Page - 89 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/02

Film, Parable, Reciprocity | 89www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 69–98 it is the strange likeness of assembly-line workers with the product that they produce out of once living things. Their mind-numbing labour, ignored by most people opening cans of mass-produced food, suggests a state similar to that expressed by a former student of a high school in a letter read by the principal to a group of teachers (High School, Frederick Wiseman, US 1968): “I am just a body doing a job.”48 Wiseman’s film Meat (1976), shot at Montfort slaughterhouse and meat- processing plant in Colorado, shows the industrial processing of beef cattle and sheep, reduced to a thing, but a thing with a face. The workers are often shot on the edge or to the side of the frame, the faces and bodies of the cattle in the centre. While the workers mechanically perform their kill, or single cut, the camera records the faces of the workers (fig. 8), but even more persistently the dead animals – a macabre circle of skinned faces move in a circle like an eerie merry-go-round, workers barely visible behind them (fig. 9). 48 Benson/Anderson 1989, 138. Fig. 8: Film still, Meat (Frederick Wiseman, US 1976), 00:35:53. Fig. 9: Film still, Meat (Frederick Wiseman, US 1976), 00:34:58.