Arguments without words in Unser täglich Brot (Geyrhalter 2005)

Abstract

In this article, I discuss the film Our Daily Bread [Geyrhalter, N. 2005. Unser täglich Brot [Motion Picture]. Austria: The ICA] as an almost wordless film, asking why the decision not to include interviews, intertitles or commentary, and to use carefully composed, often symmetrical framing, appears to have led reviewers to see it as an unusually democratic documentary. In my discussion, I refer to Richards' [1930. Practical Criticism. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner] four kinds of meaning in poetry, and Sperber and Wilson's ([1986]1995 Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell) model of inferential communication guided by the principle of relevance, as a means to explore how authorial feeling about the subject is suppressed in the film, and how this might encourage the belief that the viewer makes up his/her own mind about what is made visible or ‘mutually manifest’. Sperber et al.'s [2010. Epistemic Vigilance. Mind & Language 25, no. 4: 359–393] work on ‘epistemic vigilance’ and on the links between argumentation and communication is also drawn on in order to understand how separate kinds of reasoning involved simultaneously in the interpretation of the film create a dynamic ambiguity or ambivalence, which itself is the basis for the use of formal aesthetic devices in political art cinema.