The Wake

Contemporary artistic expression is always struggling to reinvent itself. Everybody wants to create something that has never been seen before. The Walker Art Center’s series of films premieres, called First Look, are no exception. March 23rd-25th the Walker showcased an award winning film that is innovative by allowing the story to tell itself. Many great minds have agreed that beauty is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but where there is nothing to take away. The film, Our Daily Bread, directed by Austrian-born Nikolaus Geyrhalter, does just that by dispensing with commentary, music, and superfluous plot.

The goal of Our Daily Bread is to honestly show people the places their food is produced. “The production of food is … a part of a closed system that people have extremely vague ideas about,” explains Geyrhalter, “The images used in ads, where butters churned and a little farm is shown with a variety of animals, have nothing to do with the place our food actually comes from. There’s a kind of alienation with regard to the creation of our food and these kinds of labor, and breaking through it is necessary.”

“I find films that give instructions on how to act boring and presumptuous,” rationalizes the film’s editor Wolfgang Widerhofer, “I tend to be careful with analogies or concepts, and I try to edit so as to create an open space that a great many things can be projected onto. In that sense it’s a risky film.” In classic storytelling tradition, Geyrhalter’s and Widerhofer show, but don’t tell, the relationships between people, machines, and nature. Although at points horrifying, this film is not meant as a social criticism or a piece of activism. Our Daily Bread presents the viewer with a certain scene, such as that of a worker washing the floor in a slaughterhouse past endless rows of hanging carcasses, and in the long pause, the viewer is allowed to make up his or her own opinions.

The entire film is a series of such images. The predominant sounds are the roars and thumps of the machines, which at times seem organic. Occasionally the sounds of the machines are overshadowed by mooing of cows or squeaking of chickens. And rarely, the voices of people can be heard speaking faintly and in foreign languages. Widerhofer explains that the choice to exclude dialogue was made so as to further avoid forcing opinions down the throats of the viewers. “An interview would be an attempt to re-individualize the industrial process, which removes all individuality. You could say we chose the horror vacua of silence.”

The silent glow of a greenhouse at night, women shoveling handfuls of baby chicks as if there were peanuts, men artificially inseminating a pig; these scenes with their respectable silences and sounds resemble a strange science fiction movie. Reminiscent at times of 2001: A Space Odyssey or A Clockwork Orange, what sets Our Daily Bread apart is that it is a documentation of true events: it is truly “stranger than fiction.” “I see this film as a place, a utopian place which we enter at the beginning and leave at the end,” muses Widerhofer, “”and the fact that this utopian place is our current reality becomes clear again and again in the course of the film.”

“I always take the thought further,” admits Geyrhalter addressing the title of the film, “and the next line would be: And forgive us our sins.” At times, during the viewing of this film, the extent to which human beings have most literally raped the earth becomes almost too horrifying to watch. Watching a worker scrape the innards out of row after row of animal carcasses with a carving knife, it is frightening to think of what may be shown next. The treatment of animals is not the only disturbing part of the film. The treatment of plants and of the planet, holistically, is equally unsettling. It is painful to watch as a machine violently shakes a small tree in order to harvest the fruit.

On the other hand, the complexity and efficiency of the machines involved in the food production industries is at times quite admirable. “What makes it fascinating are the machines and the sense of what’s doable, the human spirit of invention and organization, even at close corners with horror and insensitivity,” said Widerhofer. The workers are not unnecessarily cruel, but they are also not unnecessarily kind. “The important thing is how the animals can be born, raised and held as efficiently and inexpensively as possible, how to treat them so they’re as fresh and undamaged as possible when they arrive at the slaughterhouse, and that the levels of medications and stress hormones in the meat are below legal limits,” explains Widerhofer, “No one thinks about whether they’re happy. If you want to call that a scandal, which is more than justified, then you have to take your thinking one step further. Then it becomes a scandal of how we live, because this economic “soulless” efficiency is in a reciprocal relationship with our society’s lifestyle…we all enjoy the fruits of automation and industrialization and globalization every day, which affects much more than just our food.”