The Research

The film Eating Cultures was produced by Holly Giesman as part of a practice-based PhD thesis in documentary film at the University of Roehampton in London. The broader research project—entitled Encounters in authenticity: documentary film and the “authentic” national restaurant—consists of the film (the practice component) and a written component. Although the film was produced so that it might also stand on its own, reviewing Eating Cultures in the context of the full thesis and alongside the written work allows for a richer engagement with it.

A condensed festival screening version of Eating Cultures and an accompanying research statement were published in the journal Sightlines (available here). The full Ph.D. thesis is available from the University of Roehampton library and the British Library; the written work is available online here.

You can watch selected scenes from the film on the Film Clips page, and the film synopsis introduces some of the project’s key themes. Below is a more developed overview of the research project and themes.

Revisiting the documentary dilemma

The thesis confronts a fundamental dilemma for documentary filmmakers and scholars: How do we deal with claims and expectations of authenticity—the assumption that documentary corresponds to the “real” world in a way that fiction does not—despite the fact that documentary can only ever mediate reality? As documentary editor and scholar Dai Vaughan wrote, “film is about something, whereas reality is not” (Vaughan, 1991: 21). Yet, the fact of mediation is more problematic for documentary than for fiction, and the degree of skepticism about documentary representation is often much higher. As documentary scholar Bill Nichols cautions, “We believe what we see and what is represented about what we see at our own risk” (Nichols, 2001: xii). The unique challenge for documentary is that it relies on “a disposition to believe”—as documentary scholar and practitioner Michael Chanan puts it—whereas “fiction evokes what is traditionally spoken of as ‘the suspension of disbelief’” (Chanan, 2000: 58). One of the thesis project aims was to put this enduring documentary dilemma into a new context and offer a different way of engaging with it—experientially and from a unique perspective. Holly explored this dilemma in practice and by seeking insight from others who also deal with issues of authenticity and mediation but in a completely different context—in the foreign national restaurant in London.

Crossing cultural and disciplinary boundaries

Though the ideas presented in the thesis are—to a certain extent—relevant for documentary generally, Holly deals in particular with cross-cultural documentary or documentary that has an ethnographic element. In her writing, she takes a fluid approach to thinking on authenticity and cross-cultural encounter and highlights some interesting intersections of these themes in documentary and in the restaurant. By taking the documentary dilemma into different territory, she makes new cross-disciplinary connections—in particular with tourism and food studies scholarship. Both the documentary film and the meal in the restaurant provide spaces for sensory-rich exploration of difference and otherness, and the encounters that occur in both spaces have touristic qualities. Restaurants are often theorized as touristic spaces. In this work, Holly explores the touristic qualities of documentary encounters as well—specifically comparing the structures of documentary spaces of encounter with touristic spaces of encounter (MacCannell, 1999); the act of looking in film (MacDougall, 2006) and in the tourist gaze (Urry & Larsen, 2011); and, “the sin of Heisenberg” in documentary—wherein filmmakers are seen to be “forever interfering with what it is they seek” (MacDougall, 1998, p. 48)—with the tourist’s interference in the toured environment.

“Eating cultures” and “mediating worlds”

The film and the written thesis work together to construct a relationship between the meal in the restaurant and the cross-cultural documentary film based around the metaphors of “eating cultures” and “mediating worlds”. The film encourages viewers to engage with these themes in an experiential and embodied way. Restaurant customers are literal “eaters”, but film viewers are “eaters” as well—in a metaphorical sense. The written thesis contextualizes and develops the metaphors considering the broader contemporary context of cultural globalization as well as addressing related concerns about what has been termed “cultural omnivorousness” (Bell, 2002) or “culinary imperialism” (Narayan, 1995) and considering the opposing concept of “cultural cosmopolitanism” (Rovisco and Nowicka, 2011).

The film also invites viewers on a journey with the filmmaker through parts of the empirical research so that they may experience not just the perspective of the “eater” but also the perspective of the “cook”. The meal in the restaurant involves literal cooking, but filmmaking is also seen as a kind of “cooking” and the film as a kind of “meal”. The work of “mediating worlds” is what connects the restaurant staff and the filmmaker. Restaurant staff members are mediating the culinary worlds of Eritrea, Pakistan and Argentina. The filmmaker, in turn, is mediating the worlds of each of the three London restaurants. In both cases, mediators are trying to communicate their experiences of being there in these particular “worlds”. The process involves selection, translation, and adaptation. Staff members in each of the three restaurants are shown to be facing various obstacles. Sometimes substitutions must be found for ingredients that are not available in London. Other times meals are adapted to accommodate the London customer base. The filmmaker is also shown facing obstacles in her work of mediating worlds. Filming in busy, working restaurants is not easy. The filmmaking apparatus is an unnatural element in the kitchen or the dining room and can be distracting for people working and eating there. Certain adaptations are made. Questions arise about the effects of the filmmaking process. Ultimately, “mediating worlds” involves working with fragments—transforming raw ingredients into a cooked meal. Traces of actual worlds and lived experience are incorporated and recombined into new wholes. Yet, where the fusion restaurant or the fiction film allow for free mixing of ingredients and exploration of creative possibilities, the national restaurant and the documentary seem to be inevitably bound by claims and expectations of authenticity. In these cases, it is more difficult to acknowledge the inherently hybrid and constructed nature of cultures and cuisines or of filmmaking.

