英文長評，懶得自己再用中文寫一遍也不太想把GPT翻譯出來的東西貼在自己主頁裡面，有緣人還煩請自己把内容放到翻譯器裡面。R.I.P. Frederick Wiseman.

The meta-level structure of this film is by all means straightforward: it tracks the process of animals being fed, slaughtered, processed into meat, and finally packaged and shipped to customers. It is often said that one of Wiseman's most "auteurist" aspects is his practice of shooting hundreds of hours of footages and letting the magic happen in the editing room (so is true with many documentary filmmakers), but for this particular film, I cannot help but notice how strongly mise-en-scène and individual shots—in terms of what is literally being shown on the screen at the moment, irrespective of its placement in the montage scheme—dictates the viewing experience. Part of this is due to the convenience of the team being able to reshoot whatever shots they want from the perfect angle, since the meat plant provides a monotone setting where essentially the same things happen every day. While people often associate cinema vérité with coarseness, it must be understood that this comes as necessity rather than choice. When given the opportunity (like in this case), no filmmaker does not want to be more deliberate with their visual language.

And these efforts clearly pulled off: we see perfectly framed close-ups of sheep gushing through the narrow tunnel, carefully controlled tracking close-ups of the meat processor's hands moving up and down, up and down peeling skins off from the lambs, and the absolutely jarring and unwatchable shot of an entire row of eyeballs of dead lambs hung upside down blanking staring at me—the audience. Around two thirds of the film consists of ice-cold group images of rigorously arranged animals, workers, meat parts, and even the Japanese visitors. No single living creature or object stands out in these images, and I imagine Wiseman didn't mean it as a criticism—it is simply what it is. When people feel pain in or sympathy with the fate of the animals shown in the film, I find it impossible to imagine that anyone would feel so because of one specific lamb, sheep, etc.—ultimately, our minds can only process the whole subject matter as an abstract event, and we all approach it more or less from a sideliner's perspective. We're dealing with a situation that affects so many creatures by sheer number that our sympathy finds itself impossible to make a specific landing.

That being said, I was actually slightly unimpressed when the film proceeds to the office part in which the meat processor argues with the manager—these kinds of scenes are what Wiseman was usually most comfortable with (for obvious reasons, there can be no retakes here), but in this particular film, they only serve to complete the picture.

There was a brief Q&A after today's screening, and unsurprisingly, almost everyone was discussing beyond meat, animal cruelty, problems of meat plants, etc. While I claim the following with no basis of information whatsoever and should thus be ignored, I can almost guarantee that Wiseman did not make this film simply in order to criticize animal slaughtering or the meat plant as an institution. The film did expose certain problematic practices within these meat plants (such as the line processors wearing literally zero protection) and made some social impact at the time of its release, but I just can't conclude that Meat is an exposé of an institution. There is only one ostensible bad guy in the film (the manager), but even his problem is one of working relationship, which has nothing to do with the animals. The line processors are working their butts off to make a living; the customers phone the plant weekly expecting meat to be delivered to their doors. What's wrong with that? Much of the film is about pulling one's perspective away and seeing the group-level picture: each group follows its own patterns, some to tragedy and some to a petty minimum wage. Again, it is what it is. It is easy, if not cheap, to universally apply critical theory and read all of Wiseman's films as institutionally oriented; but on the occasion of his passing, let's go back to the images and let them speak for themselves.