A Feast for the Eyes

Film-makers often have a clear vision and their own distinct style. As it happens, the same can be said of award-winning chefs. “The auteur principle is one of many things that food and film have in common,” says Volker Pantenburg, head of the Department of Film Studies at UZH. Both disciplines demand meticulous preparation, specialized equipment and technology, impeccable teamwork and a setting worthy of the performance.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that food has played a significant role on screen since the dawn of film. As Volker Pantenburg points out, food often represents a social space that is about more than the act of eating, and it wasn’t long before cinema began serving up images that were difficult to digest. 

The first-ever food captured on film, however, is still perfectly innocent. After presenting their spectacular first works La sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon (“Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory”) and L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (“Arrival of a Train”) in 1895, the Lumière brothers captured a more idyllic moment. Their film Repas de bébé (“Baby’s Meal”) shows a couple (parents Auguste and Marguerite Lumière), seated at a garden table, spoon-feeding their infant daughter. The mood is cheerful – feeding their adorable little girl and staging the scene clearly gives the parents great pleasure.

However, the purely blissful depiction of on-screen eating was short-lived, according to film scholar Pantenburg. In the 1909 short film A Corner in Wheat, pioneering U.S. filmmaker D. W. Griffith tells the story of a speculator who manipulates the wheat market for his own profit, driving up bread prices and making a basic staple unaffordable for locals.

To illustrate the wheat tycoon’s tremendous gains, Griffith inserts a scene in which the ruthless capitalists and their wives sit at a lavish dinner table and repeatedly raise their glasses to each other. They aren’t actually eating but are shown drinking red wine – “feasting” on a luxury commodity. Intercut with scenes of hunger and misery among the poor, the contrast could not be starker.  

One of the first film auteurs to use food as a vehicle for social critique was Pier Paolo Pasolini. His short film La ricotta (1963) lays bare class divides in the way the characters deal with food, juxtaposing the desperation and genuine hunger of its poor protagonist with the unchristian behavior of the cast and crew.

Exposing bourgeois decadence through absurd dinner scenes truly came into its own after 1968. One famous example of this is Louis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), in which the dinner plans of a handful of hungry socialites keep getting derailed by mishaps ranging from simple misunderstandings to out-of-this-world surprises.

In Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983) the critique of overconsumption is decidedly less subtle: the colossally obese Mr. Creosote visits a restaurant and eats his way through the menu – until a final, wafer-thin mint causes him to explode. 

Another recurring theme in film is the family drama that unfolds at the dinner table, notes Volker Pantenburg. “Generations collide, and long-suppressed conflicts come to the fore.” A prime example is Festen (1998), the first Dogme film by Danish director Thomas Vinterberg. At the long banquet table where the family has gathered to celebrate the patriarch’s 60th birthday, tensions come to a head: instead of delivering a celebratory speech, the eldest son reveals that his father abused him and his sister, who later took her own life.

Over time, cinema also produced numerous films in which cooking and eating take center stage. Because the audience cannot smell or taste the food that appears on screen, it is up to the actors to convey, through their performance, what these delicacies evoke.

In Babette’s Feast (1987) by Danish director Gabriel Axel, the titular Babette – a renowned chef forced to flee her native France – prepares a lavish banquet for the pious townspeople of a small Danish village. The sumptuous French meal gradually softens the villagers’ frugality, explains film scholar Jan Sahli: “As the pious villagers, usually silent in their sparse everyday lives, dine on the delicacies set before them, they slowly begin to open up to each other.”

Babette’s Feast pulls out all the cinematic stops in its portrayal of food and eating: the Veuve Clicquot sparkles, the red wine flows, the meat sizzles, and the dishes appear on screen in rich colors and mouth-watering close-ups – a true feast for the eyes.

Food also plays a central role in Japanese cinema. “What a character cooks and eats reflects their social role,” says UZH film studies scholar Megumi Hayakawa, who specializes in animated films. A traditional-minded protagonist is more likely to carefully prepare their own bento box, while the Tokyo toilet cleaner at the heart of Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days (2023) begins his day with a coffee from a vending machine. “Canned coffee is cheap but doesn’t taste as good as freshly brewed coffee,” says Hayakawa. “Japanese viewers will immediately get the message: he settles for less.”

Everyday eating also finds its way into action-packed animated adventure films. In Castle in the Sky (1986), the orphaned protagonist Pazu is shown eating a fried egg on toast – but not in the usual way. Instead of eating them together, he eats the egg and the bread one after the other. This brief scene hints at a life lived outside conventional etiquette; Pazu eats the way he wants to.

“In the films of the Japanese Studio Ghibli, food takes up a more prominent role and serves a different function than in U.S. animated films, such as those by Walt Disney or Pixar,” adds film studies scholar Philipp Blum, who specializes in fantasy films.

Even in Pixar’s Ratatouille (2007), the eponymous French dish isn’t the main ingredient. The kitchen scenes primarily serve to illustrate the challenges and conflicts faced by the two main characters, the clumsy kitchen hand Linguini and Rémy, a rat who dreams of becoming a great chef and secretly guides his friend to produce Michelin-starred meals in a Parisian gourmet restaurant. 

By contrast, while many Ghibli films are otherworldly, bizarre and full of action, their fantastical plots often feature fairly ordinary food. In Spirited Away (2001), the parents of ten-year-old Chihiro stumble upon a food stall in a mysteriously abandoned theme park and begin scarfing down the dishes on offer. As punishment for helping themselves to food intended for the gods, they are promptly turned into pigs. The young hero must then face a series of trials before she can transform her parents back and escape the magical kingdom. Along the way, she is helped by an orphan boy who offers her an onigiri, a Japanese rice ball, as a gesture of friendship. As is often the case in Japanese cinema, sharing food here becomes a symbol of human warmth and togetherness. 

Increasingly, fans are carrying these culinary bonds from the fantasy world into real life. “Recreating Ghibli food is hugely popular in Japan,” says Hayakawa. “Thousands of people cook iconic dishes from the animated films, photograph them and share the images on social media, signaling to like-minded fans that they, too, are part of the community.”

The UZH film scholars agree that food has become a major presence on social media. On Instagram and other platforms, culinary content must appeal to the eye if it is to stand out. “There is an almost manic enthusiasm for photographing and posting beautiful-looking dishes,” says Volker Pantenburg. Vegan bowls and crisp sourdough bread are elaborately staged, arranged, lit and manipulated to make them look irresistibly stylish.

Cooking videos, too, have become hugely popular, racking up millions of views. With a hint of nostalgia, fantasy aficionados like Philipp Blum concede that even the most far-fetched food fantasies in Star Trek or The Lord of the Rings now elicit little more than a tired smile from audiences. Klingon delicacy gagh – live worms – or the nutritious biscuit-like cram simply cannot compete visually with the dazzling food porn of today.