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dsolomon-9
Reviews
Mahiha ashegh mishavand (2005)
Film review of Fish Fall in Love
...Fish Fall in Love is Iranian theater director Ali Raffi'i's first feature about two lovers being reunited after a twenty-year separation, and a new generation of about-to-be lovers, about to be separated.
Ex-political prisoner and Iranian émigré Aziz returns to his home at a Caspian Sea coastal village, where he finds that his former beloved Atieh, her daughter and two sisters have appropriated his family home and turned it into a restaurant. The film is shot like an old postcard from your grandparents' seaside holiday, complete with long images of regional specialties. In this film, no dish leaves the kitchen without making a cameo. Can you imagine jeweled rice doing the red-carpet walk at Cannes?...
http://www.culiblog.org/2006/02/when-fish-fall-in-love/ where there are more food-related film reviews
Drawing Restraint 9 (2005)
A film review of Drawing Restraint 9
Matthew Barney is the Lance Armstrong of contemporary art. In my opinion, no chef can yet lay claim to this position. Drawing Restraint 9 is also the best food-related film ever made, a lavish display of sensuality and ritual.
Drew Daniel of Matmos wrote this stellar description of Barney's art practice on Björk's DR9 website: Barney is a visual artist whose ambitious, rigorous multimedia work encodes esoteric meanings while providing lushly immediate aesthetic rewards. Best known for The Cremaster Cycle, the sprawling sequence of five films made over ten years which was the subject of a recent Guggenheim retrospective, Matthew Barney's work is multimedia in execution but singularly focused in conception: tightly unified fusions of sculpture, performance, architecture, set design, music, computer generated effects and prosthetics, Barney's films deploy the full range of cinematic resources in the service of a hermetic vision rich with densely layered networks of meaning drawn from mythology, history, sports, music, and biology.
This is a sexy way of saying that Barney's work is based upon his own elaborate and logical cosmology. In Drawing Restraint he playfully turns materials, forms, geometries and processes (e.g. petroleum jelly, silicone, whale blubber, ambergris, other marine excretions and accretions), cultural-historical narratives and geographic trajectories (e.g. the architecture, interior and machinery of a whaling ship, the culture of whaling, the history of a specific ship) and the experience of time (e.g. pearl oyster divers holding their breath under water, the migration of whales, a Japanese tea ceremony), into a luscious weave of deeply connected meaning and narrative.
This is where chefs tend to slack off.
But this is Barney's demarrage, an escape or breakaway that gives him an advantage over the rest of the 'field'. Whereas it is common for a chef to create a 'richly organized set of aesthetics' (as Drew Daniel describes Barney's approach to making art), I know of no example within the culture of contemporary haute cuisine in which a chef contextualizes elements on this level to form a total experience beyond the formal boundaries of restaurant culture. Perhaps I'm not going to the right sort of parties. I long for an haute cuisine that is less 'applied' and more autonomous.
The film has as its theme, the relationship between the self-imposed resistance and the trans-formative creativity inherent in the artistic process. I offer a simplified (flattened) overview of the narrative to suggest why this film is food-related, and a plea to the chefs of the world to step up their efforts and move towards creative autonomy.
37 Uses for a Dead Sheep (2006)
film review of 37 Uses for a Dead Sheep
As far as I'm concerned, you really can't go wrong with a film about yurts, yogurt, nomadic tribes and the shifting borders of the 'Stans' in Central Asia. I put my pants on one leg at a time.
37 Uses, is not so much Hopkins' film but a collaborative work, made with the Pamir Kirghiz tribe, a splendid historical document. The film begins in the 19th c. with the Super Powers divvying up Central Asia, a region that since the inventions of salt, silk, and opium remains one of the hottest properties on earth. We watch as beautiful nostalgic footage is fabricated through the tribe's reenactment, aided by the expert Kirghiz art direction of Muhammet Ekber Kutlu, son of the last Kirghizian khan, Rahman Qul.
In case you weren't paying attention during Central Asian History, the Pamir Mountains are the North Westernmost range of the Greater Himalaya, but are the feather in the cap of what is now known as 'the Stans'. Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tadjikistan, Kirghizstan and Kazachstan. Did I forget anyone? It's all about where you think the center of the world is situated, and that is what has been keeping the Kirghizians on the move, beyond their home turf pastures. The Pamir Kirghiz, no strangers to hardship inflicted by Super Powers, have (partially) avoided ethnic cleansing by doing what they do best, being nomadic.