Food Porn from MJC on Vimeo.

I was having trouble doing anything productive with the hyper-short-form, so I decided to play around with conjoining two different types of (vintage) video instead: a ~1965 warning film on the dangers of pornography entitled Perversion for Profit, and several ads and educational documentaries on the food industry, including primarily the Miracles of Agriculture film produced by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Of course, I had to call it “food porn.”

Using the audio decrying the moral filth, degeneracy, and destructive effects of erotic literature over shots of mass-produced agriculture and agricommerce is at heart “a film with a punch line, a joke on the audience who is always looking at and trying to understand the wrong image.” (Barron 132) If “the joke may be the form best suited toward exploring the archive” because every use of archival materials is in some way a misuse, this is the unjustifiable reinterpretation of the archival material par excellence: it literally just seeks to exploit the similar vintage effects (film coloration, etc.) of 1960s-era film to mashup two different topics for surreal comic effect.

Sure, here I could make a sweeping claim about how the juxtaposition of food and pornography examines the way we “consume” the female form (or the sexual encounter/description) in general the way we consume food, and how the former is rightly or wrongly pathologized in our culture. I could also say something about wanting to mix two forms of propaganda with negative and positive aspects respectively (pornography is destroying our nation vs. the modern supermarket is the marvel of our times.) The production also theoretically pokes fun at the moral panic of the anti-pornography movement, troubles our relationship to food by putting it within an eery audiovisual disjunct AND highlighting the “manufacturing” of the modern food industry, and directly juxtaposes the 60s-era fear of communism with images of well-known capitalist food advertisers as a version of the perceived communist “masters of deceit.”

And all of those things were on my mind in part (mostly during my choices for the last few seconds of the mashup), but: really it’s just meant to be a joke. I considered making it a 30-second film with the 27-second dramatic leadup from the pornography narrator, followed by three to five seconds of the cherries in the industrial bagger (possibly with cheery music; there was some in the film, but it faded too quickly to a voiceover.) The long lead-up followed by the sudden cut seems to be a very digital-age form of video mashup humor — especially if the content after the cut is itself ridiculously short in comparison or otherwise surreal/funny.

It’s possible I was overly influenced by Trash Night Video, though I don’t think I sunk-slash-ascended to that level of Dadaist supercut humor. I’m also looking at it and cringing at some of the sloppy editing, now, which sort of kills the joke on an experiential level, but this is one of the drawbacks of working with the Healey media lab software.