Excerpted from Bower, Anne L. Chapter 1: Watching Food: The Production of Food, Film, and Values.

In Reel Food: Essays on Food and Film Whenever I told friends I was working on a book about food and film, they instantly tossed out the names of movies that occurred to them, usually ones in which a main character is a professional cook, like Stanley Tucci and Scott Campbells Big Night (1995), Gabriel Axels Babettes Feast (Babettes gaestehud 1987), or Claire Dennis Chocolat (1989), or those in which food formulates a dominant symbol system, as in Marco Ferreris Blow-Out (La Grande Bouffe, 1973). As our conversations continued, it was clear that few of them realized how often filmmakers in all film genres turn to food to communicate important aspects of characters emotions, along with their personal and cultural identities; nor did my friends necessarily perceive the intricate ways in which ethnic, religious, sexual, and philosophical aspects of narratives are communicated through food. So Id find myself giving them examples from the essays in this collection; or Id turn to some recent movie they wouldnt think had that much to do with food. Take, for instance, Stephen Daldrys The Hours (2002), a movie one certainly wouldnt put in the food film category.1 Not only does food underscore thematic points in the film, but the movies three protagonists Virginia Woolf, Laura Brown, and Clarissa Vaughan (known to herformer lover and now dear but dying friend Richard as Mrs. Dalloway)are in part characterized by their interactions with food. [] Food has been part of film since films began, yet only recently have we given extended attention to the many and sometimes startling ways that food functions in movies. Food, I contend, is part of the semiotic process of filmmaking, and Reel Food provides new insights into this complex signifying system, involving what is eaten, not eaten, thrown away, preserved, chopped, baked, shared, hoarded, cooked from scratch, taken from a can, or stolen. Twenty years ago, Teresa de Lauretis helped us understand that cinema is directly implicated in the production and reproduction of meanings, values, and ideology in both sociality and subjectivity and therefore should be better understood as a signifying practice, a work of semiosis: a work that produces effects of meaning and perception, self-images and subject positions for all those involved, makers and viewers.5 Cinema critics and scholars have studied this semiosis in terms of clothes, setting, mise-en-scne, lighting, music, acting, cinematography, and many other elements. What about the recurrent use of food? Why is it that until recently foods role in movies has been given so little attention, even though it has such powerful representational, metaphoric, and even narrative power? After all, as Gaye Poole, the author of one of the few works to look at this subject makes clear: It is possible to say things with foodresentment, love, compensation, anger, rebellion, withdrawal. This makes it a perfect conveyor of subtext; messages which are often implicit rather than explicit, but surprisingly varied, strong, and sometimes violent or subversive.6 And its not as though this kind of symbolic imagery is something we havent seen in other visual art forms. For eons painters have used food images and interactions involving food to tell us about ourselves and our values. How many depictions of Bacchus show him surrounded by grapes and other luscious fruits, signaling pleasures of consumption, orality, the powerful joys of the flesh? How many still lifes indicate by the selection of foods and tableware, and the inclusion, at times, of elements such as insects or decaya variety of values, from upperclass status (the ability to import exotic items and afford crystal or fine china), to mortality (a fly upon a luscious peach)? Visual artists use food partly because it is such a common element of their world. In film, too, this very commonness is part of what allows food to function so evocatively, drawing us into a films characters, action, and setting. Food is part of the way that, for over a century now, movies have been telling us who we are, constructing our economic and political aspirations; our sense of sexual, national, and ethnic identity; filling our minds with

