“You have to edit the material.

That assumes that some kind of a mind is operating in relation to the material. 

Not all minds are the same. 

Every aspect of filmmaking requires choice. 

The selection of the subject, the shooting, editing and length are all aspects of choice.” 

~ Frederick Wiseman

 

By Cari Borja

Quotes center me. I always begin with them. Whether at the start of a salon dinner, a birthday card, a performance installation, or a piece of writing. They lend focus. The above Wiseman quote does the same ~ his words, his films, his quote ~ a focus.

And, his last word ~ “choice.”  The why’s of cinema ~ not just why the filmmaker chooses the subject and how to portray it, but us as film-goers choosing to see this instead of that ~ our choice of how to spend our time disappearing into someone else’s story, the filmmaker’s choice of how to focus our time watching their vision. The question then ~ not just what to make and why, but what to watch and how…on an iPhone alone, living room with family and dog, half packed cinema with friends, film festival full house. Context matters.

What to make and why. Let’s start with this. A filmmaker’s experience sculpted into stories ~ many times personal, then shared with the world ~ but then what to do with it? I like to make things, write things, create things that reflect an experience (too), a mirror that can become a window. That was the subject of my Masters thesis 25 years ago entitled “Hollywood in Britain: America as Other” ~ an ethnographic study of why and where the British students I was studying with got their ideas about who I was as “an American,” and then what they did with it. How those images and characterizations of the people and places in the films they watched affected how they interpreted the world, i.e. me, the American studying in their country. What did my British classmates do with that knowledge; in other words how did they see me based on the repertoire of movies they watched? This was the beginning of my fascination with power and potentiality of the moving image ~ questioning my own and other’s relationship to the films we see and experience. How those images affect perception and thus action, and how can they in fact affect change?

With Wiseman’s films, it’s not Hollywood as a way in to American culture but fly on the wall vérité , which he actually calls “reality fictions.” His historical cinematic windows give us a glimpse into the multi-faceted and oftentimes contested institutions throughout the United States ~ whether they center on education (High School from 1968 and his 4 hr and 4 min At Berkeley from 2013), mental health (Titticut Follies, 1967), public knowledge (through our libraries, Ex Libris: the New York Public Library, 2017), the police department (Law and Order, 1969), the culture of care (in Hospital, 1970), public parks (Central Park, 1989), our government (City Hall, 2020 and State Legislature, 2007), researchers (in Primate, 1974), our welfare system (in Welfare, 1975), dying (in Near Death, 1989), and over 30 other insightful explorations of the way systems work from the ground up. However, his most recent film from 2023 turned to a different type of institution, this time in France and this time focusing on how a ten course meal comes to be ~ from the dynamics of front of the house and back of the house, the life of ingredients from farm to table, and all the hands that touch it in between.

Attention to detail ~ it’s Wiseman’s view of the nuanced relations between management and staff, between employees and guests and how he directs us where to look, where to linger and how to situate us as viewer within and between those worlds, that is the remarkable feat of filmmaking and vision. In his 44th film, Menus-Plaisirs- Les Troigros Wiseman takes us on a mesmerizing 4 hour journey into the inner workings of a three Michelin starred restaurant, just like Alonso Ruizpalacio’s 4th film La Cocina (out in cinemas now) takes us into the hellish underbelly of a mid-town Manhattan eatery. One is seemingly fact, the other fiction ~ but together they illuminate the often silent truths made visual about how such institutions are run ~ the under-pinnings of an intricate caste system that still persists today.

And again, choice. Ruizpalacio chose a subject that was personal ~ his experience in London during his student days as dishwasher and waiter at Rainforest Cafe, and historical ~ from a 1957 play “The Kitchen” by Arnold Wesker, that became (because it is de facto, late 1960’s way) political. Here, Wesker sums it up ~ “The world might have been a stage for Shakespeare but to me it is a kitchen, where people come and go and cannot stay long enough to understand each other, and friendships, loves and enmities are forgotten as quickly as they are made.”

