Anthropological Analysis of the Picture of Feasting in Gabriel Axel’s “Babette’s Feast”

Joanna Drzazga

Abstract

The form of Babette’s Feast, mystery and references to the religious reality cause that Axel’s movie is a kind of parable composed in the fashion of a Biblical parable. It is designed to reveal the mystery of the supernatural power of art, sacrifice and gift, which in a whole variety of its meaning, are included and accumulate in the most unusual feast ever portrayed on the silver screen. The feast prepared by Babette represents a clash of two distinct cultures – the ascetic and religious culture of a Danish village community and the diverse culture of objects, senses and meanings represented by France’s culinary art. The congregation members find the unknown foods, their diversity, the very tradition of feasting strange; these are associated with evil and Satan. The problem arising from an encounter with the strange cuisine is turned into a religious one, and the conflict is shifted from the sphere of aesthetics into ethics. By strength of the film’s autonomy, we are told by Axel’s movie to regard Babette as an artist and her feast as a work of art. Art can take us closer to God, and the feast, treated as a work of art, was a breach in concrete reality and made it possible to rise above reality; through beauty, harmony and unusual sensations it elevated the feast participants and brought them nearer to sacredness. The artist experiences fulfilment, what is spiritual unites with what is sensual, the earth ascends to heaven and the heroes’ fates are accomplished.