ideas about love and romance, innocence and depravity, adventure, bravery, cruelty, hope, and despair. E. Ann Kaplan reminds us that in the postindustrial, high-tech age, subjects are constructed through all-invasive commodity relations; they are, that is, constructed preeminently as consumers. She also stresses that we live in a culture overtaken by machines of the visual. . . . 7 As we view a movie, then, we consume at many levels simultaneously. Cinema itself is a kind of consumption, asserts film studies professor Ian Christie, that we are fed in bite-sized chunks.8 We consume the film itself, having paid the price of admission (and perhaps bought something to eat and drink from the concession stand), and often consume through it all kinds of values, ideals, and ideas. While postmodern theory makes us aware of the commodification of personal and group identification, of culture and history, filmmakers, just like other visual artists, began playing with images that highlight consumption and commodification long before we called ourselves postmodern. Thus, while one might think of food in film as a newly emphasized aspect of cinema, upon investigation it turns out this would be a mistaken assumption. In fact, one of the very first movies made by Auguste and Louis Jean Lumire back in 1895 depicted a baby eating lunch.9 Perhaps in this short film, the Lumires wanted to show something ordinary and reassuring (the domestic scene, the baby, the food) to both interject their new technology into the home and to balance the newness of that technology with the reassuring familiarity of what they depicted. For many of us, new technologies are unsettling. Part of how we become more comfortable with and accepting of a quickly changing world (not only the technologies themselves, but their impacts on our livesfrom changing weather patterns to communications styles to employment systems), is through the representations various media offer us. Consciously or unconsciously, we use cinema, for instance, to familiarize ourselves with strange and new elements of society. As Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz explain, taking a historical view, with the advent of a chaotic and diffuse urban culture, the real could increasingly be grasped only through its representations.10 While they focus on cinematic and other art forms from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their comment remains useful in explaining one reason why movies of the past and present have such force in our lives. Part of the real we grasp is in food imagery, even though this aspect of movies has often been overlooked. Another writer, Vivian C. Sobchack, looks at how the excessive violence we see on the screen, the carelessness and devaluation of mere human flesh, is both a recognition of the high-tech, powerful, and uncontrollable subjects we (men, mostly) have become through technologyand an expression of the increasing frustration and rage at what seems a lack of agency and effectiveness as we have become increasingly controlled by and subject to technology. 11 Some food films can be taken as a kind of reaction against such waste and anomie, for they present foods preparation and consumption as reassuring signifiers of cultural continuity. In other movies we see cannibalism, food fights, or food disorders as signs of the very disruptions Sobchack describes. But whether food is coded negatively or positively, whether it plays a major or a minor role, it is often a major ingredient in the cinematic experience. In movies of the past and present, viewers group and/or individual identities are acted upon, reinforced, or perhaps reformed based on national, generational, gender, or other ideologies. Movie characters perform behaviors on the big screen that we will cheer or boo, imitate or avoid. And a surprisingly large part of what allows our (dis)identifications is mediated through food, its sensuality pulling us into film scenes.12 For example, Americans Southern, African American, or Mexican cultural ties may be renewed or questioned by the foods served up in movies like Jon Avnets Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), George Tillman, Jr.s Soul Food (1997), and Mara Ripolls Tortilla Soup (2001); the visceral reactions these movies produce affect viewers emotional and intellectual reactions to the cultural issues highlighted by the characters and their conflicts. Even among viewers who dont share the ethnic or regional roots important to these films, many will find themselves experiencing a

nostalgia for the kind of family or group solidarity that comes through the sharing of foodways. What are the conventions within the emerging food film genre? To begin with, food, as mentioned above, has to play a star role, whether the leading characters are cooks (professional or domestic) or not. This means that often the camera will focus in on food preparation and presentation so that in closeups or panning shots, food fills the screen. The restaurant kitchen, the dining room and/or kitchen of a home, tables within a restaurant, a shop in which food is made and/or sold, will usually be central settings. And the films narrative line will consistently depict characters negotiating questions of identity, power, culture, class, spirituality, or relationship through food [.] What is and what isnt within the genre of food film is, of course, somewhat subjective, with each viewer deciding individually that a films use of food is so dominant and pervasive as to put it within this classification rather than just in the class of films using food as but one of many elements contributing to a movies setting, characterization, plot, or theme [] Thus, while genres create andone hopessatisfy expectations (and also, of course, inform marketing decisions), and while defining and understanding genres assists exploration of cultural and historic trends as well as contributing to our understanding of aesthetic innovation, overreliance on strict genre definitions may be limiting.15 Whether films fall into the food film genre or simply make effective use of food as a communicative element, we see that both what is and what isnt eaten have meaning defining characters as purists, compromisers, gluttons, ghouls; as rejectors or acceptors of some cultural element (from aging to ethnicity, from class to gender identification, and so forth). Food as stand-in for or accomplice to sex is also something we easily read in films, as is a large meal as a sign of connection and communion, whether within a family, a religious community, a carnival, or a journey. Food, we also understand, can script traditional roles (the mother in the kitchen), or indicate dysfunction (food spoiled, badly cooked, poisoned, poorly chosen, vomited, or simply refused). Food can tell us about characters abject poverty or egregious consumption, about their health or dissipation. Taking movies seriously as art, as literature, as cultural work has for many been a fairly recent phenomenon; film studies courses only entered university curricula about twenty-five years ago. Food as a cultural construct entered the academy even later, though it had been part of agricultural, home economics (human ecology), and industrial studies earlier and had been a topic also in anthropology and some sociology courses. Food studies as separate (though highly interdisciplinary) field is of very recent vintage. It is thus not surprising that the putting together of food and film as a subject of investigation has only occurred recently. My hope is that the essays in Reel Food, presented in an array of writing styles and drawing on a wide variety of scholarly specialities, will provide readers with many models for looking at and understanding how food functions in and contributes to film. Clearly, when food appears in a film it is loaded with much more than calories.21
Notes