Just like my “Hollywood in Britain” thesis came out of an experience I couldn’t let go of, needed to be translated ~ so too did La Cocina, as the filmmaker uses the PLACE of the kitchen extracting, then hyper-focusing and magnifying what he saw as patterns of behavior in the distribution of power. And his extensive research with undocumented migrant workers was essential in rendering his provocative and at times assaulting vision of a brutal system that never seems to end ~ the idea of an American Dream that can never be fully realized, the invisible hands that never get recognized.

For Ruizpalacio, it is personal and political, and for me too, as participant observer in this same culinary world over the course of my life, it’s both. After reflecting and connecting and associating my own experiences from my past through present with both renditions of not just the kitchen, and its hierarchy of workers, but the place from which we as viewers can sympathize and/or empathize, La Cocina won’t leave my mind. It matters, but why?

I too have worked in and around and with food my whole life, have a lot to say about it, and the war zone that Ruizpalacio portrays is equally insightful and terrifying, a metaphor for our times. From my teenage years bussing tables and hosting birthday parties at the local Papa Gino’s in Leominster, MA and then a first college summer job in Colorado Springs as a GS1 cashier at the Commissary at Fort Carson, to the next two simultaneous post-college NYC jobs in food service ~ downtown at Time Cafe and then uptown at a small cafe in the bowels of Sotheby’s auction house, to my more recent years of apprenticing at Chez Panisse circa 2011, creating a series of salon dinners in my atelier that has extended to moveable feasts outside of it (131 to date), and most recently part of a bookstore/bar Clio’s in Oakland ~ the dynamics of power are implied in any and all of these food and hospitality-related businesses. And, I have never under-estimated (even to this day) the access that I had and code-switching that I did sliding between the many worlds in each of the places I worked. Yes, food is a powerful connector, but we cannot forget how food divides and challenges, makes us question the assumptions of who does what and how, when and where and why. And so does both Menus-Plaisirs and La Cocina interrogate visually these themes ~ and this is both of their power their beauty and their heartbreak.

To give some context, when I actually watched La Cocina from start to finish I had just arrived two days early on the island of Kauai for a Common Ground Summit this past November. Serendipitous in many ways, as the panel I was on was entitled “Food as the Great Connector,” and as I spoke a couple days later in the calm presence of an audience from around the world, many of the stories the 6 participants told were ones of conflict and tension, power and identity, struggle and resilience.

The seeming beauty and simple act of nourishing our bodies, the pleasure of tasting deliciousness and gathering around a table to connect isn’t always as beautiful and simple as it appears ~ idealized in the mind, conveyed in conversations, portrayed in the movies. Many of us know this when we think of holiday meals ~ those gatherings that for many of us aren’t the most comfortable, infused with anxiety and discord every step of the way ~ both front of house, living room, back of house, kitchen. I believe in the power of juxtaposition, the anthropological approach of the comparative method, so watching La Cocina, being on Kauai for a gathering around “place” and “our deep engagement with the places we live and work,” and thinking about Wiseman’s Menus-Plaisirs ~ was deeply illuminating, especially returning home to the Bay Area and again reflecting on the three ~ Hollywood, Kauai summit, documentary ~ context, feeling, action.

So what is it precisely that we are looking for in any of these experiences? Film-wise… a feeling of being there, embedded in the action fully engaged or outside observing the action, disconnected? La Cocina has been likened to The Bear “but on steroids,” but for me its the long pans of the opening sequence reminding me of Robert Altman’s The Player (1992) even Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967), but also the immersive chaos and steaminess of a Gaspar Noe film ~ his Climax from 2018, Love from 2015, Enter the Void from 2010 ~ it’s what each of us brings to it. From the back and forth dining room kitchen scene of “Remy Making Soup” in Pixar’s Ratatouille (2007) and the experience of Anton Ego’s Proustian madeleine flashback to the comedic nature of Mark Mylod’s culinary satire The Menu (2022). 

“There is an animal instinct force in humans that creates passion. When you love sometimes you cross a border.” ~ Gaspar Noe

At the same time I can’t help thinking not only of the labour in the kitchen but the labour on the land, where the food that’s being prepared in the chaos of the kitchen is actually coming from; what has actually happened awareness-wise between Robert Kenner’s Food, Inc in 2008 and 15 years later Food, Inc 2 (2023)? And then I’m reminded of John Chester’s inspirational The Biggest Little Farm because he was there in front of me, part of the summit on Kauai. Opening and closing shots ~ the soundscape of the finale of Chris Marker’s La Jetee (1962), I can still hear it feel it in my head now.

