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May 17, 2007
[VIEWING] Our Daily Bread (*** 1/2)
WATCHING PROCESS PLEASES ME LIKE ALMOST NOTHING ELSE: to watch work, as I would when I worked on training films, asking someone to reassemble, then disassemble again, after taking apart a steam turbine engine. Fiction filmmaking doesn’t afford many opportunities to demonstrate work as work; watching paint being painted is not the same as watching it dry; but still, watching a writer write is not the same as what a writer feels while writing and after the task has unfurled. While Richard Linklater’s 
ambitious Fast Food Nation ends with a shot-in-three-days on-the-killing-floor slaughterhouse scene, reminiscent of Georges Franju’s great short documentary, Blood of Beasts, Austrian documentarian Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Our Daily Bread (Unser täglich Brot) is another creature: deeply rooted in landscape and duration, it is hypnotic and magisterial, about moment and passage, about the industrialization of food and the necessity of nurture. Geyrhalter shot and directed, and his eye for the surreal reality of the highest tech of industrial farming monumental and surreal, wordless, a collation of clean, bright images of supernal calm and the most striking cropduster scene since North by Northwest. An experimental non-narrative epic, featuring rushing rivulets of peeping chicks, floating apples, tomatoes sorted by roving, unmanned machines and fish-gut sucking devices of metronomic efficiency, Our Daily Bread is a strange, lovely, and wholly disturbing look at one of the many worlds behind our accepted world. [Our Daily Bread has its American television premiere on Sundance Channel, Friday, May 18 at 12:35AM and 10:35AM, and Sunday, May 20 at 3:35PM. Clips and resources are available here.]
Posted by Ray Pride at May 17, 2007 08:09 AM
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