The Aerial Gaze of Agribusiness
The film uses aerial shots to elicit wonder at the corporation’s technological mastery of the landscape, including images of huge tractors and rows and rows of gigantic cotton harvesters. It also includes scenes of a manager’s helicopter flight to survey the vast fields with their ordered rows and “patterns of green and gold” that symbolically link the manager’s power to his panoptic domination of the visual field. By cross-cutting between personalizing close-ups of him in the helicopter and shots of the rows of cotton from his vantage point, the documentary invites the spectator to imaginatively identify with the perspective of the white male corporate head looking down on his factory in the fields. By effectively elevating and ennobling a white agribusiness gaze in opposition to farm workers fixed in the visual field, such films invite viewers to identify with the top-down perspective of agribusiness and take visual pleasure in its high-tech domination of land and labor.
Previous page on path | Agribusiness Futurism, page 6 of 11 | Next page on path |
Discussion of "The Aerial Gaze of Agribusiness"
Add your voice to this discussion.
Checking your signed in status ...