Repas de bébé

synopsis

The history of food in film begins with a 40-second shot of one-year-old Andrée eating the porridge that is lovingly fed to her by her father Auguste. Like family photographs, this scene from the everyday life of one of the Lumière brothers invites us to study it in detail: the miniature tea set, Mrs. Lumière's blouse, the collar fluttering in the wind, the movement of the leaves in the background. It also offers a subtle intersection in the form of little Andrée's gesture of offering a biscuit to her uncle Louis, who is standing behind the camera.

“As an image of consumption, the bourgeois dining ritual at the heart of Repas de Bebe stands in for other domestic pursuits that the film would reflect back at its growing middle-class audience, and more decisively, for the ways in which cinema itself would become an object of mass consumption, with eating and drinking integral to the commercial movie-going experience.” — Anat Pick: “Vegan Cinema”, p. 130

Source: In Emelia Quinn & Benjamin Westwood, Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture: Towards a Vegan Theory. Cham: Springer Verlag. pp. 125-146 (2018)

biography

In his family home with adjoining garden in the Montplaisir district of Lyon, Louis Lumière (1864–1948) shot several of his “animated photographic images” (vues photographiques animées), the first family films. The film Repas de bébé was first screened on December 28, 1895, at the Salon Indien in Paris’s Grand Café, along with the iconic Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895).

film details

director:	Louis Lumière
producer:	Louis Lumière, Auguste Lumière