Process makes me happy like almost nothing else: to watch work, as I would when I worked on training films, asking someone to reassemble, then disassemble again, after taking apart a steam turbine engine. Fiction filmmaking doesn’t afford many opportunities to demonstrate work as work; watching paint being painted is not the same as watching it dry; but still, watching a writer write is not the same as what a writer feels while writing and after the task has unfurled. While Richard Linklater’s ambitious “Fast Food Nation” ends with a shot-in-three-days on-the-killing-floor slaughterhouse scene, reminiscent of Georges Franju’s great short documentary, “Blood of Beasts,” Austrian documentarian Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s “Our Daily Bread” (Unser täglich Brot) is another creature: deeply rooted in landscape and duration, it is hypnotic and magisterial, about moment and passage, about the industrialization of food and the necessity of nurture. Geyrhalter shot and directed, and his eye for the reality of the highest tech of industrial farming is monumental and surreal, wordless, a collation of clean, bright images of supernal calm and the most striking cropduster scene since “North by Northwest.” An experimental non-narrative epic, featuring rushing rivulets of peeping chicks, floating apples, tomatoes sorted by roving, unmanned machines and fish-gut-sucking devices of metronomic efficiency, “Our Daily Bread” is a strange look at one of the many worlds behind our accepted world. 92m. (Ray Pride)
Ray Pride is Newcity’s film critic and a contributing editor to Filmmaker magazine.
His multimedia history of Chicago “Ghost Signs” will be published soon. Previews of the project are on Twitter and on Instagram as Ghost Signs Chicago. More photography on Instagram.
Talking Screens: A Week In Chicago Film, March 12-18, 2021 OPENERS How condensed do you want your Almodóvar? In thirty taut minutes, the Spanish writer-director burrows inside Jean Cocteau’s 1930 play, “The Human Voice,” with Tilda Swinton as his physical and psychological blade. Studio-confined during pandemic days, it’s brightly, boldly interior in every way. Music Box Theatre; shown with Almodóvar’s 1988 breakthrough, “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.”…
Talking Screens: A Week in Chicago Film, February 12-18, 2021 OPENERS The delay of the Oscars until April 25 was one of many changes in the movie industry in the past year; movies released in the U. S. through February 28 are deemed eligible if there was an intention to have released them theatrically. The standard-bearers opening this week include Shaka King's sleek Chicago-set marvel, "Judas & The Black Messiah,"…
Talking Screens: A Week in Chicago Film, February 19-25, 2021 OPENERS Searchlight Pictures' "Nomadland" expands its theater reach while debuting on Disney sibling Hulu; its reception from critics' groups continues, with nods last week from the Toronto circle (adding to a lengthy roster including the National Society of Film Critics, Boston and London) for best film, director Chloé Zhao and a flinty Frances McDormand. McDormand's Fern is on the road…
