Opening Discussion: – How can we describe this film in a sentence? Discuss with your small group and come up with a consensus.
Narrative Structure:
1) The narrative within the narrative (metanarrative); the film within the film; another peculiar aspect of the film is that the viewer of the film is announced to be viewed by a character (the man in white suits) – what is the role of this man? What overall effect is created by the presence of this man?
The episode of Tampopo’s success story develops in a linear structure. Numerous vignettes (small pictorial episodes) of food intervene without directly contributing to the main plot and yet enriching the vision of Japanese food culture.
According to Charles S. Inouye, Tampopo “marks a reassertion of pictocentrism that emerges by way of the grapheme’s eventual dominance over the phoneme within the evolution of the motion picture” (137-8).
The film exhaustively lists foods to explore Japan’s 1980s late capitalist scenes. Both production and consumption of foods display the characteristics of the epoch – Japan was seeing the heyday of so-called bubble economy, and people were becoming savvy consumers of a wide-range of international cuisines.
