Le Cuoche collects 39 stills from Le Cuoche (The Cooks), a 1999 film by the Czech-born painter and photographer Jan Jedlička about a family restaurant in the Maremma. The book was published in Zurich the same year by Andreas Züst and is sold by ECM, the label for which Jedlička has designed covers since 1992. It turns a portrait in moving images into a quiet sequence on the page.
The film runs 36 minutes and was made as a Swiss, Italian and British production. Jedlička shot it at the Ristorante Macchiascandona in Grosseto, in the part of Tuscany where he had spent long periods for two decades. Three sisters, Milena, Morena and Mari, run the kitchen, and their daughters Giovanna and Nicoletta serve the guests. Mirjam Krakensberger edited the film and Florian Eidenbenz recorded the sound. The festival Ji.hlava, which showed it in 2020 in a section devoted to Jedlička, describes it as a formally strict portrait.
The Maremma is the centre of Jedlička's art. He has worked there since the late 1970s, making pigments from the minerals, clay, sand and dust he collects and laying them out in the order he found them. In long photographic series such as Echo (1980-1989) he recorded the light, the water and the beaches over whole years. His films treat the same themes in another register: Echo – Vocis Imago (1994) and Interno (2001) are fluid and almost abstract. Le Cuoche stays in the same region but moves indoors, to the women who run a kitchen there, and the book holds the film still, one frame at a time.
Jedlička met Manfred Eicher in the late 1980s, and his pictures have since appeared on ECM records by Jan Garbarek, Tomasz Stańko and András Schiff, among others. Züst, a Swiss photographer, collector and publisher who died in 2000, issued this book alongside Jedlička's The Rose & Punchbowl. The Prague City Gallery included the film in its 2021 Jedlička retrospective, the first to cover his whole output. Its curator, Jitka Hlaváčková, placed it among works rooted in the region he knew best.
The book has 80 pages and 39 video stills, with stitch binding, and was printed by Stamperia Valdonega in Verona for Andreas Züst, Zurich, 1999 (ISBN 3-905328-19-4).