1. The Hours, directed by Stephen Daldry. Miramax/Paramount, 2002. Based on the novel, The Hours, by Michael Cunningham, screenwriter: David Hare (with Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman). 2. Whether or not the real Woolf had this relationship to food is not the point. In fact, characters in her novels are sometimes quite intimately involved with food. In the novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925), the eponymous protagonist is very involved in planning a large party, and all aspects of domestic life are important to Mrs. Ramsey in To the Lighthouse (1927). 3. Ronald D. LeBlanc, Love and Death and Food: Woody Allens Comic Use of Gastronomy, in Perspectives on Woody Allen, ed. Rene Curry (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996), 147. 4. Jane F. Ferry, Food in Film: A Culinary Performance of Communication (New York: Routledge, 2003), 2, 7. 5. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesnt: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 38. 6. Gaye Poole, Reel Meals, Set Meals: Food in Film and Theatre (Sydney: Currency Press, 1999), 3. 7. E. Ann Kaplan, Popular Culture, Politics, and the Canon: Cultural Literacy in the Postmodern Age, in Cultural Power/Cultural Literacy: Selected Papers from the Fourteenth Annual Florida State University Conference on Literature and

Film, ed. Bonnie Braendlin (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1991), 2627. 8. Ian Christie, qtd. in Susan Wolk and Mara Jos Sevilla, Food on the Silver Screen, online at http://www.londonfoodfilmfiesta.co.uk/Filmma~1/Foodon~1.htm (accessed 14 September 2003). 9. Poole, Reel Meals, 13. 10. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz, Introduction to Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 7. 11. Vivian C. Sobchack, The Postmorbid Condition, in Signs of Life in the USA: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers, 4th ed., ed. Sonia Maasik and Jack Solomon (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins Press, 2003), 379. 12. While various postmodern theories have usefully questioned the idea of a unitary identity, most readers of this volume will be comfortable with notions of fragmented and/ or many-layered notions of identity; and while some movies have explored identity in complicated and evocative ways, the powerful sensory experience of moviegoing, with such strong visual, aural, aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual content, often encourages us to have rather direct and at least temporarily uncritical identifications with whats depicted in a movie. 15. Cecilia Noveros (unpublished) presentation at the American Comparative Literature Association conference (4 April 2003), From Food as Dialectical Image to Food as Icon of Consumption: Food in European Film and the Culture Industry, has helped me a great deal to think about the conventions within the genre of food films. In her own work on the food film genre, Novero sees three developmental stages in which (1) food is seen as excess, disruption, or encodes some dialectical tension, as in the movies of Luis Buuel and in Jutta Bruckners Years of Hunger (1987); (2) food moves from images to central motif as in Marco Ferreris Blow Out; and (3) the film food genre emerges solidly, as in Greenaways The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (a film food but one that is unusual in its insistent questioning of who eats what, why, and how). Novero is also concerned with the nice image many recent food films present, which actually hides the situation of food labor (domestic or commercial). 21. Im aware of an increasing number of opportunities for work on food and film: journals like the Massachusetts Review, Food and Foodways, and Gastronomica, and conferences such as those held by the Popular Culture Association, American Culture Association, and the American Comparative Literature Association, to name but a small sampling, that feature special sections on food and film, allow those of us working in this field to exchange ideas more readily.