Ebook: Babette’s Feast

On the face of it, Gabriel Axel's Babette's Feast (1989) is a film in which the eyes – and mouths – of religious zealots are opened to the glories of the sensual world. It is a critique of what Nietzsche called life-denying religion in favour of life-affirming sensuality. But to view the film in that way is to get it profoundly wrong. In his study of the film, Julian Baggini argues that Babette's Feast is not about the battle between religiosity and secularity but a deep examination of how the two can come together.
Babette's Feast merits reading as an example of what philosopher Stephen Mulhall calls film as philosophy. Films are often taken to illustrate or dramatise philosophical issues, or to include passages of dialogue which are explicit philosophical expositions. To see a film as philosophy, however, is to see it as actually doing philosophy, not by presenting a prose argument but by getting us to attend to what is philosophically important. This is philosophy by showing, not telling. In Babette's Feast, what we are being shown is that the traditional distinctions between the spiritual; and the secular, the transcendent and the immanent, are a lot less clear than is assumed, and in many cases non existent. Baggini's analysis focuses on themes of love, pleasure, artisty and grace, to provide a rich philosophical reading of this most sensual of films.