Page - 88 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/02

88 | Alyda Faber www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 69–98 Just as Wiseman’s films can insinuate themselves into consideration of large social questions about the use of animals in the development of technology, they also insinuate themselves into more everyday habits, like opening a can of tuna for lunch, again in light of the question of what or who remains unseen, un- noticed.46 Belfast, Maine (1999), shot in a blue-collar city on Maine’s coast, has a sequence of about 14 minutes wherein even the great inequality of assembly- line workers and the fish that they process into tins of sardines is mobilised into a kind of reciprocity through visual and aural democratic noise. The people involved in the processing are reduced to quick repetitive mechanical functions, fixed facial expressions, very minimal speech or silence, in a space with clat- tering machines and mechanical sounding voices over a PA system.47 The shot/ reverse shot takes in workers and a continuous stream of sardines, neither of which regards the other – they are simply in each other’s physical space. A life- like stream of dead fish, close-ups and extreme close-ups of the fish, alternate, in quick cuts, with images of the workers; the relation between workers and fish “told” through the rapid cutting as much as in the persistent focus on the fish. More on-screen time is given to the fish, with a ratio of about five to one. The workers are shown in extreme close-ups of their faces, but just as often as arms, hands or bodies working machinery or interrupting the stream of cans for inspection (fig. 7). Even when the fish are packed in symmetrical patterns in cans, before the lids are stamped on, they are more visible than the work- ers. This sequence in the film doesn’t create a celebratory reciprocity; rather, 46 For a detailed discussion of Belfast, Maine and Meat, see Faber 2015, 143–148. 47 Another sequence of Belfast, Maine, in which a teacher lectures on Moby-Dick as a working-class trag- edy, is suggestive for this assembly-line scene. Fig. 7: Film still, Belfast, Maine (Frederick Wiseman, US 1999), Disc 2, 01:14:16.