ABSTRACT
In Bryan Fuller's television show Hannibal, the kitchen and dining room are represented as traditional spaces for the sociocultural experience of cooking and eating food; however, the deliberate use of editing techniques subverts the conventionality of these spaces by re-formalizing them as crime and murder scenes. This chapter considers how Fuller’s Hannibal deploys editing and the concept of “collisional montage” to provoke a spatial nexus between murder and the kitchen, and thus cannibalism and eating animals. It also considers the notion of “cannibalizing montage” in tandem with its analysis of montage and spatial collisions. The association between culinary practice and cinematic editing expresses the horror of Hannibal through the intersection of sociocultural thresholds and audiovisual form and aesthetics. In Fuller’s Hannibal, meat can be considered a corresponding object of montage—that is, meat as montage—insofar as flesh is similarly sliced up and constructed to challenge the acceptability of meat-eating in its association with cannibalism.
