“The Art of Eating: The Life of M.F.K. Fisher“ dives deeply into the life and legacy of legendary Glen Ellen writer M.F.K. Fisher.
Acolytes of all stripes, from literary scholars and critics to chefs, foodies, fans and followers, have long tried to put the late writer M.F.K. Fisher into context.
Her life and writing had so many layers it seemed that no one voice, however insightful, could adequately encapsulate in a few words, a paragraph or even an essay who she was and what she contributed to literature by way of the sensual, sensory experience of food. For Fisher, food was a cultural and sometimes personal metaphor, one understood by all, because we all eat.
She remains, 30 years after her death, defiantly indefinable.
But filmmaker Gregory Mark Bezat comes close to capturing the lasting impact of Fisher, who spent her last years living and writing from a cottage in Glen Ellen, in a new feature documentary, “The Art of Eating: The Life of M.F.K. Fisher.” Bezat draws from Fisher’s own words, as well as the impressions of those who knew her in life or discovered her through her writing. Rare archival material from the M.F.K Fisher Literary Trust and old black-and-white film of rural France during the time when Fisher, a young professor’s wife, first found the exquisite beauty of true food, vividly recreates her world.
Her remarkable life began in 1908 in Whittier, where her father ran the local newspaper. The film follows her through her years in France and Europe before World War II and later to St. Helena in the 1950s and 1960s.
Fisher spent the last two decades of her life at what she called “Last House,” a home built for her by her friend David Bouverie and which is now part of the Bouverie Audubon Preserve. She died in 1992 after years struggling with the debilitating effects of Parkinson’s disease.
The 85-minute film will have its world premiere Tuesday and Thursday at the Mill Valley Film Festival with Bezat, who produced and directed the film, in attendance.
Prolific writer
Doing justice to Fisher was a formidable challenge, according to Bezat. There was a vast amount of material to mine. As the daughter of a small-town newspaper publisher, she could write on command and on deadline. She didn’t belabor, she produced.
Her legacy encompasses 27 books of essays and memoir, hundreds of pieces for The New Yorker and a celebrated English translation of Brillat-Savarin’s book “The Physiology of Taste.” She also wrote a screenplay, two novels (“Not Now, But Now” and the posthumously published “The Theoretical Foot”), a children’s book and travelogues.
Bezat also had access to Fisher’s extensive personal papers at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
“When I took the project on, and I initially did an agreement with the M.F.K. Fisher Literary Trust, everyone warned me she was a complicated topic and a complicated individual,” Bezat said. “Boy, were they right.”
Fisher, fortunately, proved to be an infinitely interesting and agreeable companion for the four years he spent immersed in her life and her words.
“I would say to anyone who wants to be a filmmaker, choose a topic you can live with, because you’re going to be living with it a long time,” Bezat said. “It’s truthful to say Fisher only got more interesting.”
Bezat calls Fisher “the godmother of the fresh-food movement,” who remains “incredibly relevant today,” a woman ahead of her time.
Although she often is simply described as a food writer, Fisher was much more than that. She wrote about all manner of emotions and experiences through the metaphor of food, the memories of food and experiences around food.
“She’s not just a food writer, and to describe her that way is to do a disservice to her writing,” Bezat said. “Her writing is a lot about life, about the philosophy of life, enjoying the pleasures in life and surviving very difficult times. She went through a lot, which is well-documented in the film.”
Fisher’s first marriage, to Alfred Fisher, ended in divorce. The love of her life was the writer and artist Tim Parrish, who encouraged her writing and helped her publish her first book of essays, “Serve it Forth,” in 1937. The pair married and spent time in Switzerland. But he eventually took his own life after suffering from an excruciatingly painful and degenerative disease, which cost him a leg.
Like other great writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edna Ferber, Fisher toiled for a time in Hollywood at Paramount Studios, working with director Billy Wilder and writing gags for stars like Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour. Fires and pandemic
During the four years it took Bezat to finish the film, he faced major setbacks from the Nuns Fire that came close to destroying Last House in 2017 and the COVID-19 pandemic that impeded plans to film in Europe. But he did manage to incorporate interviews with 14 people, including writers Ruth Reichl and Anne Lamott; Fisher’s daughter Kennedy Golden; chefs Jacques Pepin, Alice Waters and Dominica Rice-Cisneros; Fisher’s personal assistant Marsha Moran; and Jack Shoemaker, the founding editor of Counterpoint Press, which still publishes many of her works.
Although she’s frequently associated with France, Fisher spent close to half her life in the California Wine Country: in Napa County, where she co-founded the Napa Valley Wine Library with James Beard, and in her one-bedroom cottage in Glen Ellen.
So it was fitting that some of the voices in the film are local, including chef and writer John Ash, who knew Fisher; consultant, author and NPR host Clark Wolf; Katrina and Kyle Connaughton of the celebrated Single Thread in Healdsburg; and writer Michele Anna Jordan, who also knew Fisher.
The rest of the film is told not with a narrator but through Fisher’s own words, interpreted by voice-over actor Mary Dilts, who at times sounds uncannily like Fisher herself.
There have been other biographical films about Fisher, but Bezat said he strove to create the most definitive to date.
“The one thing that has always attracted me to filmmaking is the opportunity to do an emotional piece, to really sink in a deep emotional feeling,” he said. “And I went for that in this film.
“I want to convey in that 90 minutes a sense of what it might have been like to have met her, to experience her workday, to feel a deep emotional connection to her.”
In fact, Bezat met Fisher in 1985 at the Last House, when he was recruited by Sunset Magazine’s food editor Jerry De Vecchio to film her interview with Fisher that would be part of a larger film for a presentation. Bezat was captivated by his day at Last House with Fisher and came away thinking he would love to do a film about Fisher and her writings.
Epiphany in France
There are great moments for a writer when something shifts. For Fisher that came in 1929, right after she had arrived in Dijon, France, with her new husband and experienced her first rapturous nine-course French meal. Julia Child and Alice Waters would experience similar awakenings decades later.
“It was an epiphany,” Bezat said. “And it changed her life.”
Through the Fisher trust, he had access to hundreds photos and more than 100 boxes of other materials that encompassed her whole life. Even after four full-time days, he was able to mine only half of it.
Some of it yielded rare glimpses into her transformative time in France. And stock footage from Gaumont-Pathe, a French production company, furnished even more treasures.
Combing through stock footage in Gaumont-Pathe’s archives, he came across a half dozen black-and-white films taken in Dijon between 1929 and 1933, the years when Fisher was there. He believes they have never been seen by modern audiences. In the film, these snippets recreate the Old World she was discovering with such wonder.
Rather than using traditional French accordion music or recordings of Edith Piaf, he commissioned original neoclassical pieces for the soundtrack, from composers Laurent Dury and Tom Disher.
Though Bezat weaves through the narrative insights from those who knew her, Fisher was an observant chronicler of her own life. Through the revelations in her writing, it all came down to a ravenous hunger.
“People ask me, ‘Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do?’ They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft,” she wrote in her 1943 book “The Gastronomical Me.”
“The easiest answer is to say that, like most humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it.”
The Press Democrat – Meg McConahey – October 7, 2022
You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com.
Recent Comments