Ray Pride

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 contains 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.

"Our Daily Bread" opens Friday at Facets for a week.

(2006-11-20)

Also by Ray Pride

Children Afraid of the Night
Friends habitually call this smoky place the All-Purpose, but not only because it's like high school or everyone who's remotely likeable is as cute and opaque as Molly Ringwald's Claire Standish in "The Breakfast Club." Strangers say this club's standoffish, but it's not really a club, it's regional and seasonal and elective affinities, it's repetition and proximity, habit and hope, a cushion nearby on hardwood times
(2006-11-14)

Craig, Daniel Craig
Martin Campbell, who also directed Pierce Brosnan's first appearance in "GoldenEye," makes a pretty terrific, gritty, twenty-first century thriller
(2006-11-14)

Tip of the Week
"Shut Up and Sing!" is Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck's stirring documentary about three years in the life of the Dixie Chicks: is this the wilderness or a new world for them?
(2006-11-14)

A Chicago Like No Other
Thirty-one-year-old Zach Helm, screenwriter of "Stranger Than Fiction," graduated DePaul's Goodman Theatre School as an actor in 1996. But it was his playwriting that led him to Hollywood
(2006-11-07)

Tip of the Week
(2006-11-07)

Tip of the Week
(2006-10-31)

After the Headlines
(2006-10-31)

Reeling In the Years
(2006-10-31)

The Beauty of All History
(2006-10-24)

Tip of the Week
(2006-10-24)

Tip of the Week
(2006-10-17)

I Want Candy
(2006-10-17)

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