Nagini's Blog

Food On Film – Week 6

I watched two documentaries that run by the same name – Our Daily Bread (1949) directed by Slatan Dudow and Our Daily Bread produced by Australian filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter. I must say both of them have a lot of things I can learn. Our daily bread (1949) is a story about a father Karl Weber of Berlin observes from a distance how his son Ernst participates in the building of a new socialist society in World War II. When I was watching the film Our Daily Bread(1949), be honest the first thing I noticed is that the background audio music really brings me to the environment that the director has been creating. Music by Hanns Eisler was the centerpiece of a contemporary review, he created a score that challenged, thrilled, and focused the documentary. And it allows me to realize how important the audio takes in a documentary, it defiantly shows the emotion and feeling in the film. On the other hand, Our daily bread produced by Nikolaus Geyrhalte collecting the vast product lines of animals, and some plants and flowers, are shown being harvested in huge rows, seen from dizzying, vertiginous perspectives which is incredible. There is no voice-over in his film, but his film brings me to the zones and areas I never see before. I feel that way even though there is no explanation, but I still get into the film. Geyrhalte takes me inside worlds of wonder and of terror in “Our Daily Bread”. From the reading of Helen Hughes ‘Arguments without words in Unser taglich Brot’, I think the strategies of telling audiences a narrative without any word is to create a connection between the filmmaker and the participators. The goal of a documentary which uses poetic mode is not to create a traditional narrative, but rather is to look into presenting patterns and associations to create meaning and evoke an emotional response from the audience. As Hughes adopts in the reading, the audiences will create their own mental representations of the object represented I the image is in the film. As what Tong and I want to explore the idea of our documentary, the authenticity in ethnic restaurant in Melbourne, what we really want to do is not the information about what is authentic food(well, we maybe will talk about it little bit), but more about capturing the relationships between people and food identity, we also want to provide authentic food categories for our audience of how documentary incorporates relationships into the interpretive process.

Technologically, a poetic mode documentary has no voiceover, no interviews and there is no obvious angle that the filmmakers are taking. “Mood, tone and effect” are stressed a lot more than “displays of knowledge and acts of persuasion” and there is also a lack of a rhetorical element. However, it has the ability to look into alternative forms of knowledge” that may differ to the traditional transfer of information (Nichols, 2010). It inspired me to think about create an open space onto which our audiences’ thoughts could be projected. We plan to do an interview this week of a restaurant which both of us is really interested in (culture and food identity) and shoot some close up of their chef making the food, in order to create some space for audiences to make up their own minds about authentic food. The poetic mode allows me to think about the documentary is not only about educating someone, but it also about brings people’s feeling together and allow them to respond to the film. I guess this shape me to thinking about a documentary is not something that is separate from the world, it actually comes from the world we live.

 

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