Contemporary Eco-Food Films: the Documentary Tradition

Studies in Documentary Film ISSN: 1750-3280 (Print) 1750-3299 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsdf20 Contemporary eco-food films: The documentary tradition Robin L. Murray & Joseph K. Heumann To cite this article: Robin L. Murray & Joseph K. Heumann (2012) Contemporary eco-food films: The documentary tradition, Studies in Documentary Film, 6:1, 43-59 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1386/sdf.6.1.43_1 Published online: 03 Jan 2014. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 285 Citing articles: 2 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rsdf20 SDF 6 (1) pp. 43–59 Intellect Limited 2012 Studies in Documentary Film Volume 6 Number 1 © 2012 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sdf.6.1.43_1 Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann Eastern Illinois University Contemporary eco-food films: The documentary tradition Abstract Keywords This article examines the central role food has played in documentary films as early ecology as the Lumiere Brothers’ 1895 view, Repas de bebe/Baby’s Breakfast through the food more recent eco-food films from United States, Canadian and European film-makers. direct cinema Responding to non-fiction works of Michael Pollan, popular US documentaries such documentary as Food, Inc. by Robert Kenner (2008) and King Corn by Aaron Woolf (2007) environment assert clear positions through their talking heads approach to exposition but draw nostalgia on a limiting nostalgic view of food production. Austria’s We Feed the World by Erwin Wagenhofer (2005) and multiple National Film Board of Canada documentaries, on the other hand, provide a depth of evaluation supported by multiple exam- ples missing in both Food, Inc. and King Corn, yet weaken their arguments with an evenhanded approach to food ecology. Germany’s Our Daily Bread by Nikolaus Geyrhalter (2005), however, comes closest to capturing the truth, offering frag- mented observations that closely replicate the segmented process of industrial food production, effectively revealing its consequences to human and non-human nature because the intermediary veil of direct cinema has been lifted. Documentaries focusing on the production of food have become popular in the last few years, with films from Morgan Spurlock’s personalized examina- tion of the consequences of a fast food diet, Supersize Me (2004), to the recent critically acclaimed documentary Food, Inc (2008), directed by Robert Kenner. A blatantly rhetorical documentary and adaptation of Michael Pollan’s 43 SDF 6.1_Murray&Heumann_43-59.indd 43 4/26/12 11:58:07 AM Robin L. Murray | Joseph K. Heumann book-length exploration of the factory farming, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Food, Inc., for example, contrasts imagery of a mythic agrarian United States with horrific portraits of an industrial food system. Through the voice-over that explains the problematic consequences of this move from traditional farming, the film asserts this system began with the move to fast food in the 1950s. Another response to Pollan’s work, the film King Corn (2006) documents the process film-makers Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis follow when planting, cultivat- ing and harvesting an acre of corn, as a way to interrogate the consequences of corn’s predominance in the American diets. This trend extends beyond American documentary traditions. Erwin Wagenhofer’s Austrian documentary, We Feed the World (2005), also provides a nostalgic view of traditional farming methods as a contrast to industrial methods currently employed in Europe, but instead of a voice-over, the film foregrounds a diversity of voices providing multiple perspectives on the food industry. Although most of the film’s experts lament the loss of traditional methods, the film provides a more ambivalent and, to a certain extent, evenhanded approach to its exploration of the move to industrialized food production. Several National Film Board of Canada films continue this approach, as in Beef, Inc. (1999), Bacon: The Film (2002) or Animals (2003). German director Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Our Daily Bread (2005), on the other hand, argues effectively against the move to industrial farming by eliminating verbal explanation altogether. With only background sounds and voices to support its visual rhetoric, the avant-garde rhetorical documentary Our Daily Bread conveys its message differently than do Food, Inc., King Corn or We Feed The World. By relying exclusively on visual rhetoric, Our Daily Bread works as a powerful rhetorical tool, undiluted by ambivalent multiple viewpoints, a voice-over that sometimes disguises the consequences of industrial farming on display, or nostalgia for a better, cleaner world. Whereas Food, Inc., King Corn and We Feed the World draw on environmental nostalgia, a nostalgia as in The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936) or An Inconvenient Truth (2006), Our Daily Bread invokes an avant-garde and direct-cinema influenced rhetoric, a powerful nonlinear visual rhetoric without the limits possible when nostalgia underpins a