Film Food--Celluloid Gastronomy (2012 IVAC)

The following is my essay accompanying the three-evening program of 'Film Food--Celluloid Gastronomy' that Federico Rossin and I curated and presented at the 2012 Images and Views of Alternative Cinema in Lefkosia, Cyprus earlier this month.   A wonderful selection of experimental films that explore food, eating, and the rich tapestry of gastronomical metaphor.  This project opened the possibility of developing an aesthetic framework of the mouth--cinema as a meal.  Of course, this essay had to be structured like a dinner menu.  Enjoy.  Many of these films are viewable on-line.

Jan Svankmajer's Food--1992

Film Food—Celluloid Gastronomy

Christopher Zimmerman

Apéritif

Celluloid /ˈselyəˌloid/

noun:   1.  A transparent flammable plastic made in sheets from camphor and nitrocellulose, formerly used for cinematographic film.

            2. Motion pictures as a genre

First Known Use: 1870

Gastronomy /gaˈstränəmē/

noun:   1.  The practice or art of choosing, cooking, and eating good food.

2.  The culinary customs or style of a particular region.

First Known Use: 1814

D.W. Griffith's Corner in Wheat--1909

Hors d’oeuvres

‘It is gastronomy which so studies men and things that everything worth being known is carried from one country to another, so that an intelligently planned feast is like a summing-up of the whole world, where each part is represented by its envoys.’

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

‘Substances, techniques of preparation, habits, all become part of a system of differences in signification; and as soon as this happens, we have communication by way of food.’

Roland Barthes

‘The ways people deal with food and eating can be quite good at reflecting our civilization.’ 

Jan Švankmajer

Martha Rosler's A Budding Gourmet--1974

Entrée

Food and Everything

Every living thing is concerned with food.  Food provides the very possibility of life; without it, we would literally be food for other organisms.  However, it is not simply a question of survival; rather, food—its production, preparation, ingestion, digestion, and excretion—is at the very heart (or stomach, perhaps) of human culture.  The act of eating touches on issues simultaneously personal, political, economic, social, ethical, environmental, ecological; it is intricately woven into the fabric of human history, tradition, and of the everyday.  Isn’t the ability to use fire to prepare our foods one of the central characteristics that separate us from our animal friends? 

Not only does food touch and involve each of us repeatedly on a daily basis, it plays a vital role in all spheres of life: from quotidian nourishment, to food as nature, as culture, as nutrition, as spirituality, from the meal as social site in which community is formed, to food as cultural identity, as ceremony and religious ritual, from consumer culture and the machinations of global capital, power, and exploitation, even to food as an aesthetic object.  The act of eating is woven into a rich tapestry of meanings at once literal, metaphorical, symbolic, and allegorical.  Food (at least traditionally) grows from the earth nurtured by the elements and, through literal and metaphorical processes, enters our bodies and souls, into our very cells and cycles of life.   

Food and Thought

Yet, for something that is so basic, so absolutely elemental to life, food is often overlooked philosophically.  It is as if food is too close to the bodily, too animalistic for it to be the subject and source of serious philosophical thought.  We see this throughout Western philosophy reaching back to Plato and Aristotle:  sight and hearing are privileged over the other senses.  With seeing and hearing, the sensory organs do not physically come into contact with the objects perceived, unlike with the other three senses:  taste, smell, and touch.  This gives vision a distance, i.e. a removed perspective from which observation is possible, an objectivity that creates a rationally ordered world.  Our world is indeed visual—ordered visually, controlled visually, understood visually, we relate to the world within a subject/object dynamic characteristic of the visual.  At the same time, the sense of gustatory taste suffers from a history of aesthetics in which taste is considered a lower pleasure, as opposed to the higher pleasures of the mind—a distinction closely connected to the mind/body dualism pervading Western thought.  The experience of taste is transient; it leaves our palate after the food is consumed; whereas a painting or sculpture is permanent and stable, thus worthy of contemplation. 

Although the literal sense of gustatory taste has been given little theoretical attention, philosophy has focused significantly on the metaphorical sense of taste, i.e. ‘taste’ as aesthetic discrimination.  During the Enlightenment, theories were developed in which ‘taste’ provided the conceptual framework for the theoretical understanding and aesthetic appreciation of works of art.  Critical taste was based loosely on gustatory taste in terms of the savoring of pleasure and appreciation, yet the experience of gustatory taste was itself excluded from consideration by these same  theories.  Barred from the realms of art in which beauty and universality were contemplated, literal gustatory taste remained in the practical realm of the commonplace; after all, animals eat too.  A central difficulty with ‘taste’ as a critical concept for describing experiences of the beautiful is that theories of taste can never quite shake off the charge of hedonic subjectivity, irrespective of Kant’s efforts.  How is it possible that taste be held to an objective standard when it is based on individual reactions to sensual experiences, which are ‘necessarily’ private and subjective?  De gustibus non est disputendem…

Cinema as Meal

The complex culinary web marinated in the films of Film Food—Celluloid Gastronomy captures the intricate and co-dependent nature and issues of food in contemporary life, while, at the same time, offering something of a ‘counter-history’ of cinema told through food:  winding through cinema’s early history with Griffith’s film from 1909 to Michael Snow’s ‘structuralism’ and Martha Rosler’s feminist criticism and to the documentary with Matta-Clark and Luc Moullet and on…  Most interestingly, however, is that Film Food—Celluloid Gastronomy takes its subject to heart (or, again, stomach, perhaps) and suggests the idea of cinema as a meal.  Our three-course program—breakfast, lunch, and dinner—opens the possibility of an aesthetic theory (or a theoretical framework) based not on the eye and the ear, but on the mouth—a theory of the mouth, reminiscent of a theory of taste, in which our experiences and judgments of a film are articulated along the lines of eating and digestion.   Film culture might be seen as a kind of gastronomy.  The experience of sitting in a dark room with others watching projected images would take on the participatory nature of a meal.  I am not suggesting, however amusing, that we think of the director as chef and the actors as wait staff and the like; rather, I am suggesting that we adopt and explore the kinds of relations, awareness, care, and hospitality triggered by modes of eating and operative in culinary traditions as we approach this film program and the experience of cinema in general. 

