Feb. 14, 2007

The title for Niklolaus Geyrhalter’s new minimalist documentary, Our Daily Bread, sets the stage for a poignant irony. The phrase, most associated with the “Lord’s Prayer,” reminds us of the spirituality that since prehistoric times is associated with our food. Spanning cultures, we have regarded that which has been provided to us as a blessing, and even into the industrial age, have given at least a perfunctory respect for its origins.

This chronicle of mechanized farming in Europe, which invites comparisons to Fast Food Nation, does not focus on exploited workers or unsanitary conditions. On the contrary, most facilities viewed are clean to the point of being clinical, more reminiscent of laboratories than farms.

The camera shots, meticulously framed, are long but seldom tedious. There is no dialogue. No interviews. Only with very rare exception do humans or animals make an utterance. But the audio is rich with the benign hum of machinery and the shuffling of hooves. Absent are the plaintive cries from chickens, cows, and pigs headed for the slaughter, as is the coaxing from the humans who guide them through the gates and down the ramps. All involved are eerily compliant, resigned, and mute.

Beginning the process of artificial insemination, workers effect a coitus interuptus, a method by which the handlers collect the ejaculation of a mounting bovine. A quick Google search does not reveal sexual satisfaction as a chief concern of animal rights groups, so, any complaints from the frustrated female will likely fall on deaf ears.

The tendency to assign human qualities to the condemned — and hence empathize — is greatest with the pigs. They seem to be the most eager to please: carefree and cooperative as they, much like grade-schoolers on a fieldtrip to a carnival, take a ride in an open-air truck.

Once euthanized, the animals are turned over to the robots. As in a Pixar cartoon, automatons, with anthropomorphic mannerisms, attend the conveyor line, armed with surgical instruments with which they perform the dissection process. This little piggy went to the computerized butcher.

The animals are uniform in size, each carcass within anatomical tolerances, avoiding costly downtime for readjustments. It’s all a bit eerie, evocative of the sci-fi cartoons where this robotic process continues uninterrupted into the home, where an articulated arm comes out of the wall and places a plate of steak and potatoes in front of you.

But the point is not what we see here, but its invisible corollary. The cows that used to graze in the fields, the rooster crowing at dawn, the pigs rolling in mud. That’s not just folklore, that’s life, ours and theirs: the cycles, the seasons, the procreation that reaffirms who we are. But it’s not here, and that’s the magic of Geyrhalter’s art — a frightening abstract based on absence, loss, and the implication that what’s gone isn’t coming back.