Julia Ducournau’s cannibalistic horror movie Raw made headlines at the Cannes Film Festival after members of the audience rushed out of the screening to puke while others fainted. Why? Alison Peirse’s Three Ways to Dine has the answer.
Screened at the Wench Film Festival organised by Sapna Moti Bhavnani, the film essay explores the relationship women share with food in the horror genre. Alison Peirse who works as a professor at the University of Leeds takes film extracts spanning a century, from narrative and experimental shorts to features from works of women like Daria Nicolodi, Mary Lambert, Karen Arthur, Stephanie Rothman and Julia Ducournau to understand the intimate and subtle relationship women share with the food on screen.
Peirse, in the introduction, notes that the tones surrounding food and women usually have to do with the idea of nourishment and love but the rupture the horror genre brings to this common world understanding of gender and social contract makes this anomaly interesting to the viewers.
Referencing Virginia Woolf’s ruminations on the importance of food and the gendered discourse it generates, the short posits that in horror there are three ways to dine well — through an exploration of food-loathing, monsters that devour humans and dining table traumas. The essay also looks at the horror sub-genre of the fear of being eaten by seemingly other-worldly beings… the act of being consumed by something alien. This act of consumption soon morphs into a tale of lust in movies like Ginger Snaps and Jennifer’s Body where women feast on men and work towards commenting on objectification in a patriarchal world.
The theme of objectification runs large in another short called Spiralling into Desire by Brinda Jacob-Janvrin and Roohi Dixit. Inspired by the epic poem The Descent of Innana, the short has references to the story of the Sumerian goddess Innana’s descent into the underworld and in the process explores the psychoanalytic phenomenon of the Madonna-whore complex.
Poster of ‘Spiralling into Desire’. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
Brinda who takes the centre stage in the production successfully holds the attention of the audience with her unique yet flawless movement that guides the camera and the narration. The monochromatic hues contrast the exploration of the split and make for a striking visual commentary on the phenomenon.
Prevalent in Martin Scorsese’s movies like Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the complex has been immortalised in film. Brinda takes to the same medium with ease to craft a woman’s perspective on the phenomenon.
Sigmund Freud argued that the Madonna-whore complex, also known as the Madonna-mistress complex, was caused by a split between the affectionate and the sexual currents in male desire. Through lyrical movements of the human body along with taut cinematography, the filmmaker successfully merges the split.
Women have had a long tryst with the horror genre and through film festivals like these Sapna and filmmakers like her are making significant strides to cement their standing.
However, both the shorts are not tailored for audiences new to the genre and amateur horror fans might find the film essay particularly uninteresting. But for connoisseurs of the genre, the shorts work as a hat-tip to the history of cinema and the celebration of gore.
