Film and Garden

The Culinary Cinema examines the garden, looking at it both as a place and a metaphor. For there's an important parallel between film and gardens. The garden is an in-between space, the bridge between natural wilderness and the artificiality of houses and streets.

Film too is made of in-between spaces and individual frames. Every single frame lets light through and advances in a specific order and speed. The inertia of human perception turns these single frames into motion sequences, which our minds quickly process into stories. A single frame is like a garden patch in a pool of sunlight.

Defined spaces like gardens, kitchens or cinemas offer us a special opportunity to "search for large meanings in small things", as Michael Pollan puts it.

If we were to adopt the gardening metaphor in politics, for example, there would always be something to do. Weed a bit here, fertilize a bit there. There are indeed some branches, but not entire fields, that would be better off untended, as some economists demand of the markets, which ostensibly work more efficiently when left unregulated.

For a gardener politician, people wouldn't be cogs in a machine, rather dynamic and unpredictable entities. Change is a natural part of gardening and of filmmaking. Nothing is perfect.