Meat

You ever want to look at something that scares you? Like (for me) a big spider weaving its web outside the garage? You can step back away, watch from a safe distance, not have the image filling your view. Or sometimes you can just peak at something, maybe between fingers, one eye shut? This film lets you see how meat is really made. If you went to a slaughterhouse and walked around, had a tour, it would be a completely horrifying sensory overload. But here, on your TV screen, and in B&W, it seems somewhat safer to look. Close your eyes and it will be gone, you are safe.

There is no narration, just the sounds of the plant as the workers do their jobs, the machinery clanks away. Very sterile feeling. (Nothing like Motel Hell). Very simply, each line at the plant, from rounding up each type of critter, killing it, and processing it.

Again, this may sound overwhelming -- but it isn't. The B&W, the natural sound, the slow even pace, it seems more like an automobile assembly line after a while.

So, if you are fine with not knowing, perhaps even not imaging what goes on in a slaughterhouse then you are all set. But if you are curious -- just what goes on behind those doors -- this film will tell you in as gentle but honest a way possible.

Saw this documentary once in the late seventies when it aired on PBS and, considering the subject matter, the Meat Packers lobbying group probably went ballistic and has prevented it from ever being shown to the public again.

It's pretty scary and after seeing how cattle and sheep are processed for human consumption. After I saw it I stopped eating any red meat product. Thankfully, it was shot in black and white (the only 'color' you would have seen would be red from all of the blood) and follows the cattle from the pens where they are milling about and then get directed to the slaughter house. They are then 'humanly' dispatched by knocking them out with an electric shock. Probably to prevent the adrenaline from pumping into their system which acts as a 'poison' spoiling the meat for consumption.

They camera then follows the carcass thru the whole meat packing process showing the meat packers standing knee deep in blood as it drains from the carcases that are hooked by their hooves on the assembly line and then sawed up for their particular 'cuts' of meat. There's no narrative or music. Just the raw video view of what happens to cattle when they are prepared for human consumption. The camera really does everything necessary to show the process of delivery of the less glorified image of your basic hamburger, t-bone steak, rump-roast, etc.

I don't know how most people feel about what they put in their bodies but after seeing this documentary you will swear off of any meat that's 'red'. Medically, red meat, with the nitrates and nitrites included to 'preserve' the meat on the shelf longer, can cause all sorts of cancer causing maladies to your intestinal tract and colon. Stick with chicken or fish for the time being but those two groups are inching their way to being unfit for human consumption also.

"Meat" changed my life. After viewing it once, I tried to eat meat once again. I got sick and after that, have remained a vegetarian for the past 29 years. The power of the images - without narrative interpretation - is worth a study in itself of the effect of cinema as a language.

This documentary accomplishes something that seems foreign to modern filmmakers - the objective point of view. While every frame is a choice and thus filled with implications, this filmmaker takes no opportunity to poeticize or dramatize a message not already contained in the objective representation.

It is a poignant representation of man's ability to desensitize himself to the plight of coexisting animals on this planet.

But then again, that is only my subjective feeling from the images which themselves do nothing but reflect an objective truth.

Saw this on PBS a long time ago. This B&W film is very long and tough to look at. If life in all of its grittiness is what interests you, this slice of it will be worth seeing. If you are the type of person who wants to know something as basic as how the food you eat is processed for you, and if you are not the squeamish type who blanches at the sight of blood, even if in B&W, than you will find this a truly interesting and informing film. Starting at the farm/ranch in the darkness of early morning where the cattle are loaded onto trucks, and ending at the completion of the workday at the slaughter house, it carries the viewer through all phases of the production process. Yes, it isn't pretty, but it is real, very real. The use of a Judas goat to lead the cattle up the ramp to the chute where they are quickly dispatched with a stun gun to their foreheads is a never to be forgotten piece of film work.

The beautiful thing about Wiseman's documentaries, are that he doesn't have to say anything at all...because he lets the images speak for themselves.

And in the case of Meat, things are no different.

Here, he confronts the industrialized feedlots and factory farms, in midwestern USA.

We watch the entire process from the auction house (where these large scale operations buy animals off of the smaller scale farmers who raise them); to packaging; rounding out with the goods being shipped off to market.

With a little business in between.

It is, however, a bit of a selective endeavour...as we only watch the process as it applies to cattle and sheep.

Pigs and chickens are not covered here.

After leaving the auction house, we head to the feedlots, where the cattle are fattened up on grain.

The industry leaders, here, are educating a group of Japanese businessmen, who want to take what they learn, so they can start up a similar such operation back at home.

From here, we head straight into the slaughterhouse.

Where the cattle are put through a very fined tuned- and highly efficient- operation, that sees them stunned, slit open, gutted, deskinned, and left to hang for marbling purposes.

Then we switch over to watch sheep go through a similar such process...as they are led to the slaughter by the "scapegoat".

A turncoat of an animal, that leads the recently sheered flock straight toward their impending doom.

The stunning part of the process is the most disturbing...as the animals are strung up, and hung from their limbs, as they continue to twitch, after being subject to an intense electrical shock, applied to the brain.

Though, the remaining part certainly isn't for the faint of heart.

As it makes you understand why people like Ed Gein were such affective serial killers.

Because working in this industry is sure to desensitize you from the blood and guts involved in the act of dismemberment.

Wiseman might seem like a fly on the wall.

A neutral actor in the whole ordeal, not imposing his voice, or opinion upon the viewer.

But the film certainly comes off as a critique, in this vegan's (admittedly bias) opinion.

On one hand, it is a valuable look at what these animals- and those engaged in the act of slaughtering them- must endure, to bring meat to your kitchen table each night.

Thus acting to bridge the disconnect that your average urban dwellers have, between what they eat, and where it comes from.

But at the same time, can be seen as a critique of the heartless, emotionless, process that is the industrialized slaughter of animals for meat, and related such products.

Because it certainly is easy to see how such a world could breed sociopaths, and serial killers of the future.

As, lest we forget...meat will always require murder.

His films having such dichotomies, are why Wiseman is- and always will be- such an important documentarian.

8 out of 10.