What's it all about? Nick Roddick ponders the symbiotic link between cinema and catering. Or something like that
Para One: Apologia pro vita sua. After a week in, things take on a kind of metaphorical meaning, and every film title seems to strike right to the heart of one's soul. In my case, it's Downhill Willy.
Para Two: In which we make the obligatory literary reference. Readers with a passing knowledge of French literature may recall Huysmans' Là-bas. The title translates, more or less, as ‘Down There' and Down There was not a nice place to be.
Para Three: In which we see the light. It came to me that once you actually got Down There, you'd call it Down Here. And Down Here is what a lot of us call Cannes. People in LA say «this town», meaning not just geography but the whole shooting match. Down Here is a similar state of mind, a site (as we used to say) within which meaning can be constructed. Down Here, things get confused: movies with meals, parties with sales pitches, ideas with identities, post-structuralist aesthetic theory with gossip, art with - well, art with more or less everything.
Para Four: In which someone gives me a press release. Rocket Pictures - an outfit based in, believe it or not, Ostend - has grasped this all too clearly, and is shooting a movie Down Here called Cannes Man about a courier who finds fame at the festival. Some of the scenes are scripted, some of them seized on the hoof - real encounters with real people. I'm sure people will believe the former, but they're bound to think the Rocketeers made the latter up.
Para Five: In which we say thank you. Down Here, for all the largesse, there is no such thing as a free anything. Which is why I would like, in passing, to record an experience of some importance. A couple of days ago I went to a movie which had a party afterwards. It's a set up of which I have, in the past, been suspicious, on the grounds that the party tends to be the hook, the movie the sinker, and the line (if you see what I mean) never comes. Well, on Saturday night, Blue Juice the movie and Blue Juice the party were both fun.
Para Six: In which we start again. At all events, it provoked some further reflections on the strange symbiotic link between films and parties or, more precisely, between cinema and catering. I say «further» because those of you with a long memory may recall I have strayed into this thematic area before. But that was only in relation to the cash nexus - to the fact that, Down Here, companies use food to demonstrate their power, much as they use Land Cruisers and impressionist paintings in the toilet to do so in LA. Down Here, after all, the room you hire was hired last night by somebody else. Only the food you put in it is you.
Para Seven: In which things get heavy. Food is discourse, not subject. I wasn't joking about post-structuralism and gossip. I've been reading one of those books while I wait for the screenings to start, figuring that there is enough frivolity Down Here without adding to it in my off times. Anyway, here is a sentence from the book in question, just to give you a flavour of the kind of discourse I am talking about. Here goes: «Telephones and sound reproduction engineers assumed that all sound representations must take into account the physical and physiological circumstances of an ideally defined listening situation [...] and attempt to replicate their conditions in all their complexity [...] in order to achieve a satisfactory simulation of actual presence at the original production of the sound.» There are another 41 words in the square brackets, but I think you get the gist.
Para Eight: In which we finally get to the point. What the book contains is a series of essays attempting to grasp that holy grail of 70s and 80s academic research: the precise relationship between the structures of the studio system and the narrative structures of the movies it produced. Put another way (a favourite comment in post-structuralist criticism, where all concepts are infinitely rephrasable): Does the business mean anything? In much the same way, I figured, there must also be a link between the food served at the receptions and the films in whose honour it is handed out - a link, that is, beyond the obvious (Moroccan food to promote Sinbad, a Burmese buffet for Beyond Rangoon) and beyond the merely fanciful (the best of recent German films are, like the aforementioned German brunch, bite-sized and tasty).
There must surely be a dialectical link between the comestibles encrusted on the plates, and the signifiers buried in the film.
Para Nine: In which we concede defeat. Buggered if I can see it, though. Not with the space I have here.
Para Ten: In which try to go interactive. Answers on a very large postcard, please. Sentences of less than 120 words will be automatically disqualified.
