Patrick Trefz's art and culinary documentary is both a feast for the eyes and for the...feasts...profiling environmental artist Jim Denevan, a California native who makes ephemeral sand-drawings and patterns in the landscape—sometimes on a monumental scale (appreciated best by satellite view). Denevan was also showcased in filmmaker Meredith Danluck's 2011 Art Hard.
This new feature (lensed over eight years) devotes as much if not more time to another of Denevan's passion projects, Outstanding in the Field: lavish meals served al fresco in untypical locations and precise seating arrangements as per Denevan.
Many times these fantastic repasts are positioned close to or within the actual sites in which the food originated, such as small farms across the USA or even at a Brooklyn rooftop-agricultural experiment, for literal "farm-to-table" dining. On other occasions, the environment and Denevan's precise patterns become part of the experience, as when a bacchanal on a beach continues until the incoming tide literally swamps the diners.
Certainly, the concept has brought unique recognition, awareness, and fellowship to many grateful independent food producers. Of Denevan we learn only a little upfront, except his early male-modeling gig and the genesis of Outstanding in the Field. Only in the second half does a fuller portrait of the artist emerge, and it is a painful one.
The tranquil-seeming guy is one of the younger of a large, tragic family scarred by the early death of the father, onsets of schizophrenia for three of the brothers, and a brilliant mathematician mother described as aloof in her formulas and graphs until dementia robbed her of her faculties. Denevan's drawings are a form of zen-meditation/therapy, and he himself speculates the communities he creates with his public banquets are an attempt to replace the intact family table he never really knew himself.
While some viewers might wish for more of a Michael Pollan-style message on small farms vs. Big Agra/GMO villainy, politics are left at the (nonexistent) coat-check room (the meals are not necessarily vegan, either). Even the closing credits—which are more like a salute to Outstanding in the Field's many collaborators—take place as a hypnotic display of typographical design.
An educational documentary that hits marks in the arts and dining sections, the title is highly recommended, especially for art history professors or culinary students. Aud: H, C, P.