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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, editor of Film Comment magazine and a 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.)
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That movie brought to mind Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum (2008), with “the rain, the very taciturn sensuality, and this attention to domestic relationships,” Girish adds. (After she said so in a post on X, friends pointed out that Denis’s film also featured a red rice cooker.) It also reminded her of Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000), another “rain-soaked Asian film about yearning that features rice cookers.”
A call to add to the growing canon crowdsourced a wealth of suggestions—and some discourse. “It went a little bit viral,” Girish smiles. “People debated whether a pressure cooker counts and how prominent a rice cooker has to be.” She joked about doing a series—and began developing a working theory of rice-cooker cinema.
First: Both films and the rice cooker involve temporality. “Cinema is a medium of time, and the rice cooker is, in a way, a machine of time,” Girish says. “The intervention of the rice cooker is that it turns itself off on its own, so it gifts you back time you might have spent at the stove. There’s also a poetic pleasure in checking to see whether the steam’s still coming out. It measures the passing of time in a very beautiful and cinematic way.”
Indeed, many films in the series explore the concept of time, including slow-cinema master Tsai Ming-liang’s 2012 short “Diamond Sutra,” in addition to his 2003 classic Goodbye, Dragon Inn. The Taiwanese filmmaker has long been preoccupied with time’s passage, and his ongoing “Walker series” inspired by a seventh-century Chinese monk known for his epic journeys on foot features frequent collaborator Lee Kang-sheng. In it, Lee, as the monk, slowly traverses various urban environments, reimagining a monk’s pace of life in modern times—all while a rice cooker steams in the background. Tsai compared the steam rising from a rice cooker to his dying mother exhaling her final breath.
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The rice cooker also reflects how we confront consumerism, capitalism, and modernity in the kitchen (and, by extension, in the home and society)—and all their attendant contradictions. Girish considers All We Imagine as Light’s rice cooker: “Is this a beautiful gift from a lover or a kind of insult that this husband, who doesn’t call or write, sends her something that will allow her to cook more easily?” On one hand, the rice cooker brought convenience to Asian homes, particularly to Asian women, at a time when women were entering the workforce. “But it also reinforced this idea that cooking is a woman’s job in addition to her other work,” Girish notes.
The last quality marking the cinema of the rice cooker is yearning. “The cooking happens on its own, so there is a depersonalization,” Girish says. “An object is doing the cooking for you. In All We Imagine as Light and 35 Shots of Rum, the rice cooker signals something impersonal. It crystallizes a life of self-sufficiency and independence, which is also lonely.”
The series also includes a rarely screened 1995 Stephen Chow gross-out comedy, which speaks to that era’s preoccupation with cyborgism (“Only in an Asian film would the cyborg turn into a rice cooker,” Girish quips), and an early short by Bong Joon Ho in which a rice cooker features in a laugh-out-loud gag and a signature twist.
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One of Yasujirō Ozu’s films had to be included, naturally. “When you think of a rice cooker in film, you think of Ozu because he captured Japanese domesticity of the 20th century so evocatively,” Girish says. She ultimately chose Good Morning (1959) because the plot centers on a family on the cusp of modernity. “It situates the rice cooker as a precursor to these even more sophisticated examples of automation that were coming. And of course, there’s an iconic scene where the boys steal this rice pot and run away as a protest for not getting a television set.”
The theme struck a deeply personal chord with Girish, who grew up in India with a beloved rice cooker—and continues to cherish her own tiny, cheap, reliable one in Brooklyn. “Rice cookers have always been quite dear to me,” she muses. “It’s a humble appliance, but it meets such a key need. I cannot be myself if I don’t eat rice every day. It’s the thing that makes me feel in my body, like myself. It ensures that I don’t go hungry, no matter how busy I am, and keeps me connected to an important part of my culture while living abroad. It’s something that I feel so deeply connected to and that keeps me alive.”
Girish hopes the rich legacy of rice cookers in film continues to, well, cook. “This is my dream series,” she says. “Hopefully, people will see this and keep building the canon of rice-cooker cinema.”
