Film and Everyday Eco-disasters

4. Contemporary Eco- food Films

CHAPTER FOUR CONTEMPORARY ECO-FOOD FILMS The Documentary Tradition Documentaries focusing on the production of food have become popular in the last few years, with films from Morgan Spurlock’s personalized examination of the consequences of a fast food diet, Supersize Me (2004), to the critically acclaimed documentary Food, Inc. (2008), directed by Robert Kenner. A blatantly rhetorical documentary and adaptation of Michael Pollan’s exploration of factory farming, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Food, Inc. 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 shift from traditional farming, the film asserts that 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 that filmmakers Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis follow when planting, cultivating, and harvesting an acre of corn, as a way to interrogate the consequences of corn’s predominance in 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 70 PART TWO 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 transition to industrialized food production. Several National Film Board of Canada films continue this approach, as in Beef, Inc. (1999), Bacon: The Film (2002), and Animals (2003). German director Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Our Daily Bread (2005), on the other hand, argues effectively against the shift 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 Blood of the Beasts: Preindustrial processing of slaughtered sheep Contemporary Eco-food Films 71 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 found 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 imposed by nostalgia. Environmental nostalgia is by definition limited, since a pure, untouched, and unpolluted past projected onto a now lost wilderness cannot recover frontier 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. Modes and Types of Food Documentaries Documentary films are categorized in a variety of ways but typically align with two types of form: categorical form, which conveys information in an analytical fashion, or rhetorical form, which makes an argument to convince audience members to change an attitude or opinion and, sometimes , to take action to move toward change or eradicate what filmmakers 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; they are produced by assembling images from archival sources, as in the 1982 film Atomic Café. Some food documentaries integrate such archival or “found” 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 World War II 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 (2008) also includes compilation segments. Some documentaries rely on interviews or “talking heads” to record testimony about events or social movements. Both Food, Inc. and...