Animal products: livestock farming and ecological citizenship in French political documentary

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the past 15 years, French cinema has seen a significant uptick in documentary films devoted to the issue of industrialized agriculture. These films join a large international corpus of documentaries that critique agricultural threats to human health, animal welfare, and the environment. This article analyses four recent political films on French livestock production that critique industrialized agricultural practices. Three are solutions-oriented films, Herbe (2009), Solutions locales pour un désordre global (2010) and Steak (R)évolution (2014), and one, Entrée du personnel (2011), that takes stock of one set of consequences of the system by portraying the interior of an industrial slaughterhouse. The article uses the framework of ecological citizenship to analyze the films’ political stance through the implied viewer they address. The analysis demonstrates that this viewer is assumed to share concerns about both the social and environmental consequences of food choices. The films articulate these concerns through various visual and verbal strategies that make the link between individual acts and collective concerns visible. They also suggest the existence of a non-territorial environmental community that the viewer might join. The values that emerge from the films align with more generalized concerns about French food that are migrating out of activist circles and into the mainstream of the French population. These include the quality and geographic origin of food, and concern for animal and human welfare, and the ecological footprint of various food choices.