Cinema
Witchcraft Through the Ages
Häxan
Benjamin Christensen · 1922
Synopsis
In seven chapters, the film sets out witchcraft and then stages it. It begins as an illustrated lecture: a pointer moves across engravings, sculptures and models showing what the Middle Ages believed about heaven, hell and demons. Then come reconstructed scenes: an old woman accused of witchcraft, the interrogations of the inquisitors and the confessions wrung from her, the sabbath presided over by the devil, a convent overcome by possession. The last part draws a parallel between these wretched women and the nervous patients of modern times.
Context
Turned down by Danish cinema, whose censorship rules excluded blasphemous subjects, the project was financed by Svensk Filmindustri. Christensen researched it for years, chiefly in the Malleus maleficarum, an inquisitors' manual of 1486 found at a Berlin bookseller's, and attached a bibliography to the programme of the premiere, in Stockholm in September 1922; he plays the devil himself in it. In 1968, Antony Balch made from it a sound version of seventy-five minutes, in which the intertitles give way to a narration spoken by William S. Burroughs.
Who it is for
A silent film of about a hundred and four minutes, mixing documentary exposition and reconstructed scenes; some scenes of torture and nudity remain harrowing.
Prizes and reception
The most expensive Scandinavian silent film; censored or cut in Germany, France and the United States, it did not earn back what it had cost.
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