Isabel Tuyls Visual Anthropology 2009-2010 Sociology
The Visual Meaning of Food in
Four Contemporary Movies
Table of Contents
Table of Contents 1
Introduction 2
The Hours (2002): the use of food as a narrative supporter 3
Babette’s Feast (1987): the meaning of food in the community 20
Eat Drink Man Woman (1994): food and commensality 25
References 29
Conclusion 30
Introduction
Food, as well as movies, is ‚consumed‘. In this project I would like to investigate the function of food in movies, and the different functions it can fulfill to support the movie’s narrative. Food can play a supportive role, used in a metaphorical and symbolic way, adding to the characters and the story and deepening the plot, or it can be used as the main character of the movie, like for example, in the recent Julie & Julia. In the movies I will discuss food will play both a supporting role (a.o. The Hours) and a main character (a.o. Eat Drink Man Woman).
How can the cinematic use of food and dining provides clues to understanding how food performs as an instrument for communication within culturally defined systems of thought? Analyzing the food and dining images in films should show how food’s meaning comes from the structured system of social life for each specific social and cultural group. If you start to closely observe specific movie scenes in which food plays a role, and you go beyond its immediate meaning of the scene, you will see that the use of food contains symbolic power. In this context I want to refer to Barthes and his Mythologies (Barthes 1972) in which he sees ‘signs’ in a specific culture as ‘second-order signs’, dependent on their place and time in history. (Ferry 2003: 4). Basically, he states that on top of the ‘sign’ – which is a combination of a signifier (the literary representation) and a signified (the concept) – we distinguish another ‘sign’, which results in a ‘myth’. Translated to our project this means that the different customs and food that we analyze in our movies have different meanings dependent on a.o. the country, the period of time and the social class we are situated.
If we look at social anthropology specifically, there are two names worth mentioning. One is Norbert Elias, who in his Civilizing Process (Elias 1994) described the role of food’s symbolic meaning and how it helped determining social order and power relationships. Sydney Mintz in his Sweetness and Power (Mintz 1986) described then how our daily life can change as a result of macro-economic and political changes. He did this by describing the history of sugar and the role of colonization in this process. In the movies we will discuss we will refer to these specific influences.
Four movies are analyzed in this essay and they all deal with food in a different way: the meaning of food in the community (Babette’s Feast), the meaning of food in the family (Eat Drink Man Woman), the meaning of food as a narrative supporter (The Hours), the symbolic meaning of food (The Cook The Thief His Wife and Her Lover).
The Hours (2002): the use of food as a narrative supporter
By way of a first example, I want to discuss ‘The Hours’ (director Steven Daldry). Although the theme does not focus on food, food contributes significantly to the story line. There are three main characters, three women: Laura Brown, Clarissa Vaughn and Virginia Woolf. Although they live in different time periods, they lives run parallel, connected through Virginia Woolf and her book Ms. Dalloway, which Virginia is writing in the movie. The pregnant Laura Brown lives a domestic life in 1951, trying to please her husband and being a good mother and wife, but feeling suffocated by the confined life she is leading.
Virginia Woolf (here played by Nicole Kidman) prefers smoking over eating. When she comes down in the morning, her husband, Leonard Woolf, checks whether she had breakfast. Food is a way of controlling her, of checking whether she is all right. In general it is difficult to communicate to Virginia, so Leonard tries to connect to her through every day practice. He tries to keep control by forcing her to eat, and when she refuses breakfast, he insists on ‘proper lunch with husband and wife, with ‘soup’, ‘pudding’ and all’. Instead of eating lunch, Virginia goes to her room and writes and smokes.
This smoking (and the lighting of the cigarette) is shown in detail, whereas Virginia throughout the film is never seen eating. She even takes a piece of left-over cigarette, and lights that –as if she ‚chews‘ on the ideas she was thinking about before. ‚Earthly‘ food gets contrasted to the more mental smoking, and would only get in her way. The camera moves to a close-up, as if we can get more easily get into Virginia’s head, we can get closer to her. The look on her face is more certain and open:
The previous scenes –in which she gets interrogated about breakfast show her more from a distance, embedded in the surroundings. Her whole attitude breathes ‚reluctance‘:
Refusing lunch can also refer to Virginia’s being associated with the high culture of literature, while cooking at that time was more associated with low culture. The fact she refuses food of course also has to do with her nervous and unstable attitude towards life. She has difficulties living and welcoming life.
