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Cesar Chavez's Video Collection

Curtis Marez, Author

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The Aerial Gaze of Agribusiness

Agribusiness film and media employ an aerial gaze in ways that symbolically elevate and ennoble corporate perspectives on land and labor. Why Braceros? (1959), for instance, includes numerous long, high-angle shots of farm workers stooping over rows of crops, thus symbolically reproducing hierarchies of labor and management by positioning spectators above farm workers, looking down on them with a panoptic gaze while they work. 

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. 



The visual dynamics influenced and were influenced by Hollywood conventions for representing similar, elevated long shots of agricultural fields and farm workers, as in the opening shots of the Imperial Valley in Border Incident (1949) and of the Central Valley in the TV show The Big Valley (1965—1969).




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