Frederick Wiseman

Frederick Wiseman is among America’s foremost documentary filmmakers. The recipient of many awards, including three Emmys, Wiseman has made more than thirty feature-length documentaries during a career that has spanned five decades.

Un récit d’apprentissage des temps modernes. La vie des ombres est un passionnant livre hybride, qui tient parfois de la comédie, parfois de la tragédie, et qui toujours raconte une part de notre humanité.

In the tradition of such acclaimed cinéma direct works as Jean Eustache's Le Cochon (1970) and Frederick Wiseman's Meat (1976) comes Nikolaus Geyrhalter's 92-minute documentary Our Daily Bread – an ironic, detached cinematic glimpse of how the food we eat on a daily basis is picked, killed, mechanically processed, and packaged for human consumption. Geyrhalter resists having an overtly political or muckraking agenda; instead, his sequence of images acts as an extended visual meditation, a plunge into the poetic mundanity of everyday existence. By singling out processes that we would otherwise take for granted or overlook, Geyrhalter calls our attention to the more absurd and surreal aspects of the food chain – with the graceful and rhythmic, yet thoroughly strange and haunting, processes of automatization in the foreground.

Documentary films constitute a major part of film history. Cinema's origins lie, arguably, more in non-fiction than fiction, and documentary represents the other - often submerged and barely visible - 'half' of cinema history. Historically, documentary cinema has always been an important point of reference for fiction cinema, and the two have often overlapped.