Film Food--Celluloid Gastronomy---IVAC 2012, Lefkosia, Cyprus

This evening, we will be serving 'dinner' of our program 'Film Food--Celluloid Gastronomy' at Theatro Ena in Lefkosia, Cyprus to close out the 2012 edition of Images and Views of Alternative Cinema.  Special thanks to Federico Rossin for his insights into the film selection and his collaborative spirit.  What follows are my synopses of our three-course filmic meal.  Bon appétit... 

Film Food—Celluloid Gastronomy

curated and presented by

Federico Rossin and Christopher Zimmerman

Exploring connections between experimental cinema and food, Film Food digs into the rich tapestry of metaphors and ramifications of eating, consumption, ritual, etiquette, (in)digestion, satiation, globalization…  These films, in creative and often experimental ways, create something akin to cinematic nourishment—films about and with food that are themselves food to digest aesthetically and philosophically—a cinematic supper.

Program 1:          Breakfast           78:00

Jan Švankmajer  Food (Jídlo) 1992   17:00   color, sound  

Jan Svankmajer's Food--1992

To say that food is a recurring theme in the work of legendary Czech surrealist filmmaker Jan Švankmajer would be an understatement.  Rather, food—and the often-abject nature of eating—is ‘something of an obsession’ for Švankmajer.  His overriding preoccupation with food is most fully realized in his 1992 short Food (Jídlo), which presents, using stop-animation, claymation, and live action, a three-course cinematic meal:  a machine-like breakfast, an insatiable lunch, and a cannibalistic dinner.  The three vignettes of Food suggest the existence of a dark underbelly to social ritual, in which humans are equated with food and are devoured by mechanistic states of desire.  In an interview given in 2002, Švankmajer explains that, ‘The ways people deal with food and eating can be quite good at reflecting our civilization.’  He conceived of Food as a political allegory in the 1970s during a period when the communist authorities had banned him from making films.

Frans Zwartjes   Visual Training   1969   8:00   b&w, silent

Zwartjes' Visual Training--1969

The films of Frans Zwartjes—Dutch filmmaker, musician, violin maker, draughtsman, painter, and sculptor—achieve an uncanny sense of foreboding as severely made-up actors find themselves caught in eroticized webs of power characterized by themes of cruelty and psychosis.  Visual Training from 1969 creates a sinister atmosphere as a seemingly apathetic man becomes involved in a food orgy, in which two scantily clad women are smeared with food—a twisted exploration of the sensuous pleasures of food and sex.

Vivian Ostrovsky  Eat     1988    15:00   16mm, color, sound

Ostrovsky's Eat--1988

Vivian Ostrovsky’s films have been described as being situated between ‘film journals and film collages’ (Yann Beauvais).  Eat is a comparative study of humans’ and animals’ ‘table manners’ as food and drink are gulped down within a variety of contexts.  Originally shot on super-8 and blown up to 16mm, Ostrovsky’s film calls into question the truism that animals ‘feed’ and humans ‘eat’. 

Michael Snow  Breakfast (Table Top Dolly) 1976   15:00   16mm, 15 min, color

Snow's Breakfast (Table Top Dolly)--1976

P. Adams Sitney recognizes Canadian experimental filmmaker Michael Snow as one of the progenitors of ‘structural film’—a movement away from complex forms towards a simplified, often predetermined film practice in which the shape and the form of the film take priority over content.  Shot in 1972 and shelved until 1976, Michael Snow’s Breakfast (Table Top Dolly) takes on a similar structure to Snow’s Wavelength in that a single camera movement moves from and to fixed starting and end points.  The film is a table top dolly traversing a breakfast table and ultimately crashing into the objects of breakfast.  Snow suggests that this movement refers (literally) to the ‘violence of the camera’s gaze’, and Deke Dusinberre sees the continuous zoom as ‘serving as a grand metaphor for indigestion’.

Kurt Kren   9/64 O Tannenbaum   1964   3:00    16mm, color, silent

Kren's 9/64 O Tannenbaum--1964

In 9/64 O Tannenbaum, Kurt Kren presents a pulsating document of the development of an Otto Muehl ‘action’ carried out by members of Vienna’s Direct Art, Material Action group.  In typical economical fashion, Kren’s jump cuts heighten the drama of this performance ritual in which naked men and women writhe smeared in blood, eggs, feathers, paint, and various foodstuffs with a dilapidated Christmas tree on top.  The intense, even disturbing, imagery tests the viewer’s limits as to what he or she can ‘stomach’.