In one of the later scenes, with one of the other characters, this ‚controlling‘ and ‚refusing‘ aspect returns. Clarissa, takes care of her former lover and friend Richard, who is suffering from aids. She checks whether he has eaten his breakfast and in that way she tries exerting control, and tries ‘to keep him down to earth’ and ‘in the here and the now’.
Later, at the train station, Virginia has escaped the ‘suffocating anesthetics of the suburb’ and prefers to go the ‘violent jolt of the capital’. Richard calls her back and says: “We must go home now, we must eat Nelly’s dinner. It’s our obligation to eat Nelly’s dinner” at which Virginia answers: “There is no such obligation, no such obligations exists”. They are not talking about food in this scene, but they are talking about life itself, and about a person’s own right to make decisions in his or her own life. Leonard thinks that Virginia’s illness will go away when she will follow the everyday routine of meals. When they have finished the scene at the train station, Leonard says: ‘Aren’t you hungry, I am a little hungry myself’, which means that he is ready to take up life again, to start eating. In this scene, food is first a symbol of ‚control‘ and a metaphor for society, then it is used to describe ‚acceptance‘ by expressing appetite.
Later Virginia has to deal with the servants in the house, but she has difficulty doing this. They are in the kitchen, preparing lunch, which Virginia until now has refused. Virginia stays at the door, reluctant to come in and to mix with daily occupations such as ‚cooking‘. You can see how her body holds back:
The servants are dealing with raw meat, organs, and raw eggs which support their vision of strength, masculinity, working, reality, as opposed to Virginia who apparently cannot deal with real life, is weak, does not perform daily duties, doesn’t eat.
Virginia gets immediately exposed to the most ‚terrifying‘ part of the animal, the organs, which are shown in close-up:
The breaking of the eggs stresses the continuation of ‘normal life’, or the way the servants try not to break down. By giving a close up of the eggs, they show how a simple routine job like cooking can become something to fight about, or constitutes a fight between different classes. The breaking of the eggs could also refer to the ‚breaking down‘ of communication, to destroying something. At exactly the moment when Virginia mentions she wants to spoil the children of her sister with fresh ginger (which will have to be bought in London, which is a trainride away), the close-up of the younger servant breaking an egg is shown:
The eggs are also used in other scene, where they also denote mental breakdown. I will come back to this later.
The third woman, Laura Brown, played by Julianne Moore, lives a very standard domestic life in the U.S. from after WOII. On the surface everything seems perfect: she has a beautiful house, a loving husband and an adorable kid. She feels she has conform to this life because ‘she owes to her husband’ (they just came back from the war). In a final attempt to show her love and to show her dedication, Laura tries to bake a cake for her husband’s birthday. Cake baking is not just cake baking, but symbolizes love, warmth, the domestic perfect household. Cake baking is an art, and not everyone can do it. Only really good housewives succeed. (Devault 1991: 77)
Although Laura tries to pay vigorous attention to the details, the cake turns out to be a disasters and she throws it away, which constitutes a dramatic moment in the movie:
She starts all over again…
This ‚baking a cake‘ depicts the confinement of women within the home, and their failure to make a life for their own (Devault 1991: 139). Their only duty seems to be pregnant, bake cakes and take care of the kids. Laura is more interested in art, or at least she tries to see ‚art‘ in her dull daily life, so when sifting the flour for the cake, she notes the beauty of it, as if these little details give her a temporary relief. Later in the movie they are celebrating her husband‘s birthday. The decor is very conventional, like anything else in her life, and while slicing the cake, the husband expresses that such a party is what he had always wanted:
The party is all about appearances, it is fake. Clarissa is, just like Virginia’s Ms. Dalloway and as throwing a party. The party itself is meticulously organized, there are many flowers, impressive china and the seating has been done beforehand. Since they are celebrating the fact that Richard, her friend, has received a literary price, the food and the party has to be in accordance. The party is not about the food, but about art, and the ceremony, the form should take precedence over the food. (Bourdieu 1984: 180) In a later scene Richard’s mother and Clarissa talk to each other about their past, and they sit down in a surroundings of ‚etiquette‘, ‚rules‘, strict organisation‘ and ‚keeping up appearance‘ (Bourdieu 1984), while the conversation deals with ‚breaking rules‘ and ‚trying to live‘, against all the rules of society. It is very striking how the exxaggerated decor contrasts with the feelings of the two actors:
In another scene Clarissa is talking to Louis Waters, a common friend of hers and Richard, and during the conversation she is trying to cook. By means of the cooking (and the breaking of the eggs) she is trying to counterbalance her very emotional state of mind. The tapping and breaking of the eggs structures and ‚holds together‘ their very ‚dangerous‘ conversation.
