which nursing mother pigs
are jammed into steel chambers the size of wash
basins, where as many as a dozen piglets compete
for suckling and breathing space. No one is dancing
as the captive creatures are bludgeoned, hog-tied
and hung upside down on moving tracks, then whisked
past machines that slice their abdomens and leave
their innards dangling.
You might not want to know what transpires in
between birth and slaughter, especially if you
are a big fan of bacon.
Filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter also has something
to say about how eggs find their way to our tables,
along with the hens that lay them and the salt
we sprinkle. But instead of words he presents
us with a series of dispassionate, narration-free
images that move from one to the next with the
fatalistic trudge of a factory conveyor belt.
Together, they create an alarming vision of the
antiseptic order we have created around the business
of stocking our fridge.
Giant, extraterrestrial-looking machines, designed
for maximum product output and minimal human input,
vacuum up live chicks and dead flowers alike with
a Darth Vadar-esque imperviousness. Humans do
step in, often gloved or in eye-catching, spaceman
uniforms, to gather up insecticide-drenched fruit,
snip off live piglet extremities or collect any
hens that may have expired in the shoebox confines
of a cage.
Geyrhalter captures these rituals with a formality
that can be unnervingly beautiful. As Fernando
Botero recently demonstrated in his paintings
of Abu Ghraib prisoners, aestheticizing ugliness
can endow the subject with a power unavailable
through more conventional means of documentation,
such as a snapshot or newspaper story.
The distributors of "Our Daily Bread"
have opened the film the day after Thanksgiving
rather than the days preceding, a compassionate
exercise in holiday-release strategizing that
should give turkey-sated viewers another reason
to be thankful.
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