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‘A cook can’t just mix things up’, says a woman with a typical Brooklyn accent while the camera shows sophisticated images from food and travel magazines. In this black-and-white video, her first in this format, Martha Rosler explores the relationship between gastronomy, class and breeding. A silhouetted woman hiding her face from the camera describes her efforts to improve her status and that of her family through gastronomy. With a deadpan voice and accompanied by the strains of a violin concerto, the woman explains why she wants to become a gourmet. The text comes from one of Rosler’s ‘postcard novels’ entitled Budding Gourmet – also written in 1974 – in which in eleven chapters the artists tells the story in the first person of a woman wanting to learn haute cuisine to climb the social ladder.
Director
Status
Released
Original Language
EN
A talented chef with gambling woes flees to a Latin American villa to visit an old friend who appears to be living an extraordinary life as a private chef. Envy soon turns to greed and then to something deeply unsettling for the chef when he assumes his friend's life and discovers the motives of his mysterious clients.
