Reel Food : Essays on Food and Film

This is the first book devoted to food as a vibrant and evocative element of film. It reads various films through their uses of Food - from major "food films" like Babette's Feast and Big Night - to less obvious choices including The Godfather trilogy and The Matrix. The contributors draw attention to the various ways in which food is employed to make meaning in film. In some cases, such as Soul Food and Tortilla Soup, food is used to represent racial and ethnic identities. In other cases, such as Chocolat and Like Water for Chocolate, food plays a role in gender and sexual politics. And, of course, there is also discussion of the centrality of popcorn to the movie-going experience. This book is a feast for scholars, "foodies," and cinema buffs. It will be of major interest to anyone working in popular culture, film studies, and food studies, at both the undergraduate and graduate level. Anne Bower's Reel Food is an intellectual feast, where each essay serves a delicious new course filled with meaty morsels and delightful aromas. It provides thoughtful lenses in which to view the culinary dimensions of all films, but be prepared to reexamine the taste sensations of traditional food movies, such as Chocolat, Babette's Feast, Eat Drink Man Woman, and Tortilla Soup. I ignored the incessant urge to put the book down and head to out to the video rental store to pick up the films devoured in this book. I'll never look at a movie without seeing its culinary dimensions in new ways. So, make some popcorn and settle down in your easy chair--you're headed for a great read |o Andrew F. Smith, editor-in-chief, Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America From sci-fi to horror, from romance to adventure, the films discussed in this collection are enriched by cogent analyses of the ways food is used to signal issues of cultural identity, assimilation, and conflict. With Reel Food, you won't need popcorn |o Darra Goldstein, Editor, Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture Reel Food is the go-to book for anyone interested in the rich intersections between food and film studies. The compelling, wide-ranging essays gathered here demonstrate that if you are interested in film, then you can't ignore food, and vice versa |o Doris Witt, author of Black Hunger: Soul Food and America From sci-fi to horror, from romance to adventure, the films discussed in this collection are enriched by cogent analyses of the ways food is used to signal issues of cultural identity, assimilation, and conflict. With Reel Food, you won't need popcorn |o Darra Goldstein, Editor, Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture Book Cover......Page 1 Title......Page 4 Copyright......Page 5 Table of Contents......Page 8 1 Watching Food......Page 12 2 Feel Good Reel Food......Page 28 3 Food, Play, Business, and the Image of Japan in Itami Juzo’s Tampopo......Page 38 4 Il Timpano—“To Eat Good Food Is to Be Close to God”......Page 52 5 Cooking Mexicanness......Page 72 6 Chickens, Cakes, and Kitchens......Page 86 7 “I’ll Have Whatever She’s Having”......Page 98 8 Food as Representative of Ethnicity and Culture in George Tillman Jr.’s Soul Food, María Ripoll’s Tortilla Soup, and Tim Reid’s Once upon a Time When We Were Colored......Page 112 9 Gendering the Feast......Page 128 10 Food, Sex, and Power at the Dining Room Table in Zhang......Page 140 11 Anorexia Envisioned......Page 158 12 Production, Reproduction, Food, and Women in Herbert......Page 178 13 Images of Consumption in Jutta Brückner’s Years of Hunger......Page 192 14 Appetite for Destruction......Page 206 15 “Leave the Gun; Take the Cannoli”......Page 220 16 All-Consuming Passions......Page 230 17 Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s Delicatessen:......Page 246 18 Futuristic Foodways......Page 262 19 Supper, Slapstick, and Social Class......Page 278 20 Banquet and the Beast......Page 292 21 Engorged with Desire......Page 308 22 What about the Popcorn? Food and the Film-Watching Experiances......Page 322 Notes on Contributors......Page 346 Index......Page 352 Reel Food is the first book devoted to food as a vibrant and evocative element of film, featuring original essays by major food studies scholars, among them Carole Counihan and Michael Ashkenazi. This collection reads various films through their uses of food-from major food films like Babette's Feast and Big Night to less obvious choices including The Godfather trilogy and The Matrix. The contributors draw attention to the various ways in which food is employed to make meaning in film. In some cases, such as Soul Food and Tortilla Soup, for example, food is used to represent racial and ethnic identities. In other cases, such as Chocolat and Like Water for Chocolate, food plays a role in gender and sexual politics. And, of course, there is also discussion of the centrality of popcorn to the movie-going experience.
This book is a feast for scholars, foodies, and cinema buffs. It will be of major interest to anyone working in popular culture, film studies, and food studies, at both the undergraduate and graduate level. 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 Campbell's Big Night (1995), Gabriel Axel's Babette's Feast (Babette's gaestehud 1987), or Claire Denni's Chocolat (1989), or those in which food formulates a dominant symbol system, as in Marco Ferreri's Blow-Out (La Grante Bouffe, 1973).