Okay, so this is old news. But how many of you have actually seen "Kitchen Stories," Bent Hamer's 2003 off-beat Norwegian comedy? That's what I thought. I, American Philistine that I am, saw it in Portland, OR, when it came out, and I just watched it again with my wife the other day. In my aspiringly cinephilic mind, there is no other film that so handily and winsomely eviscerates the inhuman Weltanshauung of the Enlightenment. And "Kitchen Stories" dismembers the Enlightenment precisely for its inhumanity, which is the aspect that I personally find most hateful.
As far as plot summary goes, the idea is that this 1950s Swedish home design outfit, after its success in mapping the traffic patterns of the Swedish housewife and developing an efficient kitchen, decides to send a team of observers to Norway to study bachelors. The bulk of the story dryly and wryly points up the ridiculousness and misanthropy of the self-described "positivism" of the company's approach to tabulating the movements of the Norwegians, and fleshes out the blooming humanity of the Swede and the Norwegian as they escape the chilly grip of scientific materialism, objective rationality, and deontological ethics.
Kitchen Stories - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
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1 comment:
Sounds like an interesting movie. And hey, hello, hi :)
Hint: my cat's blog
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