Fascinations: Food

Materialaktion nr. 15 by Viennese actionist Otto Muehl is transformed in Kren's lively montage into a grotesque image of Christmas orgies centred around a festive table. The main course consists of flaccid genitals with a hard-boiled egg and an anus covered in béchamel sauce. A critical view of Christmas overeating meets an emphasis on excretion as a natural part of the biological chain of food consumption. The rhythmic alternation of shocking compositions of the Christmas table, albeit without accompanying sound, seems to invite the humming of carols.“Like most of his films, this one is extremely economical at a mere three minutes running time, this being perhaps the limit of what any audience would accept. (Not surprisingly, Kren had great difficulty finding labs to develop such material.)” — Gary Morris, “‘Sorry! It Had to Be Done!’ Radical Actioner Kurt Kren”, Bright Lights Film Journal, 1999Source: https://brightlightsfilm.com/sorry-done-radical-actioner-kurt-kren/

Gelatin, an animal product produced by the partial hydrolysis of collagen from the skin, bones, and tendons of cattle and pigs, is part of the light-sensitive emulsion layer of classic film stock. In 2019, Esther Urlus and Josephine Ahnelt began a series of experiments with the aim of replacing this component with a vegan alternative. The face that appears on 16mm material in both positive and negative versions is the first proof of this possibility.“I create my own film material, literally, by mixing silver nitrate and bromide salt with gelatin and water to form a light-sensitive emulsion. I'm not looking for a naturalist, commercial like film material, outcome. I intend to create unique components that, by their singularity, generate a special and cinematic experience.” — Esther Urlus

To celebrate the centenary of the birth of Norman McLaren, an icon of Canadian animated and experimental film, Wilson prepared this baked film tribute. The research, experimentation, and artistic innovation that McLaren promoted in his work take place here in the world's most prolific laboratory – the kitchen. The colours and textures of the film were created by immersing the film strip in various mixtures and then baking it in the oven.“Ottawa filmmaker Roger Wilson has been producing some of the most daring and inventive experimental films in Canada. Exploring the physical properties of celluloid – through optical printing, hand processing, allowing celluloid to decay/develop while buried underground – and incorporating those explorations in the films themselves, Wilson, like all true avant-garde artists, pushes the boundaries of image construction and investigates how moving images make meaning.” — Tom McSorleySource: http://www.thefilmscientist.ca/news.html

The film documents Materialaktion nr. 19 by Viennese actionist Otto Muehl. The performers' bodies, covered in mushy and powdery substances, are transformed into pieces of meat; their positions, props, and methods of submission change rapidly. The film itself undergoes the same degree of destruction, with positives, negatives, and blank film layered haphazardly, accompanied by a wildly fluctuating sound collage.“Bodybuilding reads like the early formulation of an aesthetic programme that aims to destroy traditional cinema.” — Peter Tscherkassky, Die rekonstruierte Kinematografie, in: Horwath/Ponger/Schlemmer (Hrsg.), Avantgardefilm ÖsterreichSource: https://www.sixpackfilm.com/en/catalogue/214

The camera slowly moves along rails laid on a crowded breakfast table, gradually pushing individual objects off it. The destructive effect of its gaze ironizes the supposed innocence of the act of filming, and reminds us of its presence. The self-reflective level is further developed in the second part of the film, in which a group of students and, ultimately, the author himself comment on the film.“This work is good. […] It is hard to sum it up. There’s a lot of variety. Something for everyone.” — Michael Snow

A crazy found-footage collage composed of monotonous, advertising, and playful shots is overlaid with hand-painted illustrations directly on the film emulsion. The outlines of objects peel away from their photographic record and jump into another film. The open refrigerator door spews out its contents until there is a syncopated pause, during which the calf of a leg trembles under the sensual vibration of the word FOOD.“Our food is radioactive. The fallout descends upon our cities and ourselves. It penetrates everywhere. The world takes on new colours, values are upset, and existence involves risk. Only dreams and expectations remain.” — Eino Ruutsalo

This camera-less film was created in a darkroom from photograms of the ingredients of four dishes: alphabet pasta soup, goulash, the Austrian dessert Kaiserschmarrn, and coffee. The ingredients were placed directly on the film strip, exposed, and then developed by hand. The result is an abstraction of the cooking process itself – a series of images-touches of ingredients, arranged in the order in which they were mixed.“We no longer notice what is extraordinary in daily life. The artist Viktoria Schmid, however, takes this as her material. Schmid manages to draw out the fascinating potential in the interweaving of light and time. She makes traces of light visible, and turns them into the central focus of how she deals with time and space. While we generally only pay secondary attention to the play of shadow and light, she manages to draw attention back to these phenomena, and she does so with impressive reduction.” — Siegfried A. FruhaufSource: https://bb15.at/2025/zeit-schwindeln/

The experience of an ice cream factory worker sublimates into a testimony woven from faces, gestures, and reflected connections between capitalism, AIDS, the relationship to the body, and the fragile position of women. Anger does not melt away like ice cream on the tongue in this poetic essay, inspired by the ideas of anthropologists Emily Martin and Karen Ho and sociologist Lisa Adkins.“The personal is not only political but cultural. What if culture was about taking care of basic needs like food and relationships? Every evening starts with a free home-cooked meal before the artist opens a conversation, as we slouch over couches or sprawl across the floor, close enough to be touched. Let’s remember that we have bodies together. We make a meal of each other’s words and appetites. What could be more intimate than to be eaten?” — Mike Hoolboom, an interview with Salome Kokoladze (2020)Source: https://mikehoolboom.com/?p=21026

