Of Bacon and Animals in National Film Board of Canada Food Documentaries: A Synthetic Approach Part II

 

Some industrial practices are constructed as cruel in Hugo Latulippe’s Bacon: The Film through scenes of distressed piglets, which become portraits of infants taken by force from parents. These changing practices in industrial hog farms around Quebec are contrasted with pastoral scenes around the farm. But these scenes are devoid of farm animals, and shots outside slaughterhouses and images of hogs as food suggest there was no place for connections in this hyper-industrialized era.

Animals Streaming

Jason Young’s Animals, on the other hand, provides clear portraits of animals raised on a more traditional family farm. The film looks at the everyday slaughter of animals for food on the farm where the animals are personalized as pets with names before the slaughter.

Animals are included in the credits alongside their human filmmaker counterparts, as well, so the sentience of these farm animals is validated. These animals' faces are even reasserted onto the meat after their slaughter. In the film, actual slaughter of a rabbit and a yearling are shown, but we only hear the filmmaker's acts of killing. And although Young does decide to stop actually killing the animals on the farm, he and his family continue eating meat. As Young notes, this leaves him off the hook, not his favorite animals.

The message in Animals is ambiguous, then, but still points to the need to realize our meat comes from sentient beings. Despite their rhetorical weaknesses, these films articulate similar arguments against factory farming, as do popular U.S. food films such as Food, Inc. and King Corn, and European films such as We Feed the World and Our Daily Bread.