Latest news with #domesticity
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Vogue
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
The Unlikely Subject of a Riveting New Film Series in New York? The Humble Rice Cooker
Consider the rice cooker. The dead-simple-to-use, quietly bubbling home appliance changed lives in Asia and then the world over after its invention in 1950s Japan. Yet, in the decades since, it's been something of an overlooked countertop workhorse. Now the squat kitchen stalwart is finally sliding into the spotlight, thanks to the clever and insightful film series 'Let Them Cook: Cinema of the Rice Cooker,' playing Friday to Tuesday at BAM. Guest programmed by Devika Girish, a co–deputy editor of Film Comment magazine and New York Film Festival programmer, the seven films by some of cinema's greatest auteurs highlight the humble houseware's succinct poetry, representing no less than the passage of time, the exquisite pain of yearning, and the mixed blessings of domesticity. One particular scene in Payal Kapadia's lyrical All We Imagine as Light from last year sparked the idea for the series: A character receives a delivery of a rice cooker, and while who sent it isn't clarified, the movie suggests it was her estranged husband living abroad, possibly as a token of affection or remorse. 'She's stuck in this limbo of being married but having all this yearning and desire without an outlet,' Girish explains to Vogue. 'And there's this moment where you see her at night, sitting and hugging this mysterious rice cooker between her legs. It was erotic and sexual and also very moving. That was one of my favorite scenes of the whole year because this household object was imbued with so much feeling.' (Rice-cooker keychains were duly distributed at the film's Cannes after-party.)
Washington Post
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Many women ‘just don't want to' have kids. These books don't blame them.
When the writer Shirley Jackson went to the hospital to give birth to her youngest son in 1951, a clerk at the front desk asked for her personal information. 'Age?' the clerk chirped. 'Sex? Occupation?' 'Writer,' Jackson replied. 'Housewife,' the clerk countered. 'Writer,' Jackson insisted. 'I'll just put down housewife,' the woman told her. That Jackson's best fiction is about the debasements of domesticity is a cruel irony, one the dismissive hospital clerk no doubt failed to appreciate.