Of course La Cocina is such a different experience than Wiseman’s Menus Plaisirs: Les Troisgros, but one can imagine the quiet chaos implied in each shot, going on in the mind ~ the same undertone of a different kind of culinary combat that happens in the dynamics of any kitchen, for who if anyone ever truly belongs as the power continually shifts ~ insider outsider, upstairs downstairs, front of the house, back ~ it depends from where you stand.

So why film and why feel? And how do we even, if feeling is first like e.e. cummings said back in 1926? La Cocina’s melting pot reality but with the hope of some sort of an American Dream is not just a promise unfulfilled ~ a dream so far from being grasped, but the every day feeling of what it means to do meaningful work becomes such an improbability, any way out of the daily grind of this mid-town Manhattan machine lost. Any feeling of belonging or even disconnect that makes us want to act, becomes a numbing inertia.

When I arrived at UC Berkeley for graduate school back in 1997 I took a class by Peter Sellars, the opera director activist, my inspiration and mentor in all things experiential. His class “Art as Social Action / Art as Moral Action” is something he has taught over 2 decades and still a all-encompassing lecture experience that I return to again and again. His words I also return to again and again, said to me before his performance of Desdemona in 2011 with Toni Morrison ~ “You have to imagine a world, create it, and then live in it.”

There is the world that is, and the world that we envision ~ and the gap between the two is the call to action that each work of art, of storytelling, of filmmaking of any mission-based organization hopes to close ~ that gap between what is and what can be.

And most of the time it’s difficult to see the gap, acknowledge it and deal with it until someone stops your world. Until the machine literally breaks down in front of all of the people that are part of it.

YOU STOPPED MY WORLD…

It’s this line and this moment and this stopping of things that shows who is whom.

And what to do next? status quo, remain silent, or an acknowledgement that there needs to be a change, something different, something more. So how do we do it ~ how to feel (again), and be able to listen, collaborate, conjure, act.

Food is a nexus to everything ~ to connection, to conflict, but also to change. I have seen and experienced its promise, and the promise of film. My initiation to the power of documentary film (and to Wiseman) was through film professor and scholar b. ruby rich. She introduced me to their potential to convey the unsaid the deep silences and their and their ability to change the world ~ or at least people’s perceptions of certain realities. However, there is the next step of what to do with a film when one makes it ~ to distribute it, get it out there and that’s where the late Tom Luddy and the Telluride Film Festival came in. The year after I met ruby in 1997 I met Tom on Main Street Telluride where he and his whole team brought together a group of believers year after year since its inauguration in 1974, around the possibility of film in the context of a festival ~ its capacity to show us worlds unknown, visions to be experienced together, still to this day the closest to perfection of this purpose.

Last month, as I was writing this piece, Alice said to me across the table on the porch at Chez Panisse ~ “Diplomacy begins at the table,” and so it does. And I have seen, experienced and put in to motion just that. Inspired by both Alice and Tom Luddy around “the power of gathering,” 13 years ago I created a series of salon dinners in my design studio; and, I just had my 131st gathering celebrating Dias de los Muertos in Orinda with one of my collaborators Lisa Mueller. A few weeks before, I was behind the scenes at a dinner at Joan Nathan’s home with Surgeon General Vivek Murthy on the occasion of his new book Recipes for Connection ~ which was well detailed by Julia Moskin in her NYT piece “A New Campaign Against Loneliness Starts With a Potluck.” 

Alice has not only been a pioneer in farm to table dining in California for the past 53 years at her Berkeley restaurant, but inspired by the legendary M.F.K. Fisher, gathering people around food and wine and “exploring the power of connection through the ritual of a meal,” has been integral to her mission. I have seen its possibility, its beauty and its potency, most recently at our gathering in Washington DC on October 19th. We invited over 200 people to the table for a luncheon called Climate Food Hope, with a screening of Robert Kenner’s Food, Inc 2 the evening before, to set the stage for discussion the next day.” 