A Baroque still life with a glass of red wine, fruit, and a severed tongue serves as a prelude to war. The following aerial shots are accompanied by news reports in several languages commenting on the fighting in the Persian Gulf. The experience of war conveyed by the media is transformed here into an emotional explosion perceived from the foyer.“The first videos dating back to the early 90’s were commentaries on the social and political situations. Their undertone rose from the cruelty of man, submission, from dialogue between order and discipline.” — Ulla VäätäinenSource: https://www.midday.fi/en/artists-statement/

The main character in this three-act visual gag is an apple, subjected to extremes of lightness and heaviness. Méliès’s camera magic enchants it in such a way that, in the most realistic shot, it ultimately seems the least real.“The fruit levitating over a table was done with the help of a stiff steel wire contraption in Myllymäki’s parents’ home in Turenki.” — Mika TaanilaSource: Mika Taanila. “Outsiders of The Seventh Art. Finnish Experimental Cinema 1933–1985”, in: Väkiparta, Kirsi, Sähkömetsä – suomalaisen videotaiteen ja kokeellisen elokuvan historiaa 1933-1998, Valtion taidemuseo / Kuvataiteen keskusarkisto, Helsinki, 2007 (unpublished, in English), https://mikataanila.com/texts/

Greasy fingers, puffy cheeks, and pieces of meat disappearing into the guts. The film reel meets the same fate as the chicken in the jaws of the devouring man—chemically corroded and increasingly crushed in a repeated loop. The desynchronized soundtrack in this found footage collage has a similarly chewed-up effect.“In this film, the chicken eater's jaw seems to be engaged in a strange chewing motion itself. The image is bent and torn in all directions, the film crushed under the incisive blows of a merciless hunger.” — Yann Beauvais, Le cinéma décolleSource: https://yannbeauvais.com/?p=1012&

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. 130Source: In Emelia Quinn & Benjamin Westwood, Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture: Towards a Vegan Theory. Cham: Springer Verlag. pp. 125-146 (2018)

Shrimp, mussels, onion rings, and other fried specialties from a stand tucked under the steel structure of the lift bridge on 95th Street in Chicago. The establishment, which made a brief appearance in the comedy The Blues Brothers (1980) during the legendary jump over the bridge, is still in operation today and is one of the city's unsung icons. Deborah Stratman intersperses bridge scenes from a videotape recording with her own shots of the environment, which is raw, bleak, and yet strangely homely.“As a person drawn to unusual landscapes living in a chronically flat city, the highest road for hundreds of miles is interesting. I would go there sometimes to look at it at night, and on one of those drives, I found Calumet Fisheries. […] It wasn’t until I’d been there a couple of times that I noticed the little cut out newsprint photo of the Blues Brothers and realized that the film’s bridge jump scene had been shot right there. […] I like the way the location absorbs both its real and its fabricated pasts. The Blues Brothers’ jump casts no less substantial a shadow than the Skyway.” — Deborah Stratman

Backed by an ingenious score, this black-and-white film with twelve colour fragments is composed of an exact number of frames containing extremely short image sequences that switch between several basic motifs—a woman at a table, a hand pouring beer, a group of people, or a beer brand logo. Flashes of contrasting images alternate with passages of blackness and are interspersed with two electronic tones. An advertising job rejected by the client gave rise to this prime example of metrical film. It forces viewers to use their eyes as if they were hands: to grasp what is visible and not let go.“In a sense, Schwechater is the most stunning eye-training film ever made, for it is, indeed, a film that trains us to see while it opens our eyes to the nature of film. In challenging the notion of how many frames must be shown for an image to be perceived, Schwechater destroys conventional assumptions concerning filmic perception. It is a masterwork, a work stripped to essentials, complex in structure, dissolving one of the basic notions of the art of cinema: the illusion of the moving image.” — Elena Pinto Simon, “The Films of Peter Kubelka”, The Artforum Source: https://www.artforum.com/features/the-films-of-peter-kubelka-210081/

The nearly year-long cycle from the autumn sowing of winter wheat to the summer harvest is captured in an educational film, which Street disrupts through chemistry and physical traces in the emulsion. As the cycle is repeated, the events depicted from the life of mass-produced grain are increasingly transformed: images of a combine harvester, hands stroking grains, and a map of the US with Kansas – the “wheat state” – marked on it gradually fade and are covered with scratches and coloured spots.“Street plays the images in a variety of ways, stating, varying and altering his theme with a symphonic sense of invention.” — Calvin Ahlgren, San Francisco ChronicleSource: https://film-makerscoop.com/catalogue/mark-street-winterwheat

From images of half-open slits, trembling petals, fruits that can be peeled and sucked, and leaves pressed tightly together, Barbara Hammer has composed a hymn to lesbian love. Her camera closely and tenderly explores the most unique places on the bodies of her loved ones. Like a botanist captivated by floral morphology, she finds an endless variety of shapes, structures, and colours in which physicality is transformed into a garden of sensuality.“I always ask the audience to look for the differences in relationships in the film – differences in form and content. They’re supposed to be looking and thinking about the formal concerns: who in here was a lover, and who was a friend? I think it's apparent.” — Barbara HammerSource: “An Interview with Barbara Hammer.” Interview by Kate Haug. Wide Angle, Ohio University School of Film, 20.1 (1998), 64-93.