Let Them Film Cake: A Confectionary Montage

Welcome to The Queue — your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web. Today, we’re watching a video essay that explores cake on film.

As we keep learning in this column, the list of “stuff with an innate affinity with film” just keeps on growing. Dancing looks preternaturally good on film. Cooking and film are a match made in heaven. And so does today’s subject: cake.

That’s right: cake. A sweet, bread-like dessert, there are enough iconic cakes in cinema to open a pastry shop. The carrot cake in 2009’s Drag Me To Hell that has a demonic eye in it? Incredible. Bug-eyed Milton Waddams failing to grab a slice at a lukewarm celebration in Office Space? You love to see it. Debbie Reynolds’ exploding out of a cake in Singin’ In the Rain? Put it in the Louvre.

With very few exceptions, cakes are meant to accompany special events. A housewarming party? Cake. Weddings? Cake. Depressive episode? Cake.

Maybe it’s a false positive, but since major life events and cake tend to go hand-in-hand, the pastry benefits from a good deal of residual metaphorical power. We all have strong emotional associations with cake; good, bad, nostalgic, you name it. And that’s precisely the kind of visual storytelling cinema latches onto.

Need more proof? — (don’t proof for too long though, I’ve heard that makes baked goods cave in on themselves) — then check out the video essay supercut below that celebrates the screen time of cinema’s sweetest treat.

Watch “Cake on Film | A Sweet-Toothed Supercut”

Who made this?

This look at cakes on film comes courtesy of the fine folks at Little White Lies, a film-obsessed magazine based in the United Kingdom. Madzia Zalewa edited this video. You can follow Little White Lies on Twitter here. And you can check out their official website here. You can subscribe to their YouTube account here.

More videos like this

• Here is Little White Lies‘ look at how Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar uses sound design to construct vibrant, tactile worlds.
• And for more food-related video essay content, here’s herrozzy with a look at how how food made its mark on the films nominated for Oscars in 2023.
• And if you’re hungry for more of herrozzy‘s work, first off we can’t blame you, second: Here’s their video essay on the art of food in the films of Studio Ghibli. Be warned: watching on an empty stomach is going to make you want to order ramen and pan-fry an egg.
• And finally, here’s the fine folks at Fandor with a look at what food can tell us about a character.