Joyce Wieland   Catfood   1968   13:00   16mm, color, sound

Wieland's Catfood 1968

In a career at the forefront of feminist practice, Canadian multi-disciplinary artist Joyce Wieland’s work explores female sexuality, domestic life, ecology, and Canadian nationalism.  In Catfood, Wieland presents a portrait of her cat Dwight eating various fish on a white tablecloth—a film of particular immediacy and emphasis on texture.  Catfood was filmed while Wieland was living in New York City at a time when the Vietnam War was raging.  The cat’s unrelenting devouring of fish and the bloodstained tablecloth suggest that this seemingly banal domestic scene is actually implicated in a war, in which one ‘species’ eats another, that was ostensibly being waged on the other side of the world from the American home.

Andy Warhol   Mario Banana 1 & 2    1964     7:00

Warhol's Mario Banana--1964

Underground actor and transvestite Mario Montez is Andy Warhol’s star in Mario Banana 1 & 2.  Dressed as famous diva and gay icon Maria Montez, Mario fellates a banana.  Warhol’s double portrait of Mario, who also starred in Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures and Ron Rice’s Chumlum, revels in the redefinition of sexuality and gender roles indicative of the concerns of the era’s artistic and political vanguards.

Program 2:          Lunch                115:00

Luc Moullet    Genèse d'un repas    1978   115:00

Moullet's Genèse d'un repas--1978  

With his 1978 Genesis of a Meal, French New Wave auteur Luc Moullet moves away from the anarchic and satirical comedies for which he is known towards a serious political essay of an engaged documentarian.  Moullet analyzes the economic chain from origin to production to consumption of a can of Senegalese tuna, an omelet, an Ecuadorian banana, and a reel of 35mm film.   Genesis of a Meal maps the machinations of the globalized food market and traces the lines connecting our everyday food to the exploitation of workers in the Third World.  This pioneering film anticipated today’s plethora of documentary films that focus on limited cultural and economic fields in order to explore and critique the implications of globalization.

Program 3:          Dinner               75:00

D.W. Griffith  A Corner in Wheat   1909  14:00   16mm, b&w, silent

Griffith's Corner in Wheat--1909 

A Corner in Wheat is an early masterpiece in which D.W. Griffith experiments with the pioneering uses of cross-cutting, strategic editing, and other innovative narrative devices for which he eventually became legendary in the history of cinema.  Based on the Frank Norris novel The Pit, Griffith’s socially conscious film elucidates the exploitation of agricultural workers within the American capitalist economy through a narrative in which a monopolistic investment baron attempts to corner the wheat market, in turn driving up the price of bread and thus ruining the lives of those who produce the grain.  Griffith’s juxtapositions of the rich and the poor masterfully demonstrate how the wealth of the powerful is made on the backs of the working classes—a prescient film that still resonates over one hundred years after it was made.

Martha Rosler              A budding gourmet                1974                17:45   b&w, sound

Rosler's A Budding Gourmet--1974

A budding gourmet is Martha Rosler’s ironic exploration of the ideological processes through which food preparation is transformed into ‘cuisine’.  With a deadpan approach, Rosler’s narrator explains that she wants to become a gourmet in order to become refined, worldly, spiritual, to demonstrate good ‘breeding’.  Photographs from food and travel magazines suggest that the concept of the gourmet is a cultural construction bound up with notions of class.  A budding gourmet critically demonstrates how cooking—traditionally regarded as a woman’s task—can be wielded as a means of maintaining mastery over other cultures.

Gordon Matta-Clark    Food    1972   43:00  b&w, sound, 16 mm

Matta-Clark's Food--1972

Gordon Matta-Clark designed and built the legendary SoHo restaurant and artists’ cooperative Food.  He regularly presented art events and performances at Food, which opened in 1971.  Matta-Clark’s film Food documents this landmark eatery, social space, and ongoing art project for the emergent downtown community of artists in New York City where food and eating intersected artistic endeavor and sociability outside of consumer culture.   Camera and Sound: Robert Frank, Suzanne Harris, Gordon Matta-Clark, Danny Seymour. Editing: Roger Welch

Synopses by Christopher Zimmerman © 2012