Bananas, eggs, and tuna: three basic foodstuffs with three wildly different points of origin. Moullet begins with these on his plate but constructs his film by working backwards and finding the sources for these items and how they reach our plates. As Moullet’s investigation deepens, however, the film moves beyond the confines of a simple exploration of food origins into more political and social realms, not only relating to food but also to the medium of film.
Genèse d'un repas, Genesis of a Meal
France
France
To begin with, we said that your films are consciously built on a geographical principle. But this principle is also heuristic, or encyclopaedic. Whether it’s a city like Foix or the opening of a Coca-Cola bottle for Essai d’ouverture, you proceed in the same way, by delimiting and then exhausting a place or an object. Your brother Patrice plays in Les Carabiniers, under the name of Albert Juross: the famous postcard sequence, with the enumeration of all the important places of the world that have all become fictitious properties, is not unrelated to your cinema. Everything in your work is marked out, coordinated, “saturated,” we could say. How would you describe this comic and obsessive attachment to lists, classifications, taxonomies…
What Moullet does is not just show you just where your food comes from and the political ramifications of every bite, but he illustrates the broader idea of how every facet of consumerist capitalist imperialist culture is constructed on exploiting the poor (and non-white) populations of the world. It shows in explicit detail the blood in every forkful. It is impressively structured, peeling layers off as it explores the ramifications further and further, and while it relies on commentary and interviews, it doesn't rest on talking heads. There are even quiet sequences that just let the imagery of factory, farm, or fishing village tell their stories, making the most evocative moments of the film.
December count: 38/100
Tough and kinda tiresome watch, but this couldn't be more appropriate in the case of a movie that tries to expose the system of food trade and production in painstaking detail. Every shot equals with one startling information. The point where you can't take in any more of this is reached fairly quickly and yet the film continues and forces you to look the wrongness of whole system in the eye. Moullet at his most serious but his style is surprisingly consistent with his other efforts. The way he frames the bosses in their pathetic bureaux betrays his views better than anything he says on the voice over.
Um filme que começa dando a própria prestação de contas antes de fazer a prestação de contas daquilo que analisa: a comida que chega até nossos pratos, do mercado até as distribuidoras, das distribuidoras até sua produção, da sua produção até os trabalhadores. Depois de uma análise da estrutura de onde se originam as comidas Moullet faz uma análise de seu próprio processo de filmagem. Da origem das bananas passamos para a origem da celuloide, daí para o processo de produção do filme e uma autocrítica desse processo. Um filme radical: que vai na raiz para encontrar o todo.
Back in September, Moullet came to Pompidou to introduce Wiseman's Meat. While I was, of course, familiar with Genèse d'un repas, I hadn’t yet had the chance to watch it. Now that I have, comparing both films in terms of their approaches to capitalist and industrialized mechanisms of production, reproduction, and exploitation is truly fascinating. Between Wiseman’s observational and inherently cynical style on the one hand, and Moullet’s didactic, formally conventional perspective—one that nonetheless demonstrates a critical incisiveness as relevant today as ever—I found myself more appreciative of the latter. As Moullet says in the film, “Knowledge is nothing but a subtle form of exploitation,” and the film’s acknowledgment of how we, the spectators, and the very existence of the film itself are complicit in the systematic exploitation perpetuated by the neoliberal capitalist Western world reflects an intelligence and lucidity that only a few films manage to articulate.
Moullet traces the commercial path of the bananas, eggs, and tuna that end up on his table, and in the process articulates the exploitative mechanisms through which wealthier countries extract value from poorer countries. The point is soundly made that there is a precisely inverse relationship between the amount of work one contributes to the process and the benefits one gains from this work. It’s refreshing that Moullet does all this without moral self-congratulation (just the opposite). What’s most impressive is the way he allows the workers themselves to articulate their understanding of the oppressive mechanisms that structure their lives.
Devastating, brutal and sickening. Capitalism is a curse. Moullet’s lack of answers and knowing complicity paint an ever more dismal reality. Can there be an economic and social structure without exploitation?
'Comme si la connaissance n'était qu'une forme subtile de l'exploitation'.
An essay on the world market chain of France's colonialist economy. Incredibly smart and so thorough in its research that even its own means of production end up being questioned by the film.
Moullet examines where his tuna (Senegal) and banana (Ecuador) come from and discovers the exploitation involved to make those products affordable for French and other Westerners. Still feels incredibly relevant. Much more ambitious than I had anticipated. Probably could have been tightened a bit (in fact, it feels like it is wrapping up around the 60-minute mark before going on another 50), but I really dug this one, one of my favorite new discoveries in my Birth Year Challenge.
