Contemporary eco-food films: The documentary tradition

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article examines the central role food has played in documentary films as early as the Lumiere Brothers' 1895 view, Repas de bebe/Baby's Breakfast through the more recent eco-food films from United States, Canadian and European film-makers. Responding to non-fiction works of Michael Pollan, popular US documentaries such as Food, Inc. by Robert Kenner (2008) and King Corn by Aaron Woolf (2007) assert clear positions through their talking heads approach to exposition but draw on a limiting nostalgic view of food production. Austria's We Feed the World by Erwin Wagenhofer (2005) and multiple National Film Board of Canada documentaries, on the other hand, provide a depth of evaluation supported by multiple examples missing in both Food, Inc. and King Corn, yet weaken their arguments with an evenhanded approach to food ecology. Germany's Our Daily Bread by Nikolaus Geyrhalter (2005), however, comes closest to capturing the truth, offering fragmented observations that closely replicate the segmented process of industrial food production, effectively revealing its consequences to human and non-human nature because the intermediary veil of direct cinema has been lifted.