ASSIGNMENT ONE
VIDEO ESSAY
https://youtu.be/JR55RwMrlws
ANALYSIS
Chef’s Table is a Netflix-curated series following the lives of influential chefs, focusing on their lifestyle and culture. It follows a different and varied aspect on food across the six seasons, however, for my Analysis, I decided to focus on Season Six, Episode Four. I regard the link between culture, ethnicity and food is something that I want to reflect on further in this course, therefore, I embarked on analysing the Chef’s Table season that allows these ideas to grow and develop further
Asma Khan – raised in Calcutta, India: continuously shatters norms through her London restaurant, Darjeeling Express. After being outcast as a child through the dowry system and India’s societal view towards woman, Asma creates dishes from her deep-rooted national heritage, with the assistance of her staff – who are all women. Asma Khan originally cooked in her home with ‘supper clubs’ – small dining experiences from her home and now owns one of the most successful Indian restaurants in Soho, London. The framing and imagery used to express her ethnicity and Khan’s idea of culture is shown through wide angled shots and participatory engagement with the audience through the filming style. By allowing the audience to reflect on what drives their ideas of culture and food, the production dives into a realm of new ideas and a storyline which allows the audience to reflect and gain a greater understanding regarding food and culture.
Through this episode, it allowed me to understand a deeper meaning about how food can influence culture in ways that I don’t usually expect, as well as how our heritage is carried with us through our daily lives, especially through our experiences of food. The filming process and observational segments of the documentary, for example, when Khan visits the local markets to pick up her ingredients for her dishes, you can see the care and understanding when she is talking to the staff, but also the way she inspects the produce.
Through the studio, I want to be able to relate my concepts of culture into how I view food, hoping that through this semester, these views will grow and amalgamate with the experiences that I learn about and involve myself in. The series use of narration, camera angles and the mixture of angles is something that I want to explore in my own video, as I feel that it offers a range of history of the issues at hand, whilst expressing the story that is currently happening. For example, the establishing sequence of the episode of Asma Khan talking to the camera about her strongest memories as a child: the Darjeeling Express train – something that she identifies as a catalyst for her story and an inspiration for her restaurant, and her vision for the name. Through challenging not only the Indian social norms, but the fine-dining restaurant norms as well: Khan represents the social change that is propelling through the food industry. The documentary uses a mix of the participatory and observational styles to represent these ideas. In turn, this allows the audience to remain hooked to the documentary, whilst allowing there to be variety in each ‘scene’ of the documentary. These shots are intertwined with interviews and break-out scenes from Khan’s past. Fox (2018) in “Reimagining Documentary” highlights that an audience member will seek and discover meanings within the sphere of documentary for themselves: “We can actively seek out and synthesize meaning from a range of media forms and how we produce and insert new imagery and media into the conversation” – through using different mediums and levels to their documentary series, it adds an element of trust and visibility to the material that the viewer watches. The ideas of Reflexivity (History and Memory, Tajiri) is also explored through the film through the breakout shots of India’s history and the caste system.
Furthermore, in Fox’s “A Brief History of Documentary” Movements and Modes (2018), the use of poetic, observational, participatory and autobiographical modes are all present in Chef’s Table. Although the budget for the film is high, they obtain many levels of filming and modes to create authenticity and engage the audience for a full-hour long documentary.
The documentary showcases the intricate details of running a restaurant, as well as the methodology being restauranteurs and chefs: right down to the details of kitchenware and layouts as well as the impacts of their emotional journey and how being a chef impacts their family life. This showcase of intricate details in such an emotive way is something that I want to possess in my documentaries throughout the semester. The reading “Contemporary eco-food films: The documentary tradition” (2014) has influenced my thought on filming and my documentary style to think about the social issues through traditional documentary making and the idea of nostalgia: “Most food documentaries, however, draw on an expository Talking-Heads approach and a rhetorical form that argues through a nostalgic vision of the pre-industrial farming period… Nostalgia has been critiqued, reified and recovered in the past few decades, with a resurgence of research in memory studies complicating negative views of nostalgia built on postmodern views.” – the idea of nostalgia is something that is explored through the historical elements of Chefs Table, and is something that I want to focus on in my own documentary making, however, the reading has made me have a better understanding of allowing the audience to develop their identity and ‘self’ within the film before introducing elements of nostalgia.
Thus, the ideas of documentary and food documentaries have been sparked through Chefs Table and Asma Khan’s story – not only through the story itself but how it is told through modes of documentary, inspiring me to create my own work that evokes nostalgia and culture within my own community.
CITATIONS
Videos Cited in Video Essay
Pexel Videos Stock
https://www.pexels.com/video/grilling-barbecue-856399/
https://www.pexels.com/video/cooking-meat-857779/
https://www.pexels.com/video/chopped-broccoli-854566/
https://www.pexels.com/video/video-of-city-1258446/
Work Cited in Analysis
“A Brief History of Documentary” Movements and Modes (Fox, 2018)
Reflexivity (History and Memory, Tajiri)
“Contemporary eco-food films: The documentary tradition” (2014)