f À table: an exploration of the uses of food in Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion, 1937

This paper examines the uses of food in La Grande Illusion and considers the insights this offers about the film’s double historical context of 1937 and the First World War (1914-1918). It is a first attempt to focus exclusively on food in one of Renoir’s films. I argue that the many ambiguities, ambivalences and contradictions revealed by the uses of food not only provide us with multiple layers of interpretative potential about the transformation of human society in the film’s historical contexts but that they also serve to engage us specifically in the ideology of these historical changes.

My preoccupation is with the meeting: how to belong, how to meet. Often Renoir compared the functions of a film director with those of a chef in a restaurant. A chef can create great meals, but they are also the result of his collaboration with his helpers, the meat chefs, the wine stewards, the sauce makers and the rest.