Fork Over Knives (2011), directed by Fulkerson Lee, is a documentary highlighting the relationship between Americans, health diseases and food diet. “A movie that can save your life” as Roger Ebert labelled it, Fork Over Knives is as informational as it is persuasive in converting one’s eating habit.
The movie follows Lee Fulkerson himself and three other sick patients, as they underwent a whole plant-based diet and see significant improvements on their medical results and feel better in terms of overall health. The movie concentrates on the lifelong research by two well-known nutritionists, Dr. T. Colin Campbell of Cornell and Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn of the Cleveland Clinic who both share the same objective of spreading awareness of the benefits of adopting a whole plant-based diet.
The reason I chose this movie because it has the same point of interest as with my own project. The film focuses on the relationship between animal-based products and health, while my project will highlight my own personal perspective on food diets, specifically on the elimination of animal-based products. In this studio, I hope to explore even more deeply into this issue by integrating my own journey and other’s, digging up the reasons and beliefs regarding animal-based products while presenting information about both my own and their diets. This movie serves as a great reference source not only for the abundant facts it contains but also its production techniques and styles. It is highly informational and persuasive without being too aggressive, which I really appreciate as an audience.
Lee Fulkerson, as the filmmaker and director of this movie is distinctly present in the movie. Not only did he narrate the whole film, he is present inside the film itself by documenting his own journey of trying this life-changing diet. This movie therefore adapts the autobiographical mode, where there no longer exists a gap between producer and audience (Fox 2011) as Lee through this film brings me as an audience along on his journey. This is an appeal that I find engaging while watching the movie, because I get to actually see the progress from the day he started eating only whole plant-based food to the when he finally has his health checked six months later. Watching the film therefore feels exciting because I was constantly curious of the outcome of this diet that the movie continuously convinced me to adopt, and I have to say it felt rewarding every time a patient gets their results, and especially when Lee himself got himself checked at the end of the movie.
Fork Over Knives also takes on a rhetorical form, which Hubbard and Murray (2012) explained provides “argument to convince audience members to change an attitude or opinion and, sometimes, take action to move towards a change or eradicate what film-makers see as a problem”, or as Fox (2011) would term it, expository. The message the film is trying to get across is quite clear, with a goal of persuading its audience to give-up all animal-based food products and instead start to adopt or at least try an all whole plant-based eating habit. The film is therefore pretty subjective, and this is evident in the way the film is constructed, with interviews and facts supporting only the intended argument. Even when it includes interviews with opposing figures like Connie Diekman, an advisor of the dairy council, or David Klurfeld, an USDA, they only serves to even strengthen the film’s argument by dismissing their point with facts. I think Lee utilises this mode effectively, as I’m pretty convinced myself. However, I couldn’t dismiss the feeling that the movie purposely left out some parts and information which made me doubt its reliability.
Apart from autobiographical, which is ‘inherently reflexive’ as Fox (2011, pg. 34) stated, and expository, the film also implied a few other modes including: participatory (short street interviews) and performative (illustration on screen). These two modes were a great addition to the completeness of the whole film, as they provide playfulness the film needed. I honestly think that if the movie was to be approached in any other way it wouldn’t have an impact that it had, which is to convince and persuade its audience.
The way the movie conveyed its information, which are mostly facts and statistics, is through voice-over or narration by Lee himself, but made it feel less assertive as they were backed up with pleasing on-screen visuals in the form of illustration and implementation of stock footage (visual observation). Most of the crucial information were also conveyed through interviews with the patients and other experts, although mostly coming from Dr. T. Colin Campbell and Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn as the main figures in this film, along with dialogues between subjects. I find the combination of the methods information is conveyed made it engaging, because if the movie was only filled with interviews or narration, then it would be monotonous and to some extent, boring.
In the end, Fork Over Knives is a persuasive, informational yet entertaining documentary. It has lots of great elements, including its characters, visuals and structure, which I’d love to try and imitate, but of course with my limited budget, time and resources, I’ll have to do it my own way. It’s a great form of expository and autobiographical documentary, however I hope to approach my own work more to the later, to make it about myself and make it as transparent as possible.
reference list:
Fox, B 2011, Documentary Media: History, Theory, Practice, 2nd edn, Routledge, New York, NY.
Robin, LM & Joseph, KH 2012, ‘Contemporary eco-food films: The documentary tradition’, Studies in Documentary Film, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 43-59.