The camera focuses on her actions and, the breaking of the eggs, and on her hands separating the yolk from the white, establishing ‚order‘:
At exactly the moment when she tells her old friend and lover „that she regrets there wasn’t more about him in the book“ (of the book written by Richard) the camera shows the very vulnerable yolk of the egg, as if this stresses the vulnerability of the scene and of Clarissa:
Right after that she changes the topic of conversation (‚How are things in San Fransisco?), she gathers the egg shells and throws them in the garbage bin, as if she wants to get rid of the previous topic of conversation. So by throwing away the eggs, she throws away her vulnerability, and she wants to be strong again:
But then, after trying to keep it up, she, her body, ‘breaks down’, just like the eggs she was breaking:
Before, Richard had already questioned the social significance of her party, which he identified as a mere ‘show’ for an eager and curious audience who would probably only come to the party to enhance their social status, to act politically correct.
Later, after Richard has committed suicide, Clarissa realizes the party was not important, and the food was disposable. She reacts by throwing all the wonderful expensive food away, also the exclusive crab dish, Richard’s favourite.
The Cook The Thief His Wife and Her Lover (1989): the meaning of food as a surrealistic and baroque signifier
This movie by Peter Greenaway has a classic frame and a chronologically structured narrative (which is not always the case with other movies that Greenaway has directed). Although the movie depicts quite horrible scenes (cannibalism, violence, mad and aggressive characters, death) the very ‘controlled’, detailed photography and the special baroque décor make the movie a very aesthetic performance. One can also see this at the beginning and at the end of the movie. The movie both starts and ends with the fall of a curtain, very typical of theatrical performances:
The characters, in my opinion, also seem to be a little bit unrealistic, and more seem to be symbolic of certain big ideas.
The beginning scene is very shocking and violent and it this way already contains a flash forward to the rest of the movie, which is also violent and aggressive. This first scene contains lots of information on the different characters and the essential topics of the movie. It has the violence, the dogs, the different characters, humiliation, nakedness and a bored and detached wife (smoking a cigarette) in it.
On the side of the scene (which looks really as a mise-en-scene) there are two delivery cars with (seemingly rotten) fish and meat inside, which you could interpret as referring to the restaurant Le Hollondais. The scene of Le Hollandais is rotten, as well as the characters living there. Everything is in decay.
Throughout the movie violence is connected with food. In this first violent opening scene, a man is stuffed with dog shit.
From the screenplay:
‘(…) racks of red and white meat and tiers of blue and white fish; pig’s heads, trotters, bull’s tongues, offal, kidneys, tripe; squid, clams, herring, flatfish, lobsters, prawns. The rich,colourful, boldly-lit, raw food is examined with both enthusiasm and nausea’. (Greenaway, p.10)
So from the start on, ‘flesh’ is always present in the movie. Flesh as the opposite of the mind in one way or another. Every place is crammed with ‘flesh’: the trucks on the parking lot, all sorts of game in the kitchen and the ‘still lives’ in the restaurant.
In the movie one can see that Greenaway has a love for painting (he is a painter by training). In The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, you can detect Flemish paintings in the background:
This indicates a special interest in the visual representations, and hints at what Greenaway does in the movie: he pays attention to the framing, the composition, the structure- the same way this is done in painting. Special attention deserves the thematic and expressive use of color. All the rooms have a very different colours, and even the costumes of the characters change colour when going from one room to another.
The parking lot is icy blue:
Literally, the kitchen is green, it is a place of peace, a place of nature, life, warmth, positive thinking. The food that is prepared is also very aesthetic and artistic, as opposed to all the violence and the aggression in the movie:
The two lovers also come to the kitchen to find a place to secretly make love and are given a place between freshly baked loaves of bread. The lovemaking of Georgina and her lover Michael (short scene in close-up) are interfered by a kitchen scene, which is a contrast, but adds meaning to the scene (the blood, the stuffing, all references to future scenes). The following pictures show this contrasting editing:
The restaurant itself is a dark red, which could denote passion, blood, danger, violence, a place of mystery.
And the toilets are snow-white, which make you think of innocence, virginity and purit – exactly the place where the two lovers first meet and ‘consume’.
Michael, Georgina’s lover, is his enemy: it is ‘the man of books’, as opposed to the over-eating Albert:
Michael could associated with culture and art (the mind), while Albert is connected to the body. He says of reading:
‘Reading gives you indigestion’ (sc.23, p.44).
