Staging Reality in Order to Discover the Historical Paradigm

With these three particular examples we attempted to demonstrate the manner in which Kerekes combines the symbolical levels, first at the level of comment and the illogical frame composition, then at the level of mise en scène (foreground, middleground and background), or finally at the level of visual symbol as an independent iconic comment. The other staging modes were developed fairly traditionally. For instance, there is a scene of dramatized cooking without ingredients in an empty pot during food preparations for the dead comrades or literally – to reconstruct the story in which the cook hides behind enemy tanks in a corn field, or the case with the explosion of the pot of goulash behind the Hungarian army chef who “does not see it coming”. The various visual effects sometimes draw the attention away from the overall meaning which thanks to the playful form of presentation and the ironic ease as if bypassing the ethical parameters beneath the tragedy of the individual stories. We may only conclude: there is no accounting for taste. As much is the cooking authentically portrayed and the staged reconstructions inauthentically, so is each addition directly dependent on the narrated story.
Either way, we cannot deny Kerekes his tendency to develop an eclectic style in his work as documentary film director. Apart from the dramatizations and reconstructions, he also aims to offer well-founded opinions, makes unconventional use of counterpoint in editing the segments, attempts to establish a dialogue between the archival and the authentic, for instance, by using tools such as the quotation. For example, the archive frame in which German armed forces are lifting the ramp, and the frame shot today. The frail old men, former Wehrmacht soldiers, cannot even manage to boost the ramp. Kerekes quite often establishes an open dialogue with his protagonists, even though positioned merely as a voice behind the camera whereby interactively influencing the performance itself since he “imposes” his own value judgements to his characters: Do you believe the recipes to be orders? and the like. Another time, together with the protagonist and on his initiative, he reacts skilfully and offers an improvised confession during the filming of the unbiased participants, members of the Israeli armed forces during grocery shopping at the supermarket.
The flexible directing, stylistic diversification, the collage and the eclectic variation of practices condense the film space with ambiguous symbols and blurring the clear-cut expression of the message of the documentary. Kerekes may be even too focussed on creating an “intellectual” type of film that particularly relies on the emotional involvement of the viewer in the action. He borrows not only from the documentary, but above all from the feature film tradition, whereby opening a polemic discussion between times. Between the time of the conflict seen historically and the time of mentioning, that is to say, in the context of today’s perception of the past event. The polemically built character of the film document in which the authentic is transferred from past into present by the process of staging reality leaves plenty of room for subjective assessment of the events by the viewer. The unifying principle of the film Cooking History is not the relationship between the truth captured documentarily and authenticity in a historical sense of the world. This film is united by the principle based on the paradigmatic relation between the subjective narratives on the topic of cooking in the time of war and the transnational nature of food preparation as one of the human activities acquiring particular meaning and character in wartime. Kerekes in therefore less interested in the reasons and consequences of the rage of war, he has no interest in judging; he primarily to observe the particular event somehow marked by war, as well as its repercussions on the individual regarding food, eating, cooking, that is to say, regarding survival. The fact that food in the army is crucial part of every war is confirmed by the many additional mini-narratives. The Jewish supporters of the resistance toward the end of World War II managed to poison the bread intended for the captured German troops; food was the reason for the attack on the Russian soldiers in Chechnya; the famine during the siege of Stalingrad was an omnipresent constant; the sugar cube managed to provoke hatred toward the ruthless invader; the pickled mushrooms gathered from the occupied territory became souvenirs of war, and so on. From this first – and banal – point of view the contemporary viewer can directly see the aspects of war and the army forces’ motives for action based on food. Kerekes manages to effectively include other aspects within the subject matter, such was: heroism, cowardice, hatred, betrayal, vengeance, national interests, the attitude of the state towards members of its own or of another people, nationalism, as well as ordinary soldiers’ naivety and primitivism which at times even result in atrocities.
Kerekes thus attempts to ironize the individual episodes in order to relieve the pathos of the “warring” parties in the account. It is this humour that helps him not to fall prey to the seriousness of the tragic subject matter. It may also be seen in the twelve cooking recipes appearing directly on the screen as subtitles, and their presentation is at times quite cynical considering their contents. We certainly cannot question the director’s enormous effort to present subjects captured as understandably as possible. He has no ambition to attack the great historical events but to mainly focus on the tragedy of the common man who, in the pull of history and under the pressure of the war machinery, is in a situation to prepare perhaps what is most banal, but also most important – a good meal.