ENGLISH TITLE: The Imaginary of Food, the Food of Imaginary. Semiotic Reflections on the Cinematographic Representations of Sushi

ABSTRACT: Sushi has permeated numerous spheres of sense in present–dayWestern society. This Japanese dish, increasingly less exotic and more familiar, has come to constitute a semiosphere of its own which, starting from the semiotic issue of food as a signifying vehicle, now crosses into other universes and assumes the status of a crossmedial vector. This conception of sushi as an actor whose semiosic identity in Western societies is in constant evolution lies at the base of this paper which, concentrating on case studies belonging to a specific medium about which semiotics has already had much to say, intends to recreate the structure of theWestern imaginary of sushi in relation to its cinematographic representation. If the crasis between food, cinema and imaginary already underpins a literature which still has a lot more to say, it proves fruitful at this point to ask what the consequences are in terms of the imaginary when sushi becomes the dominant element in a triad of recent — and totallyWestern — films: Jiro Dreams of Sushi (Gelb 2011), Sushi Girl (Saxton 2012), Sushi: The Global Catch (Hall 2012).

KEYWORDS: cinema; food studies; imaginary; semiosphere; sushi.