Every one knows that cinema is about desire—for sex, power, perhaps knowledge, love, or self realization. But what about our most primary desire, the desire for food? What happens when cinema takes a more than passing interest in food and the desires it unleashes? The answer is the food film, an international cinematic genre that explores some of the most basic and often repressed questions of human life. In this course we will approach classic food films from a variety of perspectives including anthropology, cinema studies, cultural studies, gastronomy, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Among the topics we will address are oral desire and visual representation; food, sex, gender, and family; food and its connection with death; food utopias and dystopias; cannibalism; food and ethnicity. The menu features some of the finest food films ever made: Babette’s Feast; Big Night;Celebration; Chef in Love; Chinese Feast; Chocolat; Delicatessen; Dinner Rush; Eat, Drink, Man, Woman; Fast Food Nation; Hotel Splendide; La Grande Bouffe; Like Water for Chocolate; Parents; Soylent Green; Super Size Me; Tampopo; The Cook, the Thief, his Wife, and her Lover; The Discreet Charm of the Bourgoisie; The Exterminating Angel; Tortilla Soup; and What’s Cooking? Food will never look the same.