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.

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Related Topics: food, The Queue

Meg has been writing professionally about all things film-related since 2016. She is a Senior Contributor at Film School Rejects as well as a Curator for One Perfect Shot. She has attended international film festivals such as TIFF, Hot Docs, and the Nitrate Picture Show as a member of the press. In her day job as an archivist and records manager, she regularly works with physical media and is committed to ensuring ongoing physical media accessibility in the digital age. You can find more of Meg’s work at Cinema Scope, Dead Central, and Nonfics. She has also appeared on a number of film-related podcasts, including All the President’s Minutes, Zodiac: Chronicle, Cannes I Kick It?, and Junk Filter. Her work has been shared on NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, Business Insider, and CherryPicks. Meg has a B.A. from the University of King’s College and a Master of Information degree from the University of Toronto.