Food Blog: Week Two

Choose a food-related subject and from this week’s reading write about how you might use one or more of these documentary modes or approaches.

This Week’s reading was Broderick Fox, ‘A brief history of documentary movements and modes’ – I found the reading interesting to link my ideas about documentary to my current preconceived ideas about food. The quote “The fact that histories of documentary often begin with Grierson is testament—for better and arguably for worse—to his prevailing legacies of shaping the form and function of social issue documentary” reflects what I want to achieve with my own documentary through camera angles and the storyline of culture and food. The explanatory mode – “explains” with the purpose of offering a linear, logical, didactic argument. The image track is usually silent; synchronous location sound is often replaced by a disembodied, voice-over narration that serves as the film’s organising principle”. Narration is one of the key concepts that I want to explore with my imagery, as I think it allows the viewer to have a deeper insight into a subject rather than simply watching a film. I enjoyed the narrative storyline of Chef’s Table as it allows the storyline to come through without taking away from the documentary style. This is something I want to explore in my documentary. 

Furthermore, in the reading “Contemporary eco-food films: The documentary tradition “  – the examples of food industrialisation is something that I am also interested in exploring, and how that links to culture. I have previously watched Fat, Salt, Acid, Heat & Food. Inc in my food journey before embarking on this course, which follow and comments on the food industry, in particular the USA. In my documentary, I want to show a history and the angles of culture as well as what culture means in todays society. The quote “nostalgia serves as a powerful rhetorical tool that placates and paralyses the disenfranchised: ‘Nostalgia is an essential, narrative, function of language that orders events temporally and dramatizes them in the mode of “that’s what happened,” that “could happen,” that “threaten to erupt at any moment”’ is something that I want to address in my documentary studies throughout this semester. By evoking personal memories and nostalgia within the audience of my documentary as well as allowing them to develop their own questions regarding culture and what makes their version of culture unique.