film’s rhetoric. Environmental nostalgia is by definition limited, since a pure, untouched and unpolluted past projected onto a now lost wilderness cannot recover its history. Only King Corn gains rhetorical force when an environmental nostalgia with emotional appeal is evoked within a comparison and contrast mode that argues powerfully for sustainable environmental policies by invoking both personal and universal ecological memories. But its arguments may lose strength because they too are subject to the limits of nostalgia, despite the film’s more synthetic approach. Our Daily Bread avoids these limitations. Modes and types of food documentaries Documentary films are categorized in a variety of ways but typically align with two types of form: categorical, which conveys information in an analytical fash- ion, or rhetorical, which makes an argument to convince audience members to change an attitude or opinion and, sometimes, take action to move towards a change or eradicate what film-makers see as a problem. Within these two forms, documentaries may draw on a variety of types. At the lowest level of control, some documentaries are compilations, so they are produced by assembling images from archival sources, as in the Jayne Loader et al. 1982 film, Atomic Café. Some food documentaries integrate such archival or ‘found’ 44 SDF 6.1_Murray&Heumann_43-59.indd 44 4/26/12 11:58:08 AM Contemporary eco-food films footage to serve a variety of purposes. In Food, Inc., for example, archival footage provides a historical view of farming and food purchasing changes from WWII to the present. Some of these segments draw on nostalgia for a more pastoral approach to food. Others illustrate particular points in time when that approach began to deteriorate. The French documentary The World According to Monsanto (Robin 2008) also includes compilation segments. Other documentaries rely on interviews or ‘Talking Heads’ to record testi- mony about events or social movements. Both Food, Inc. and We Feed the World include this documentary option. Other documentaries take a direct-cinema approach in which film-makers record an ongoing event as it happens with minimal interference from the film-maker. Frederick Wiseman’s Meat (1976) and Our Daily Bread employ this documentary option. Nature documentaries magnify and explore the worlds of nature, as do the Disney Earth Day epics, Earth (Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield 2007), a full-length version of the television series, Planet Earth and Ocean (Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud 2009), an ecological drama/documentary that meditates on the vanishing wonders of the sub-aquatic world. Portrait documentaries centre on scenes from the life of a compelling person, as does The Real Dirt on Farmer John (Taggart Siegel 2005), but most documentaries pursue several options at once, mixing archival footage, interviews and material on the fly as synthetic documentaries, as do Food, Inc., We Feed the World and a National Film Board of Canada work, Bacon, The Film (2002). Food as a basic need has played a central role in documentary films as early as the Lumiere Brothers’ 1895 view, Repas de bebe/Baby’s Breakfast, but Cricks and Martin’s 1906 nonfiction film, A Visit to Peek Frean and Co.’s Biscuit Works, an industrial process piece that documents tinned biscuit baking, packing and distribution from start to finish may arguably be the first food documentary. The film provides a glimpse of each step of the process of biscuit making in a British factory, showing workers completing each task with help from bright indoor arc lighting. The film even includes a scene in which workers clean the tins for reuse before a transition to a packing sequence. Later documentaries take a more ethnographic approach to food acqui- sition and preparation, as in Robert J. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), Moana (1926) and Man of Aran (1934). As Jack Ellis and Betsy McLane note in their book, A New History of Documentary Film, in Nanook of the North, we see Nanook ‘spearing fish, catching and rendering walrus, [and] hunting seals’ (Ellis and McLane 2005: 16). In Moana, Moana and his family are seen ‘snar- ing a wild boar, collecting giant clams, gathering coconuts, capturing a huge tortoise, making custard, scraping breadfruit, and baking little fish’ (Ellis and McLane 2005: 16). In Man of Aran, too, food takes the fore in multiple fishing scenes, even though the controversial shark hunt is meant to capture shark livers for fuel instead of food. Each of these Flaherty films also aligns with Karl G. Heider’s definition of ethnographic film as ‘film, which reflects ethnographic understanding’ (Ellis and McLane 2005: 8). As in Nanook of the North (1922) in which archaic Inuit hunting practices are re-enacted to highlight a romanticized more natural state and Cooper and Schoedsack’s Grass (1925) and Chang (1927) – which show us how civilization has corrupted the native, Flaherty’s films reconstruct (both literally and figuratively) the stories his subjects tell, providing view- ers with a romantic narrative that foregrounds progress.

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