When Albert discovers his wife has a lover, he says:
•ALBERT (with great emphasis): „I’ll kill that bloody book-reading jerk!!! I’ll kill him and I’ll bloody eat him!!”
So, again, all violence is done through ‚food‘.
The cannibalism if of course a very shocking element, and probably the most debated, part of the movie. It refers of course to Christianity, but you also get the impression it is a kind of a sacrifice (through the special way of presenting the body of the bookkeeper). Through this scene Georgina wants to take her revenge, she wants to create a ‘balance’. She knows her husband will not be able to take this ‘new recipe’:
„ALBERT: God! GEORGINA (ice-cool). No Albert. It is not God. It’s Michael. My Lover. You vowed you would kill him. You did. And you vowed you would eat him. Now eat him”.
One can clearly see the metamorphosis in this scene. A body takes in food, and then becomes food again. It is a cycle.
Babette’s Feast (1987): the meaning of food in the community
Babette’s Feast plays with food in many different ways. The movies takes place in a remote Danish village, on the coast of Jutland. Two very pious Christian sisters, Philippa and Martine, lead a very quiet and secluded life, helping the community with providing them with meals. Babette arrives in their village as a refugee, escaping Paris, and asks the two sisters to whether she can live with them, since she has no other place to go to.
Without mentioning anything about her background, she takes on the job as the cook and housewife with the two sisters. Food plays a role on different levels. First, Babette can distinguish herself by being a better housewife. We can see how in the movie the previous servant dropped a tray of cookies and tea.
Then, later, we hear the two sisters praising Babette, mentioning the fact that since they have Babette, they end up spending less household money. Babette assimilates with their culture by learning their cooking methods without protest. She conceals her own culinary background, being the chef of one of the most famous Parisian restaurants, Café Anglais. So, by learning their cooking methods and by letting go of most of what she learned in her past, she integrates into this secluded Danish village life.
In this still, you see how the two sisters teach Babette how to cook. Babette just listens and ‘learns’, without revealing she knows how to cook:
Secondly, there is Babette the professional cook. Although she doesn’t reveal her background, you can notice her professionalism in small details: the way she bargains over fish, the way she judges the ham, the fact that villagers like her food more than the sister’s food, the fact she can better ‘organize’ the meals by spending less. Her work has changed from being a ‘commodity’ to being a ‘gift’. She does not get paid for her services, and never asks for anything in return. This may have to do with the fact that working for Babette, in this case cooking, has never been purely ‘exchange for money’, but something that constructs her identity, or as she says herself at the end of the movie: “an artist is never poor”. For her, being able to exercise her profession, even if she does not receive money in return, is necessary and enough for her. By cooking, she rewards herself, because she can exercise her art. The preparation of the feast is shown in a quite detailed way in the movie, and in this way it stresses the ‘craft’ involved. The next still is a picture of Babette preparing a cake like a real piece of art:
A third part of the cooking and food refers to food eaten in the community. Food is a way to ‘help’ the community, since the sisters and Babette go around to distribute food. When the two sisters organize their communal gatherings, there is always tea and cookies, but nothing more than that. They make sure the dinner is frugal, since giving in to their senses and to the good taste of food could turn them into ‘sinners’ and could give them ‘unsuitable thoughts’. When Babette wins money through a lottery ticket, she asks permission to prepare a real French meal for the community. She orders all the expensive ingredients directly from France, so she can make sure to present the villagers an authentic Parisian meal. The food literally has to come from ‘outside’ the community, it comes from overseas:
So the community members agree to go to the dinner, but not to comment on the delicacy of the food under any circumstances. This plan gets difficult when an unexpected guest, the famous general Martine, who is familiar with authentic French food, and who has eaten in Café Anglais in Paris, shows up. He is baffled by the excellence of the wine and the food, and challenges their intention by commenting on exquisite quality of the meal.
By cooking a truly French haute cuisine meal for them, Babette seduces them into letting go of their inhibitions. Although they have difficulty admitting, they start to enjoy the food, and slowly you can see how this communal meal melts their bitter hearts. They start to forgive each other, and develop true friendships again.
One can also detect a mix of classes here. Under normal circumstances, these villagers would never be able to taste haute cuisine, and although they know how to behave, they are not aware of the cultural and status connotations of the food. Where the general knows what it means to drink a Veuve Clicquot 1860 – it is not just a glass of champagne, it is a Veuve Clicquot, representing the high classes who supposedly have an extraordinary taste and know how to distinguish themselves, and it is a class-symbol, certainly not something you would expect in a remote Danish village – the other guests can only appreciate by taste. So the villagers need an outsider to know what they are eating. Babette ignores this class distinction, and serves this food to people who not necessarily know what it means. For her, cooking has become something else, not something that is used to distinguish, but something that is used to unite.
