Actually cooking the egg

 


Actually cooking the egg


    An extremely esoteric tape title since it was just a little throwaway line from a deeply disturbing documentary made in the 1970's. To anyone else this all would be silly but it was all part of the tapestry that gave us laughs. We  loved the works of Frederick Wiseman, the great documentarian who got us hooked with Titicut Follies about a mental institution. He had a unique style where there was no narration and the point of view is objective. He allowed his subjects to tell the story with their words unadorned. Wiseman paid the price for these works of  art by embedding himself in stories for months and gaining acceptance by staying with people and places he examined under a film microscope. For him it was all about editing these many hours into a distilled view of the truth. He called it elaborations of personal experience. He started in  1963 and at 94 the man still creates excellent films. You might call them cinema verite now but then they were something new and fascinating depite the extended length of the pieces. They used to show these films on PBS back when culture was free and they got better and better. Together we watched "High School," "Law and Order," "Welfare," "Basic Training," "Hospital," and "Meat" which is where the line comes from in dialogue. Greg, Tim and I watched this one together and there was a scene where some earnest salesman was trying to sell his products that would be used to feed people in an institutional setting. They had devised a machine that could stack dozens of raw eggs, steam cook them and produce a long tube of egg matter. It was when the food was being prepared that the salesman looked toward the camera and let the audience know that it was "actually cooking the egg." He said it with such conviction and crispness that we repeated the words to eachother any chance we could. When Greg was stirring the gravy at one of his Thanksgiving feasts I would approach him and say "it's actually cooking the egg" You had to be there but Wiseman is a genius




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