Films Main point
The main point of this film was how increased corn production has negatively affected American society. This film was trying to convey how corn has impacted and evolved American floodways. In a supporting detail, the narrator Ian Cheney quotes…
“seventy percent of fructose corn syrup will end up in a soda” – Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis
Ideology and Primary aim
In this film, the ideology that they are promoting is not how corn is the problem but corn is being put into everything by food manufactures and that is causing health problems. A key storyline throughout the film was how Earl L. Butz (secretary of agriculture for Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford) changed our floodway’s from having enough food to having an abundant amount of food. This change in policy and ideology has had a direct impact to the United Sates dependency on corn and corn products in so many of the foods that Americans eat or drink every day. A supporting detail that a farmer quoted was…
“ I don’t know a single farm out here in a government program, now I guarantee you if you go out there and just raise an acre of corn without any government payment you are going to lose money “ Chuck Pyatt
Linkages
In King Corn this film ties into what we have been learning in class by floodway’s. Some supporting details would be when Earl El Butts changed the subsidies around corn and made it more profitable for farms to grow and this directly relates to the food manufactures having a large amount of corn to put in a variety of different products in a variety of different ways. Many of these ways being unnaturally accruing, like high fructose corn syrup. Another key linkage I saw while watching this film about corn was food systems. In this film, food systems shows us multiple of different ways of how corn is developed over the years. It showed us how corn was developed on the farms and how farmers grew their corn. Consumer demand was very high so they had to make a large amount of corn and ended up making too much of it so distributors started taking corn everywhere to different food manufacture companies across the nation. Also this movie teaches us how corn was being processed in different food manufacture system. These details support what food systems is all about in this film.
Opinion on the film
We had vary similar opinions on this movie. We felt that it was mostly informational with no real hard stance on if this dependency on corn was good or bad thing for the United States. Ian or Curt provided a lot of facts in the movie that explained why corn is so popular in America and why we produce such a large amount of it. The movie’s strengths were that it provided a lot of factual information that gives a lot of supporting detail to make their point of what the attention of the movie is supposed to be about. The movie’s weakness is that it shows a lot of unneeded detail that doesn’t need to be added in the movie and it gets away from what the theme of the movie is actually supposed to be about. this has the added effect of slowing the movie down and making it feel longer than it needed to be. Some supporting detail with that would be how the film wasted a lot of time showing clips of unnecessary things like piles of corn and a tractor running across a field of corn multiple times with no narration to fill the empty noise. Things like this don’t need to be added in any informational films. It gets in the way of the main point and of what they’re trying to represent. this can cause the viewer to lose interest or just turn off the documentary all together.
References
Cheney, I. & Ellis, C. & Ellis, C. & Woolf, A. (Producers), Woolf, A. (Director). (2009). King Korn [Documental]. United States: Mosaic Films and ITVS.
Popcornflix. (2020). [Untitled illustration of Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis eating corn]. Retrieved March 24, 2021, from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWv29KRsQXU&t=3766s
Popcornflix. (2020). [Untitled illustration of Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis holding corn]. Retrieved March 24, 2021, from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWv29KRsQXU&t=3766s