From a feminist point of view, Babette chooses to serve, to offer her life to cook and help others, without being put in the chain of production. Her work constructs her identity and gives her power (she becomes indispensable), and taking that away from her, would make her powerless. So although she has nothing, she has come from another country, she works for free, still she is able to become someone and to construct value for herself. In the following still, she is shown in the kitchen (which she doesn’t leave during the dinner:
Eat Drink Man Woman (1994): food and commensality
In Eat Drink Man Woman (by director Yi Shin Nan Nu) the use of food is quite central, so ‘food’ is used as a theme and to symbolically support the central story line (that does not deal with food, but rather about different generations clashing). The movie uses ‘commensality’, the act of eating together. In commensality much can be hidden. It uncovers relationships in the way the food is served, in the seating, in the people who are invited or not invited. (Anigbo 1996: 101-102). In this movie this commensality is specifically exercised within the confinement of the home.
One of the main character of the film is ‘Chu’, a father of 3 daughters, whose wife has died quite a long time ago. He is a chef in a big restaurant, and cooking is his life. He is a very traditional cook, using old fashioned tools, doing some procedures outside (such as smoking of meat and fish), and, as we find out in the movie, he is a connoisseur of the old Chinese kitchen, he knows how the traditional Chinese kitchen works. He does not only use his kitchen in his job, but also at home, and it is this cooking at home that functions as a catalyst in the story. Every Sunday he makes an exaggerated Sunday meal, which is attended by his 3 daughters. The dinner reflects the movie: it has the same rhythm, cuts, ‘transformation’. It is about life and death: he kills the fish and then cooks it in several ways:
It is clear the father wants to communicate, but he is unable to, so instead he expresses his love for his daughters by cooking. The communication is done through the food: the family members do not criticize each other in a direct way, but they do it by commenting on the food. They evaluate the taste, the combination and in this way they criticize their father’s ‘rule’ over them. At the beginning of the dinner scene the whole table with the three girls is shown, when they start eating the camera only focuses on separate faces, as if they cannot be shown ‘as a family’ anymore. It seems that the food does not have the desired effect.
In Eat Drink Man Woman eating together is a ritual, a ritual that tries to keep the family together. Each member adheres to it in an almost rigid way, not because they necessarily enjoy this communal meal so much, but because they know it is the one thing that keeps the family together.
The foods that are served are so exaggerated and stand in strong contrast to the ‘icey atmosphere’:
It is also during this Sunday meal that the important announcements are made. Two daughters inform the other family members about their new partners and marriage plans, and in the end, the father uses this Sunday meal to tell the rest of the family he has found a new wife. The only way we could have predicted this, is through his care for her little girl: every day he prepares her lunch and brings it to school secretly. This part also shows an aspect of traditional Taiwanese culture: the bento box, which is almost a status symbol. The nicer and the more sophisticated your bento box, the better and more high class you are. By preparing a better bento box for the little girl, Chu indirectly enhances his future wife’s position. (Allison 1997). He takes home the Bento Box that was originally cooked for the girl and eats the food himself. So, love goes through the stomach, because by eating the mother’s food, even though it is not good, he falls in love with her.
You can see that the further that the characters get alienated from each other (or at least from the father), the more Chu looses his ability to ‘taste’ his own traditional food. His ability to exert control, by serving the perfect traditional family meal, diminishes in this way: his dishes are not able to satisfy anymore, and he feels this loss.
It is also in a kitchen that his best friend (and business partner) dies:
One of his daughters is a very successful business woman, but her real dream is to become a great chef. Long ago, Chu has forbidden her to use the kitchen, because he wanted her to study and to choose a ‘real’ profession, a profession that is suitable for women. She ends up in a big company, doing a job in a very male-oriented world, successful, but not happy with her situation. When she wants to cook, she has to find another kitchen, one outside the house of her father.
