THE RELEASE dates for these two films are almost six years apart, but, by fortunate coincidence, I saw them both for the first time only recently. As films, they undoubtedly differ, but viewed one after another, it is apparent that both are concerned with the same social phenomena: each is a powerful statement about the consequences of the Industrial Revolution (reports about the death of which have been greatly exaggerated), and, more specifically, about the increasingly prevalent use of mechanical, high yield methods of growing, controlling and harvesting food, both plants and animals. Our Daily Bread, which is in certain ways more comprehensive than the other, provides us with an overview of a broad range of factory methods applied to food cultivation, harvesting and packaging, including the mechanized “processing” of chickens, pigs and cattle. The style of filming is appropriately factory-like—the camera is an anonymous eye, a non-judging robotic observer—nor is there any narration throughout. One reviewer said of this effect that it is “Koyaanisqatsi-like,” and while I too concluded that, I was even more strongly reminded of the classic book (shocking when I first saw it) Mechanization Takes Command by Siegfried Gideon, and, in recent decades, by the documentary exposés of Frederick Wiseman (in particular Titticut Follies). Certain scenes in this film will surely be disturbing, because we are forced to be witnesses to the seemingly uncaring methods that reliably supply us with fresh and affordable food. In contrast to Our Daily Bread, the hand-held camera of French filmmaker Agnès Varda takes on an impassioned, visible role in The Gleaners and I, a film in which she herself is portrayed as a cinematic gleaner. Like the other film, this one by Varda is largely about the consequences of using factory methods in food production. Yet, in an interesting twist, it works by a shift of attention away from the efficiency of such methods, and turns instead to the fragments left over from mechanized harvests. These remnants are also harvested (within French state regulations), not by machines, but by human scavengers or “gleaners”—people who wait on the sidelines then scour the fields when the harvest is done, gathering the perfectly edible parts that the machines have missed or rejected. For many people, whether rural or urban, gleaning (as a metaphor) is a critical means of survival. But Varda’s thesis is broader than that—we are all gleaners, in the sense that much of what we do comes from rescuing, recycling and assigning new significance to the fragments left over from other events.

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