Analysis of Food Film – A Bite of China
There has always been a common and prevalent, yet quite questionable belief in food documentary, that food documentary provides a wonderful channel for food lovers to access to next level delicious food. In fact, food is not only a carrier of keeping people alive but also a bridge to convey the beauty of local popular culture and transmission of cultures (Devereaux, 1995). Therefore, in this essay, the food documentary A Bite of China will be analyzed to understand how a film can be presented in some unique manners to let the audience both in China and abroad appreciate the beauty of Chinese food, and then perceive China’s cultural traditions and social changes.
First of all, a brief introduction of A Bite of China will be discussed. As one of the most famous Chinese documentary television series on Chinese traditional food including food history, eating and cooking, this food documentary has quickly gained high ratings and widespread popularity. The first season of the A Bite of China was issued in March 2011, talking about the history and making stories of a significant number of different foods in more than 60 locations in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan (Jia, 2012). Amazed by vast territory and abundant resources in China, even a lot of Chinese audience do not realize how wonderful the Chinese food culture and local cuisine can be. So far three seasons of the documentary have been aired, with 7 or 8 episodes in each season.
In the film of A Bite of China, there are a significant number of delicious foods in different regions of China presented. This film perfectly discloses the relationship between people’s life and food in China. As the old saying in China, food is the first necessity of people, local regional culture is closely related to the development of local cuisine, including the cooking methods, ingredients selection, and flavor preference. Through this food documentary, how people live in the local culture, as well as related to food preference can be comprehensively discussed. Unlike some other film documentary such as Super-Size Me (Jia, 2012), which is trying to reveal the disadvantages of having an oversized burger to the body, the film documentary is simply presenting what people love eating in their daily life and introducing the foods to different regions. The film documentary produces contents using strong social interaction and resonations and crucial technical shifts to create suspense to the audience (Fox, 2017). Therefore, in this manner, people’s appreciation of the food and beauty of Chinese food can be clearly seen.
In A Bite of China, the documentary carefully introduces a kind of food at the beginning from the appearance of the local cuisine. The close-up shot of the cuisine with fancy color and local unique flavor shown from the cooking ingredients has strongly attracted audience attention and appetite. For example, figure 2 shows some close-up shot in Season 1 Episode 4 of the A Bite of China.
With such an impressive introduction, the audience can be easily interested in what the documentary is going to talk about. After that, the documentary does not directly show that a cook with decent cooking utensils, standing in front of the camera and presenting how to cook this food because this is exactly what the documentary is trying to avoid. Instead, the documentary will take the audience to the original home of such food and a traditional restaurant or even a family, which has already been quite famous in the local region for making the food. Being authentic without any decoration is what the film is trying to pursue. There is no fancy talk or interview. The cooks in the film are just ordinary people, like farmers, like a housekeeper, or a street hawker selling snacks or breakfast. Meanwhile, the documentary is also not directly showing them how to cook, on the contrary, it’s just presenting a whole day work of the cook. It’s just about a farmer getting up and working in the field to get the freshest ingredients and vegetables, or it’s about a mother who sends her children to school and goes to the supermarket after work to prepare dinner for the family. Everything audience can see is just normal life. With appropriate and calm voice-over to show the local culture and people’s normal life like writing a plain dairy, real life is what the documentary wants to present.
Therefore, people love this food documentary because it tells the audience that the beauty of food is simply from each family, any regions and our daily life (Chow, 2012). Food is closely related to every family, each neighborhood we live in and the installation of traditional culture we possess. The style to convey such food cuisine is extremely crucial because the purpose of the food documentary is beyond the food itself. The audience can resonate with the cultural context and food-related life because of its presentation style. Meanwhile, such food documentaries show the beauty of local cultures which is also a comfort for nostalgic people (Murray & Heumann, 2012). Fancy or any formal interview or face to face talk is not applicable in such emotional convey because the documentary is simply talking about something that is extremely close to our daily life. Showing life from the beauty of food with tremendous cultural inherit wealth is the true purpose of the film.
Personally, I believe that such a film presentation style works very well. How to present a country with a profound history of thousands of years and how to make audience resonate with such tremendous history background can be intriguing to pursue. However, the film A bite of China has provided a satisfactory answer: through our daily life because the beauty and inherits of culture has strongly blinded into people’s values, life, and thoughts. Therefore, the film documentary has found an acceptable balance between traditional influences and current innovation to food, which has strongly attracted the audience’s attention to the beauty of food and culture behind food.
References:
Chow, J. (2012). “CCTV Finds the Way to Viewers’ Hearts is Through Gorgeous Food Documentary”. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from:
Devereaux, L. (1995). “Cultures, Disciplines, Cinemas,” in Fields of Vision. Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology and Photography, ed. Leslie Devereaux & Roger Hillman. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 329–339.
Fox, B 2017, Documentary Media: History, Theory, Practice, Routledge, Milton. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central.
Jia, Mei (2012). “Readers sink their teeth into A Bite of China”. China Daily. Retrieved From:
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2012-06/26/content_15522345.htm
Murray, R.L; Heumann, J.K. (2012). Contemporary eco-food films: the documentary tradition, Studies in Documentary Film, 6:1, 43-59.