Oscar-winning Danish director of Babette's Feast
In April 1988, a week before his 70th birthday, the film director Gabriel Axel, who has died aged 95, walked up on stage at the Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles to receive the best foreign language film Oscar for Babette's Feast (1987), the first Danish movie to achieve that honour. In a mixture of Danish and French, the slim, grey-bearded, bespectacled Axel quoted a line from the character of the General in the film: "Because of this evening, I have learned, my dear, that in this beautiful world of ours, all things are possible."
It was the pinnacle of Axel's long career and marked the beginning of a resurgence of Danish cinema. (Another Danish film, Bille August's Pelle the Conqueror, won the foreign language Oscar the following year.) Despite several fine films, there was previously little in Axel's oeuvre to predict the perfection of Babette's Feast.
In April 1988, a week before his 70th birthday, the film director Gabriel Axel, who has died aged 95, walked up on stage at the Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles to receive the best foreign language film Oscar for Babette's Feast (1987), the first Danish movie to achieve that honour. In a mixture of Danish and French, the slim, grey-bearded, bespectacled Axel quoted a line from the character of the General in the film: "Because of this evening, I have learned, my dear, that in this beautiful world of ours, all things are possible."
It was the pinnacle of Axel's long career and marked the beginning of a resurgence of Danish cinema. (Another Danish film, Bille August's Pelle the Conqueror, won the foreign language Oscar the following year.) Despite several fine films, there was previously little in Axel's oeuvre to predict the perfection of Babette's Feast.
- 2/11/2014
- by Ronald Bergan
- The Guardian - Film News
The title Babette's Feast doesn't immediately jump out at me as a film I need to see immediately, but to know this Danish film bested Au Revoir Les Enfants (read my Blu-ray review here) at the 1988 Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film certainly causes me to change my mind. While I wouldn't say director Gabriel Axel's film is better than Malle's Enfants, which is a personal all-timer of mine, but it is a multi-layered story with drama in corners you can't expect heading in. Adapted from the 1950 short story of the same name (read it here) by Karen Blixen (writing as Isak Denisen who also wrote the story that inspired Out of Africa), the film takes place in a small village in 19th century Denmark, a town Denisen described as a "child's toy-town of little wooden pieces". The story centers on two sisters who grew up here under the watchful eye of their father,...
- 8/16/2013
- by Brad Brevet
- Rope of Silicon
Babette’s Feast won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1987 and was the first Danish production to ever take the prestigious award. It started a hot streak of sorts, when the following year Bille August’s Pelle the Conqueror pretty much ran the table, claiming the Oscar, the Palme d’Or and the Golden Globe, further confirming to the world that the Danish film industry had arrived. While the Danes would not win another Oscar until 2010, for Susanne Bier’s In a Better World, this tiny nation of just under six million souls has become a capital of cinematic creativity, boasting such talented filmmakers as Lars van Trier, Per Fly, Anders Thomas Jensen and Nicolas Winding Refn, to name a few. If the grand moralist dirges of Carl Th. Dreyer define Danish cinema of the WWII generation, then Babette’s Feast must be considered the nation’s inspirational...
- 7/23/2013
- by David Anderson
- IONCINEMA.com
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