
Overconsumption
A six-minute excerpt pulled from Samsara, Ron Fricke's wordless non-narrative feature, this clip strings together time-lapse footage of industrial food production: chickens packed by the thousand on conveyor belts, hogs moving through processing lines, produce sorted and stacked at a scale built for supermarkets rather than kitchens. There is no narration and no dialogue, only Fricke's camera and Michael Stearns' score doing the argument for him, letting the machinery, the repetition, and the sheer volume of animals and goods make the case about industrial-scale consumption on their own. The pace is deliberately hypnotic, speeding up processes that normally happen out of public view so the mechanics of mass output become visible in a way a grocery store aisle never shows. It runs as a standalone clip online, detached from Samsara's broader meditation on humanity and the built world, but the images carry the same charge condensed into a few minutes of unbroken factory footage.