Reel Food

Essays on Food and Film

Anne L. Bower

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135875855
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

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 TheMatrix. 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 LikeWater 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.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• 1 Watching Food: The Production of Food, Film, and Values
• Cooking up Cultural Values
• 2 Feel Good Reel Food: A Taste of the Cultural Kedgeree in Gurinder Chadha's What's Cooking?
• 3 Food, Play, Business, and the Image of Japan in Itami Juzo's Tampopo
• 4 Il Timpano—“To Eat Good Food is to Be Close to God”: The Italian-American Reconciliation of Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott's Big Night
• 5 Cooking Mexicanness: Shaping National Identity in Alfonso Arau's Como Agua Para Chocolate
• 6 Chickens, Cakes, and Kitchens: Food and Modernity in Malay Films of the 1950s and 1960s
• 7 “I'll Have Whatever She's Having”: Jews, Food, and Film
• 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
• Focus on Gender—The Body, the Spirit
• 9 Gendering the Feast: Women, Spirituality, and Grace in Three Food Films
• 10 Food, Sex, and Power at the Dining Room Table in Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern
• 11 Anorexia Envisioned: Mike Leigh's Life Is Sweet, Chul-Soo Park's 301/302, and Todd Haynes's Superstar
• 12 Production, Reproduction, Food, and Women in Herbert Biberman's Salt of the Earth and Lourdes Portillo and Nina Serrano's After the Earthquake
• 13 Images of Consumption in Jutta Brückner's Years of Hunger
• Making Movies, Making Meals
• 14 Appetite for Destruction: Gangster Food and Genre Convention in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction
• 15 “leave the Gun; Take the Cannoli”: Food and Family in the Modern American Mafia Film
• 16 All-Consuming Passions: Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief,His Wife and Her Lover
• 17 Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's Delicatessen: An Ambiguous Memory, an Ambivalent Meal
• 18 Futuristic Foodways: The Metaphorical Meaning of Food in Science Fiction Film
• 19 Supper, Slapstick, and Social Class: Dinner as Machine in the Silent Films of Buster Keaton
• 20 Banquet and the Beast: The Civilizing Role of Food in 1930s Horror Films
• 21 Engorged with Desire: The Films of Alfred Hitchcock and the Gendered Politics of Eating
• 22 What About the Popcorn? Food and the Film-Watching Experience
• Notes on Contributors
• Index