[SustainableTompkins] Industrial food production documentary

[Allison L H Jack]

>Hi everyone,


NWAEG, Greenstar and Slow Food Cornell are sponsoring the screening of a 
great film "Our Daily Bread".

Hope to see some of you there.

Take care,
Allison

>Cornell Cinema presents
>A Selection of the 2006 New York Film Festival
>
>Our Daily Bread
>Friday, March 2                 7:15
>Saturday, March 3                       5:00
>Sunday, March 4                 4:30
>All screenings in Willard Straight Theatre
>
>2005 > Germany/Austria > Directed by Nikolaus Geyrhalter
>More info at http://cinema.cornell.edu
>
>
>A massive crop-duster unfolds over a field and hovers like a prehistoric 
>bird.  Newborn chicks shoot from a metal tube onto a conveyor belt.  A man 
>in a white jumpsuit sprays endless aisles of hot house tomatoes.  Images 
>like these converge to create a world defined by machinery, in which the 
>living elements of plant, animal, and human are incidental to the larger, 
>industrial picture.  This is the world of mass-produced food.  The images 
>speak for themselves in this refreshing departure from tongue-in-cheek 
>food industry film predecessors, leading the viewer to ponder the process 
>that enables the first-world standard of living. "Nikolaus Geyrhalter's 
>superb documentary is an unblinking, often disturbing look at industrial 
>food production from field to factory." (NY Times) Cosponsored with 
>GreenStar Cooperative Market, New World Agriculture and Ecology Group and 
>Slow Food Cornell. More at ourdailybread.at
>1 hr 32 min
>
>calendarlive.com
>http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/reviews/cl-wk-bread22feb22,0,5384325.story?coll=cl-mreview
>MOVIE REVIEW
>'Our Daily Bread'
>'Our Daily Bread' provides food for thought as well as the eye.
>By Kenneth Turan
>Times Staff Writer
>
>February 22, 2007
>
>"Our Daily Bread" has an astounding eye for wonders and horrors, the 
>awesome and the awful, for hidden sights, untold stories and key aspects 
>of our world that we rarely get to see and might not necessarily want to. 
>Once witnessed, however, these things cannot be forgotten.
>
>This exceptional documentary, directed and photographed by Austrian 
>filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter, has a most humble subject: the food we eat. 
>It deals with the astonishing mechanization of modern food processing, 
>revealing how organized, regularized and systemized the world of high-tech 
>industrial foodstuff production has become. The film succeeds as well as 
>it does both because of what it shows us and the artistry with which it is 
>shown.
>
>Though "Our Daily Bread" includes scenes of things like carcass 
>disembowelment that could turn Conan the Barbarian into a vegetarian, its 
>aim is far from the facile propagandizing of something like "Fast Food Nation."
>
>Rather, director Geyrhalter and collaborator Wolfgang Widerhofer (credited 
>with editing and dramatic structure) are concerned with underlining the 
>surreal, almost extraterrestrial nature of preparing food products on a 
>colossal scale. The filmmakers want us to think about the how and why of 
>what we eat, about how strange and unnerving the building blocks of our 
>world can appear if we know where to look.
>
>"Our Daily Bread," which was shot across Europe between 2003 and 2005, 
>also wants us to consider the nature of work, to understand how mindlessly 
>repetitive and disagreeable so much of day-to-day labor is. By casting an 
>unblinking eye toward dehumanizing jobs that are almost beyond imagination 
>- harvesting semen from bulls is but one - it underlines how removed and 
>unemotional even the most boggling activities can become.
>
>Perhaps most remarkable of all, "Our Daily Bread" accomplishes all this 
>without using interviews or narration of any kind. The only words we hear 
>are bits of untranslated small talk from various workers. No one lets us 
>know what we are seeing, and while some things like the harvesting of 
>potatoes quickly become obvious, others, like the reason a newborn calf is 
>surgically removed from the side of its mother, are not, and it's 
>frequently necessary to simply guess at exactly what activity is taking place.
>
>Despite this lack of narration, "Our Daily Bread" never fails to enthrall 
>because of the impeccable eye - for composition, for color, for movement 
>within the frame - of filmmaker Geyrhalter. While his camera often does 
>not move, it invariably captures visuals that take us on a journey unlike 
>any other because it is so otherworldly as well as so everyday.
>
>Although the way the film orders things often feels random, "Our Daily 
>Bread" soon develops rhythms of its own with sequences that routinely 
>amaze, like a trip deep below the surface of the Earth to the caverns 
>where salt is mined. These shots often involve benign activities such as 
>sorting apples, blowing straw into cattle pens or harvesting and wrapping 
>lettuce. But what unites them is the unimaginable scale on which they are 
>often done and the indescribable Rube Goldberg machines that make that 
>huge scale possible.
>
>This is especially true in "Our Daily Bread's" more extended sequences, 
>most of which involve the raising and slaughter of animals. To see the 
>care and feeding of literally thousands of chicks makes the head swim, 
>while more disturbing feelings come from watching the way hogs and cattle 
>are executed and then efficiently sliced apart, gutted and cut into pieces 
>by machines and machine-like humans on assembly lines.
>
>Making these scenes somehow stranger is that they invariably take place in 
>impeccably clean environments that the companies involved take 
>understandable pride in. In fact, "Our Daily Bread's" closing credits take 
>pains to thank "the friendly support" of those corporations that welcomed 
>the filming.
>
>If there is a hopeful aspect to "Our Daily Bread," it is that it chooses 
>to acknowledge that the human impulse still exists around the edges of 
>this soul-crushing food production machine that turns workers into 
>automatons. A man takes a moment from a grotesque slaughterhouse job to 
>answer his cellphone.
>
>And when one of thousands of tiny, furry chicks accidentally falls to the 
>floor, a woman can't resist caringly picking it up and carefully putting 
>it back in its place. It may be an ultimately meaningless gesture, but 
>seeing it allows us to feel that maybe there is a reason to hope for the 
>human race after all.
>
>kenneth.turan at latimes.com
>No MPAA rating. Running time: 1 hour, 32 minutes.
>
>Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times
>
>
>
>
>--
>Mary Fessenden, Director, Cornell Cinema
>104 Willard Straight Hall
>Email: mkf2 at cornell.edu
>Phone: 607-255-3883
>Fax: 607-255-9910
>http://cinema.cornell.edu

**************************************************************************************
Allison L H Jack
Graduate Student
Department of Plant Pathology
Cornell University
335 Plant Science
Ithaca, NY 14850
607.273.5762
************************************************************************************* 


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from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences mission statement