Philosophy in the Kitchen

PHILOSOPHY IN THE KITCHEN (U.S., 21 min., 2014) is a split-screen video essay that explores how housework has changed the cinema. Well before other forms of labor in the new global economy erased the line between work and life, housework (from cleaning and cooking to child-rearing) was always that with which we are never done. It seizes all of life incessantly, requiring that we envision new forms of expression and tactics of resistance. The cinema of duration—long takes, repetitive gestures, protracted silences—was born in the kitchen in the 1940s and from there it went on to alter our sense of time and understanding of social relations. Gleaning, collecting, and reframing images of domestic labor from key European films, PHILOSOPHY IN THE KITCHEN sketches for us an alternative history of the cinema—one in which the blurring of work and life gives rise to a new image and thought of time.