Blog #2

I have watched a documentary film, “Food, Inc.”, for this assignment. This film examines large-scale agricultural food production in the United States, concluding that the meat and vegetables produced by this type of economic enterprise leads to inexpensive but unhealthy and environmentally harmful food. The most harmful scene was that one showing how the food industry produce inexpensive chickens. They design chickens to grow twice as big than regular chickens and let the chickens have bigger breasts, so that they can produce more white meat since people like to eat that. However, some of the chickens die during the growing process since their organs cannot keep up with the heaviness. There is a scene of a chicken dying in the chicken house. The chicken overturns and is hardly breathing: its heaviness is choking the chicken. This is a very harmful and difficult scene to view for me. To show this pain of the chicken, a shallow depth of focus is used to emphasize this dying chicken. This is a close-up shot of the chicken dying on the center foreground and it is on focus. The other alive chickens are moving around on the background and on off-focus. Lighting contrasts the alive and dying chickens: this dying chicken is on the shade and it emphasize the end of this chicken's life, however the alive chickens are in sunshine and looks fine. The chickens house is very dusty, dirty place and it makes us even scared if we think that chickens we eat in our everyday life is growing there. Therefore, this nasty chicken house is suitable for mise-en-scene to show the chicken suffering from the death. This scene make us doubt that what the industry is doing for producing inexpensive food is right by showing how they treat chickens, such as showing the nasty chicken house where they grow or showing the dying chicken. The lighting, mise-en-scene, focusing helps create this harmful, painful scene to achieve the producer's objective, which is showing the reality of the food industry.