Our Daily Bread - Reflection
I)
Our Daily Bread goes through the process of creating the food we eat every day. It was mostly structured by picking a particular food and jumping through the process. There were also times where instead of going through a the production of a particular food they would just look at foods within a particular category; like hand-picked vegetables. Other times they would follow a particular worker through their day on the production line. Some of these subjects were pigs growing up and being slaughtered, cows growing up and being slaughtered, potatoes, peaches, and fish.
II)
One scene that stuck out in my mind was following a woman working in the pig production plant. It showed multiple shots of her going about her work. First she was sharpening a knife, then she was slitting pig heads. After that she ate a sandwich, and finally she is sorting pig guts. This caught my attention because of how detached she is as she does this. Myself and the rest of the audience is appalled by the ghastliness of the industry, yet it seems to affect her none at all. This makes sense as she works in it all day all the time and has to become desensitized to cope with it. In this way, This is a very effective implementation of Nikolaus Geyrhalter strategy of letting his audience form its own opinions.
Another scene I remember well is when the two workers are descending for ages down into the salt mine. At this point you don't really know what is happening or why because there is no explanation of context or dialogue you can understand. It presents a sort of mystery. This documentary has all been about food production and mostly taken place in buildings or massive fields. Now we are descending for thousands of feet down into the ground and you wonder what kind of food could possibly come from this far below the earth. Eventually an alien world is revealed full of salt. Because of this, I found this scene to be the most interesting and sparking of curiosity.
The last scene that caught my attention was very short. It was looking at a group of sunflowers. They appeared healthy and bright. A plane flew overhead spraying some sort of chemical on them. The documentary then cuts very drastically to fields of dead sunflowers being plowed through by a giant tractor machine. I think this is a stark contrast that just shows the massive scale of what happens to bring us our daily bread.
III)
In general I liked Our Daily Bread a lot. I thought it was better than other food documentaries because it really did remove an enormous amount of bias by having no dialogue whatsoever and holding static shots. However, I don't think it was truly unbiased because they did pick things to do and every decision adds bias to film. I was slightly bored at first when I realized that the film was going to be very slow and consist of very long held static shots. However, I slowly fell into the rythm of the film as I watched and began to appreciate the style that they chose and saw why.