The eye may be privileged, but the mouth is liminal.  Through it, we take food—what is outside of our body—into our system.  Through the mouth, we internalize the external and are nourished by it.  It is also through the mouth that we speak, that we make ourselves understandable to others.  We express our thoughts by taking inner experiences and vocalizing them into the world.  So the mouth is the site of the external becoming internal and the internal becoming external.  It is through the mouth that we appropriate the world.    With Brillat-Savarin, who articulated three principal types of valuation running through the process of ingestion—‘direct’, ‘complete’, and ‘reflective’—gustatory experience can and should be reflective.  In the Timaeus for example, Plato explains that the intestine’s length allows us to engage in contemplation and discussion for prolonged periods of time.

What I am trying to get at is a move away from the experience of viewing films as one in which we as subjects passively receive the object that is being projected, a move away from a subject/object dualism towards a position articulated through gastronomical metaphor and the complex inter-relationality of food and life.  Just like food, we take these images, these films, into our bodies; they nourish us or disgust us; they become part of us.  We ingest them and digest them over time as we ruminate on the ideas and emotions they provoke in us and on the connections established with the larger context of life.  We discuss and argue about these films with our friends (or ‘copains’ as the French say); by sitting down to the cinematic table, one becomes connected to a history of making and viewing moving images.  The focus of film reception is shifted away from an act of consumption or mere entertainment to an activity in which one participates with others, in a mindful state, with care, and in which a host of relations emerge, relations in which we are implicated.

Perhaps by taking up gastronomical metaphor as an aesthetic perspective with which to view these films about food, we are also opening ourselves up to the reflexive possibility of the experience of cinema influencing our culinary habits and how we think about food.  Today, we are spending less time around a table with others partaking in the fruits of the earth.  The processed ‘Western Diet’ is taking over, and we are jamming food-like substances down our throats as we drive around in petrol guzzling vehicles.  Cinema demands time—the time it takes to view a film as well as the time it takes to ‘digest’ the film—and the films presented here reflect back on us and question our relationships to food and to cinema.

Vivian Ostrovsky's Eat--1988

Plat principal

Food and Film

Exploring connections between experimental cinema and food, Film Food—Celluloid Gastronomy 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.

The program is organized in three ‘meals’:  breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  Breakfast explores experimental short films touching on a multitude of edible issues:  cannibalism, the close relation between food and sex, consumption, etiquette and manners, the abject nature of eating, indigestion…  These short films are themselves food for the eye.  The veritable center of the program is lunch with Luc Moullet’s documentary Genesis of a Meal, in which the production lines extending from the earth and sea to his plate are traced out and subtly analyzed.  Moullet’s 1979 dissection of the globalization of food and its corollary systems of exploitation implicates us all.  Dinner presents a three-course meal of longer short films reaching back to cinema’s early years with Griffith’s 1909 tale of capitalist exploitation in the wheat market, and then to the 1970s with Martha Rosler’s deliciously ironic ‘A Budding Gourmet’, in which she dismantles the ideological process by which food preparation is transformed into ‘cuisine’, and the last course serving up Gordon Matta-Clarke’s biopic of the legendary SoHo restaurant and artists’ cooperative that he built—Food from 1972.

Breakfast

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.

The films of Frans Zwartjes—Dutch filmmaker, musician, violinmaker, 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’s films have been described as being situated between ‘film journals and film collages’.  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 Brillat-Savarin’s truism that animals ‘feed’ and humans ‘eat’. 

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 tabletop 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’.

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’.

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.

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.

Lunch

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.  In Moullet’s meal, no one escapes being implicated in the processes of domination.

Dinner

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.

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 designed and built the legendary SoHo restaurant and artists’ cooperative Food, which he opened in 1971 and where he regularly presented art events and performances.  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. 

Frans Zwartjes Visual Training--1969

Fromage

‘A dinner which ends without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye.’

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Luc Moullet's Genèse d'un repas--1978

Dessert

A sweet thought:  the celluloid of the film is itself food for the projector.  The film is fed to the projector, passing through its teeth, digested in light, and excreted on the screen.  The screen is, in turn, our plate from which we indulge in the delicacies of the images, digest them, and make them part of us.  The cinematic meal unfolds on multiple levels and served at multiple tables—filmic transubstantiation.

Andy Warhol's Mario Banana No. 1--1964

Digestif

‘Animals feed themselves; men eat; but only wise men know the art of eating.’

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

‘Food has a constant tendency to transform itself into situation.’

Roland Barthes

‘Life is a combination of magic and pasta.’ 

Federico Fellini

Gordon Matta-Clark's Food--1972

Christopher Zimmerman © 2012