Chu’s style is very traditional and it is intruded by ‘modern life’. His daughters make individualistic choices, working in a fast-food restaurant, choosing their own husbands. The movie also reveals typical aspects of traditional cooking, e.g. how the food is not served in different courses, but is put on the table at the same time (in opposition to our Western, more analytical way of serving food). This represents the ‘holistic-ness’ of the Asian cuisine. In the hotel, when, at a very important banquet, the food is about to become a catastrophe, Chu immediately makes the decision to ‘save their face’ and to cook a too expensive new soup. Loosing their face by serving bad soup would have much bigger consequences than loosing some money. In the following still, the hotel owners taste the food and then give Chu an invisible sign that the food is approved:
At the end of the movie, we can see that roles have shifted. His daughter, the business woman, has bought the old house, and now she is inviting the family for dinner. She has made an elaborate meal, and, in this way, regained her place in the kitchen she was banned from. Since the other family members have unexpected events coming up, it is only the father and the daughter eating together. He starts out by criticizing her soup, telling her she used too much ginger. At first she is shocked, but then they both realize they he is saying something about the taste, which means that he is able to judge taste again, he has regained his ability for judging food. So at the moment he has let go his traditional way of thinking, he has moved out of his old life, founded a family with his young wife, and accepted the invitation to come to his daughter’s lunch, he is able to ‘see’ and ‘recognize’ other people again. The letting go of the old patriarchal role patterns (expressed by the metaphor of cooking and food) has enabled him to accept and ‘see’ the world around him again. He is not caught up in his inability to see and his rigid mind. (Bower 2004: 8). In the following picture you can see the daughter giving the father the food she made herself:
Conclusion
In this photo essay I have looked at the position of food in four different movies: The Hours, The Cook The Thief His Wife and Her Lover, Babette’s Feast and Eat Drink Man Woman. In each movie, the function of food is different, but what these movies have in common is that they in one way or another negotiate identity, power, class, feelings, relationships or problems and so forth through food. So, food is a part of the semiotic process of filmmaking: food being prepared, thrown away, cooked, eaten raw, chopped, eaten alone, shared, abundant, scarce, exotic or familiar always has a meaning. A meaning, which is not always immediately obvious to the viewer, but is always present. Also, through food different roles can be signified: the role of the housemother, the servant, the cook, the rebels, overeaters, the compromisers, the procastinators, the clumsy and so on. Food can also indicate malfunctioning: e.g. failing recipes, vomiting, poisoned food. Food has different meanings in different historical periods, and a character eating ginger before the war, means something different than a person consuming ginger in the 21st century.
The makers of The Hours see food as an intrinsic, but an often unconscious part of our daily life. Food is not a theme in the movie, but it has semiotic qualities: it act as symbols of life and sensuality. They act as elements of control, as symbols of order and as tools of power, and in that way makes this movie a work of semiosis. It is exactly this ‚commonness‘ of food that makes it so powerful in The Hours,
The very violent, aggressive but very aesthetic The Cook The Thief His Wife and Her Lover has cannibalism and other forms of appalling consumption as its central theme. Basically everything in the movie is related to food: love, violence, sex, relationships and death.
Babette’s Feast focuses on food as a ‚sin‘ and on the special function of food in keeping a community together. Even when you are not in the social class you normally belong, you can turn cooking into an art and touch people.
In Eat Man Drink Woman commensality plays a central role. The special mise-en-scene of the family dinners, the specific conversations that take place and the extensive prepartion of foods are all reflections of the emotional patterns that lie behind. The detailed cooking at times reflects the film as a whole.
So, while a meal means: cutting, slicing, composing, seasoning, mixing and changing, a movie as such is in fact a composition of different scenes that are cut and sliced.
References
Allison A (1997). “Japanese Mothers and Obentos: The Lunch-Box as Ideological State Apparatus’ in Food and Culture. Routledge.
Anigbo, O.A.C. (1996) “Commensality as Cultural Performance: the Struggle for Leadership in an Igbo Village” in The Politics of Cultural Performance. Berghahn Books.
Barthes, Roland. (1972) Mythologies. Harper Collins.
Bower, A (2004). Reel Food. Essays on food and film. Routledge
Devault, Marjorie (1991) Feeding the Family. Chicago Press.
Elias, Norbert (1994) The Civilizing Process. Blackwell Publishing.
Ferry, J (2003) Food in Film: A Culinary Performance of Communication (Studies in American Popular History and Culture). Routledge.
Bourdieu, P (1984). Distinction. Harvard University Press. Bower, A (2004). Reel Food. Essays on food and film. Routledge
Greenaway, Peter. 1989. Screenplay ‚The Cook A Thief His Wife and Her Lover‘. Dis Voir.
L’ Orange Furst E. (1997) Cooking and Femininity. Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 441-449.
Mintz, S (1986). Sweetness and Power. Penguin Books.
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