Food in Film
By The ArchivesFood in Film
By The ArchivesLast week, I went to the newly opened Whole Foods Market on
“To eat is to be close to God,” says Primo, the protagonist of Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott’s film, The Big Night, and many of the dozens of films about food — Ang Lee’s Eat, Drink, Man Woman, Alfonso Arau’s Like Water For Chocolate, and Gabriel Axel’s Babette’s Feast celebrate this relationship between eating and sensory transcendence.
I wasn’t thinking of the perfect noodle, like the characters in Juzo Itami’s wonderful film, Tampopo, or of that miraculous quail Babette uses to transform the lives of two Danish spinsters in Babette’s Feast. It occurred to me that the circus atmosphere of the new Whole Foods provided a perfect setting for a movie death scene.
I harkened back to Dusan Makavejev’s film, Sweet Movie, where Anna Prucnal, the lover of the lost sailor from Potemkin Pierre Clementi, is trapped on a barge, and floats down the canals of Amsterdam, to die, killed by Prucnal in a vat of sugar.
It’s the death of the Potemkin sailor, and the death of the revolution, but it is also the death of capitalism, of conspicuous consumption, of a society unable to integrate health and freedom into individual personality. When food becomes entertainment, we lose our life-giving connection to the earth and to the food she gives birth to sustain us.
In a more radical film like Marco Ferreri’s La Gran Bouffe, four men seclude themselves to literally eat themselves to death. Food is a means of self-destruction. Later, in Sweet Movie, Makavejev returns to the subject of food psychology by introducing the character played by Carole Laure into the radical therapy commune of Otto Muehl. Muehl is a painter, and filmmaker. In the 1970s, he founded the Therapy Commune in
This year at the Berlin Film Festival, I saw the most beautiful film ever made about food. It was also the simplest. The film has no commercial future in
The second half of the film is completely visual. We see an old man, who lives in a stone house nestled in a mountainous river valley somewhere in the Dolomites, care for his garden through the seasons. There is sound but no dialogue , a barking dog , curious children who come to visit. Filmed with the kind of painterly rupture one encounters in great art, you see the pruning of the vines, the tilling of the soil, trees blooming, and grapes harvested under a winter sky.
It’s all very simple, all stuff that we know. Yet, in our world where we are alienated from the sources of our food as we are alienated from one another, it all seems strangely awesome, beautiful, moving, and revealing.