Documentary Food Films Continued

Bill Nichols’ Introduction to Documentary and Jack C. Ellis and Betsy A. McLane’s A New History of Documentary Film expand documentary categories to embrace different modes and genres, all of which are applied in food documentaries. Nichols illustrates his explanation for reflexive documentaries, for example, with an overview of Luis Bunuel’s Land Without Bread (1933), a portrait of a remote region of Spain where local peasants fight to survive. His expository category lines up well with interview or talking head documentaries, and his observational documentary aligns with the direct-cinema work. Poetic documentaries, on the other hand, move away from "objective" reality to approach an inner "truth" that can only be grasped by poetical manipulation, as in Flaherty’s Man of Aran (1934). According to Nichols, other documentaries are performative, like Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me (2004), and stress subjective experience and emotional responses to the world. Nichols last type, the participatory documentary, was first defined as Kinopravda by Dziga Vertov, who emulated the approach of anthropologists in silent films like Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Russian for “cinema truth,” the approach translated into “cinema verite” once both lighter camera and sound equipment were available to capture an encounter between filmmaker and subject. 

Television food documentaries tend to take a synthetic approach, as do the UK’s Channel 4 screened films, The End of the Line (2009, Dir. Rupert Murray) and The Cove (2009, Dir. Louie Psihoyos). PBS Point of View Documentaries (POV) such as Sweetgrass (2009, Dir. Ilisa Barbash), a portrait of the last traditional sheep ranch in the U.S., and Farmingville (2004, Dir. Carlos Sandoval), an expose of the unfair treatment of immigrant farm workers, also take this synthetic approach. Documentaries on the U.S. Food Network and BBC series, including The History of Ready Meals (2011), provide an historical overview of certain foods and traditions using a variety of documentary approaches, as well. 

 Contemporary food documentaries adhere to a variety of these documentary types or modes. Our Daily Bread, for example, may align more closely with a categorical rather than a rhetorical documentary form. This documentary reveals each step in the production process for each of the food products examined through an indirect but fragmented direct-cinema approach that combines the nonlinear form of an avant-garde cinema calling for social action with the ultra-realism of Georges Franju’s Blood of the Beasts (1949) and the observational approach of films like Wiseman’s Meat. Like Our Daily Bread, both Blood of the Beasts and Meat documented the modernization of food production. Blood of the Beasts was released a year after Red River (1948), a Western examining changes to the post-Civil War cattle drive system after the expansion of the railroad, and juxtaposes portraits of idyllic Paris life with images of slaughter that suggest humans can accept and institutionalize acts of almost surreal cruelty. Meat turns the Old West into a factory where cattle are prodded, vaccinated, and then fattened up for slaughter in enormous feedlots that are overseen by modern-day cowboys with electric cattle prods. Because of the film’s observational approach, we witness the efficient slaughterhouse and the salesmen taking orders for the product from all over the country.