Manners and Culture

Paper Summary:

To answer this question the paper uses two films; "Babette's Feast," and "The Draughtsman's Contract." It suggests that all manners are culturally constructed, although some systems of social mores allow for more change than others. It also uses Oliver Sac's work with brain damaged patients as a reference point, to explicate how the rituals of the table and of even a draughtsman's pictorial world of representation are highly specific to a particular place and times.

From the Paper:

"Eating is a natural urge, of course. Watching a film, however much film buffs may protest, is not. Yet food and film seem to go hand-in-hand today, as the popularity of Like Water for Chocolate, Eat, Drink, Man, Woman, Big Night, and Chocolat all attest. Why is this so? Perhaps, because more than any other artistic medium, film is able to render the sensual experience of consuming food more accurately than virtually any other form of representation. It is interesting to observe that although they began as texts, the film Babette's Feast and Like Water for Chocolate both began as novels, in the former case, a short story by the writer Isak Dinesen. But the film of Babette's Feast has become far more famous, and it renders, very powerfully, the unique ways that food and the manners and morals that surround them are both quite particular to a specific period, place and time."

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