By focusing on how we feed our children and support our farmers and educators throughout the nation ~ through a movement called School Supported Agriculture as a way “to mitigate climate change, address children’s health, educate our next generation, and bring our communities together…” ~ the convening in DC used food and the art of gathering around the table (through serving a “school lunch”) as a web of connectivity to the land, its labour, the institutions that procure it and the educators and administrators who serve it. The next day, Michael Pollan’s op-ed “A new slogan for Harris-Walz: Feed the Kids” came out in the Sunday Washington Post which helped push the idea forward, validating and giving perspective to much of what was said by the 8 speakers the afternoon before.

“Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” ~ Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

The contrast of not just the calm and the chaos of the two kitchens of Wiseman and Ruizpalacio but of the food prepared and how and from where ~ in many ways says it all. are we eating anger and resentment or peace and civility, and is what we see what is really there in the midst of seeming serenity at TroisGros and callous calamity of The Grill? The visually striking difference of the calm in Wiseman’s kitchen and the chaos in Ruizpalacio ~ is just the choice by each film-maker in what to focus on ~ fine dining in France and touristy midtown Manhattan eatery. I began with such a choice and with it the question what’s next, much like the Civil Eats piece last month ~ “The Path Forward for Food and Ag” that discussed where we go from here, and much like the past and future imaginings of such convenings at Terra Madre in Turino  this past September, and Terra Madre Americas ~ the pilot in Sacramento last May 2024, and the larger scaled event scheduled to take place in Sacramento next September 26-28, 2025.

How do we as film-goers and participants in the food and hospitality world choose to respond ~ status quo or actionable steps? A metaphor of the times whether a documentary or a fiction, under the surface there are always conflict and tensions brewing and bubbling, on the edge of exploding. Whether hosting or attending community screenings of Josh and Rebecca Tickell’s Common Ground or Jyunya Tanaka’s We Are What We Eat to help spread the word, we can’t help but ask the question ~ but now what? Every aspect of filmmaking requires focus and a choice which is a reminder that every aspect of living also requires focus and choice.

YOU STOPPED MY WORLD, the voice says in the room full of his employees staring him down, on the edge of a coup, begging the question what’s next…

“To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.” ~ Bessie Anderson Stanley 1911

What, when, and how do we choose to do, be, eat, and watch?

What, when, and how do we choose to see, hear, and say?

For all of us collectively individually ~ after watching a film, experiencing a gathering, eating the food that someone has served on our plate, listening to people we believe in, hearing the discontent that’s in the air post-election and trying to think of a hopeful future ~ now what?  Remember the scene of Robin Williams in Peter Weir’s 1989 Dead Poets Society ~ quoting Walt Whitman to the young students gathered around him ~

Answer.

“That you are here ~ that life exists and identity,

That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.”

What will your verse be?

(Editor’s note: This article has a tremendous number of links to terrific articles and video. Clicking on highlighted words opens a new window for your ease.)

La Cocina is playing in theaters. Check the official website for dates and venues and to sign up for notifications of more showings. The Press Kit has a lot of informative background.

For more about Frederick Wiseman’s films visit his Zipporah Films website.

Frederick Wiseman on Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros | NYFF61

Read David Denby’s New Yorker article “Frederick Wiseman in Paradise.”

Cari Borja is an anthropologist, clothesmaker, salonniere educator and currently serves as Senior Advisor to Alice Waters. She received her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology and film from UC Berkeley in 2001. Since then she has built a clothing line and salon series while using her ethnographic skills to assist non-profits and corporations in realizing their missions. From 2017 through Spring 2020 she was a consulting anthropologist at Apple, Inc, and from 2020 through the present she has taught Design Ethnography and a seminar on desire and pleasure entitled “Since Feeling is First” in the Graduate Program in Design at California College of the Arts. Cari also creative directs a variety of galas and salons for She-Can Global in SF and NYC. She is a founding member of Clio’s Books in Oakland. You can read some of her work on her Fashion Film Food blog HERE. Cari has written regularly for EatDrinkFilms.

Gallery of Fredrick Wiseman clips