Influence of visual anthropology on the research

Although this research was conducted within an arts and humanities context, both the filmmaking practice and the written work were heavily influenced by visual anthropology. Holly is interested—as filmmaker and anthropologist Jean Rouch was—in the relationship and commonalities between cinema and ethnography. Further, she wants to use film in a research context as a tool of inquiry into lived experience as well as into documentary filmmaking itself. Two key concepts that informed her methods were visual anthropologist Sarah Pink’s notion of “experiencing similarly” and visual anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall’s notion of “deep reflexivity”.

Sarah Pink claims that one of the key things visual ethnographic research methods can do is to “provide researchers with opportunities to experience similarly and use their own sensory embodied knowledge as a basis from which to learn about that of others” (Pink, 2008: 148). The video recording process is integral to this approach because the researcher can use the audiovisual material later “to invoke these experiences” again for herself and to try and communicate “a sense of how it felt to be there” to other audiences (Pink, 2008: 127). In filming Eating Cultures, Holly was focused on empathy through shared sensory experience and on reflection and definition of that experience. Her attempts to “experience similarly” were a crucial part of developing relationships with film subjects and collaborators, engaging them in the filmmaking and encouraging a collaborative atmosphere. Finally, in exploring documentary filmmaking as “mediating worlds,” a key part of the filmmaking approach was to convey to viewers the experience of being there in the “worlds” of the restaurants. Importantly, this included considering the limits of “experiencing similarly,” the aspirational nature of such an endeavor and the impossibility of fully communicating or translating experience.

David MacDougall calls for visual anthropologists to employ what he terms “deep reflexivity”:

It is…necessary for visual anthropology to take reflexivity to a further stage—to see it at a deeper and more integral level. The author is no longer to be sought outside the work, for the work must be understood as including the author. Subject and object define one another through the work, and the “author” is in fact in many ways an artifact of the work. (MacDougall, 1998: 88-89)

Holly took a similar approach to reflexivity for Eating Cultures integrating the filmmaking with the film subject in such a way as to acknowledge their interdependence and inseparability. The relationship between filmmaking and film subject is, to a certain extent, the focus of the film. Operating in this “deep” reflexive mode, she began to employ metaphor in her filmmaking practice and to formulate connections between the meal in the restaurant and the documentary film. The notions of “eating cultures” and “mediating worlds” arose during this formulation.

Working within and against dominant narratives

Due to the ethnographic aspect of her approach, Holly was interested in the perceptions of people working and eating in restaurants. The following questions were key: How is authenticity understood? How is national identity linked to food? What meaning or value does the meal in the restaurant have for those that prepare it and those that eat it? The challenge, however, was to avoid simply reinforcing categories, labels and essentialist discourse. Careful and sensitive probing—on the part of the filmmaker—was necessary in order to try and present film subject perceptions in a “non-totalizing” way that would “suspend meaning and resist closure” (Trinh, 1991: 74)—as theorist and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha advocates. Toward this aim, Holly worked to explore and highlight differing perspectives and pursue contradiction and complexity wherever possible but to do so without alienating film subjects and collaborators or discrediting their contributions.

More details

For more on the theoretical framework for the research—and in particular how tourism theory is used—see Chapter 1 of the written thesis. Chapters 3 and 4 also deal with the figure of the tourist and touristic encounters as they relate to the meal in the restaurant and the documentary film. Chapters 3-5 fully elaborate on the metaphors of “eating cultures” and “mediating worlds”. Writing on “cultural cosmopolitanism” is in the final chapter of the thesis. See Chapter 2 for full details on the methodological framework and the influence of visual anthropology. Chapter 2 deals in particular with Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s cinéma-vérité and the influence of their film Chronique d’un Été (Chronicle of a Summer) (1961) on Holly’s approach as well as the influence of the 1960s U.S. direct cinema—including a discussion about filmmaker Richard Leacock’s methods for communicating “the feeling of being there”. Chapters 3 and 4 elaborate on the pre-existing structures and categories within which the filmmaker and film subjects were working and how Holly tried to both operate within and resist them. For questions about the film or the research, please submit the form on the Contact page.

Project supervision and examination

Holly’s PhD supervisors at the University of Roehampton were Michael Chanan (Professor of Film and Video), Garry Marvin (Professor of Anthropology) and Enrica Colusso (Senior Lecturer in Film). Her viva voce (oral examination) took place in December 2013; her external examiner was Lizzie Thynne (Senior Lecturer in Media & Film Studies, University of Sussex) and her internal examiner was Michael Witt (Reader in Cinema Studies, University of Roehampton). She passed the viva with only minor corrections advised.

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