Babette’s Feast, released in 1987, was the first Danish submission to win the Oscar for best foreign language film and it’s the subject of Julian Baggini’s recent book in the BFI Film Classics series, a short, engaging essay on the film that won’t take you much longer to read than the film’s running time.

Babette’s Feast is based on a short story by Karen Blixen, best known as the author of Out of Africa. It’s set in the 19th century an austere part of northern Denmark in an equally austere Christian community, into which comes Babette, once a celebrated Parisian chef, now fleeing the counter-revolutionary violence of the Paris Commune in 1871...

Julian Baggini on Babette's Feast

Jukebox  (Stripped)- Original

Insect Love Songs - Magicicadas (Magicicada septendecim)

“...warm rain
summons them up
through loam
like Lazarus
after seventeen years” 
(Magicicadas - Fiona Benson)

Part of a series of Insect Love Songs created by award-winning poet Fiona Benson and BBC radio producer Mair Bosworth as part of our 2019 Urgency Arts Commissions.

'From Tennessee we drove 500 miles north through the forests of West Virginia to Pennsylvania. In a dusty parking lot in Keystone State Park, east of Pittsburgh, we met John Cooley and David C. Marshall. John and Dave are cicada chasers; they follow and map ‘broods’ of periodical cicadas - cicada species which emerge only once every 13 or 17 years.  They were waiting beside their Subaru (license plate = CICADAS) to guide us to a forest glade to witness the phenomenon. 

Magicicadas spend most of their lives underground, feeding on xylem fluids from tree roots. In the spring of the thirteenth or seventeenth year they emerge synchronously, in their hundreds of thousands. They have a few short weeks in which to find a mate and complete their life cycle, during which time the Mexican wave of their song is deafening.' Fiona Beson and Mair Bosworth.

Credits
Poems by Fiona Benson. Field recordings and sound design by Mair Bosworth. 

With additional Creative Commons music, samples and sound effects via Freesound; thank you in particular to Dobroide, DomestoPhonics, Patchen, InspectorJ, Janbezouska, Juskiddink, KamilNaidoo, Klankbeeld, MegMcDuffee, Ph4kture, Piggimon, Plagasul, Setuniman, Suonho, Tim_Kahn and Waveplay_Old.

With thanks to: 
Clive Betts, Sarah Campbell, Mike Cooke, John Cooley, Lynn Faust, Naome Glanville, Lara Goodband, Will Hawkes, Gene Kritsky, Eliza Lomas, Michael Malay, David C. Marshall, James Meredith, Holly Morgenroth, Becky Nichols, Phil Rushworth, Jack Skuse, Dana Soehn, Neil Swift, Tom Tregenza, and Karl Wotton.

Insect Love Songs

Insect Love Songs - Magicicadas (Magicicada septendecim)

An ancient Greek poet once said: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." These podcasts pursue questions large and small in the spirit of the hedgehog and the fox...

Julian Baggini on Babette's Feast

Hedgehog&Fox

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