SOCIAL SCIENCE II

Social, Economic, and Political Thought

Hxan : Witchcraft through the Ages: A Movie Review

February 26, 2013

Benjamin Christensens Haxan (Witchcraft Through the Ages) is a strange little movie. A documentary-fiction hybrid, it examines the superstitions and lack of knowledge about the nature of mental illnesses that led to the witch hunts of the middle ages, and though much of it is stark and brutal, there are also some surprisingly light moments. Haxan is a history lesson and an entertainment, a film quite unlike any other. Inspired initially by a reading of German clergyman Heinrich Kramers 1486 treatise on the existence and prosecution of witches known as the Malleus Maleficarum, Swedish director Benjamins Christensens 1922 silent film Hxan is a singularly unique experience in that its both documentary and horror film and is vividly memorable as such. The films basic premise and much of its beginning is a dedicated debunking of the superstitious beliefs that led people in previous, more primitive times to believing in witchcraft and, as we all know from examples such as the Salem Witch Trials, persecuting, torturing, and killing people under poorly rationalized reasoning thought to prove a person was a witch. Hxan is, of course, a strange viewing experience for contemporary filmgoers unfamiliar with silent film style in its own right which, in this writers opinion, is a positive element. With their strange tintings, overzealous makeup and acting, and usually extremely high contrast visual sense, silent films feel more like peering into a different, alien world apart from our own. The directors bizarre examination of witchcraft in the Middle Ages is brought to life with shadowy darkness, double exposures, stop-motion animation, reverse motion, stark close-ups and more. The films well-designed and carefully composed shots are full of detail and texture, highlight and shadow, and great costume and set design. At times, the film has the look of period paintings with their single-source lighting and dramatic shadows. The film was largely shot at night to put the actors into the proper mood to produce inspired performances. Christensen made a film that is episodic: an artistic blend of semi-documentary and seminarrative. His intent was to entertain his audience but also to teach and inform as well. The film is a condemnation of the narrow and ignorant thinking of the Middle Ages, when unusual, reclusive, deformed, or simply contentious people were condemned as practitioners of witchcraft. As many as forty to fifty thousand people were burnt at the stake in Europe for witchcraft, and Christensen maintains that

the procecutors were in reality the demons unleashed on the world. When ignorance goes hand in hand with rightiousness, cruelties and atrocities follow.

The film is segmented into seven chapters which is the skeleton of its odd structure. Chapter one has been described as an illustrated lecture, with Christensen showing illustrations from historical books and providing background on the subject for the story to come. Chapter two begins the narrative section of the film, with reenactments of witch practices beginning in 1488. Chapter three begins an extended section of connected narrative, based on details obtained from a number of historical sources, focusing on particular characters and beginning the witch trial cycle with accusation and witchhunting. Chapter four contains the witchcraft trial procedures. Chapter five dramatizes the process of torture to obtain a witchs confession. Chapter six returns to the nonnarrative format with the documentation of other practices of witches, the contagiousness of insanity, and the tools of torture and self-punishment of Middle Ages Europe. The section is a combination of the instructional and narrative forms of the entire film. Chapter seven takes an unexpected turn into modern day civilization, in which Christensen follows contemporary turn-of-the-century thinking which linked witchcraft with the psychological state of hysteria, all based on the psuedoscientific conclusions of 19th century French psychiatrist Chacot and others. The only view of witches being burnt at the stake comes as the last shot of the film. Hxan has this going for it, of course, and at first may seem somewhat dry and academic as it starts out as little more than a slideshow set to music. Hxan never flinches from its basic premise that people have a long history of bizarre, superstitious beliefs which often ended up incorporated into societal religious structures which, to its credit, makes this ninety year old film still topically cutting edge in todays social climate. It never announces itself as atheist, but its certainly a work of critical skepticism with ambitions in anthropology, sociology, and psychology. But what keeps Hxan from lurching into dry anthro-theological academia is the fact that not only does it explain what people thought and did in those long gone days, it dramatizes it and it dramatizes it from the point of view of what they actually believed was happening. Theres likely very few of us who havent, at some point in our lives, happened across old illustrations or photos of woodcuts in books or in television specials about those eras. Witches on brooms,

people meeting for witchs sabbaths, Satan in a gargoylian form turned around so his new recruits can kiss his behind, and many, many other sorts of illustrations have been around for a long, long while. While Christensen is using Hxan as a means to debunk the sort of cultural superstitions that lead people to believe in such things, he fills his film with dramatizations literalizing these beliefs on screen. We look upon a film that was trying very hard to bring the world depicted in those old woodcuts to life, and does so in a vibrant, surreal, immediately memorable fashion. Little old crones use spells to seduce men of the church. Witches are found and tried for making family members deathly ill with their hexes. Even Old Scratch himself played by director Christensen turns up at the windows of women who are loyal spouses in the daylight to seduce them with his sexual charms at night. At one point a sad old woman confessing before an inquisitor tells how, at her age, she served as the Devils concubine and while she describes giving birth to Lucifers Little uns, were greeted with an image of the old lady under a blanket on a bed with bizarre little monstrosities emerging from underneath. Eventually Hxan moves away from the supernatural subject matter and delves more into the psychology of people of those times. Were given a guided tour of a sort of the torturers tool racks to see some of the horrible devices accused witches suffered so long ago. Christensen goes into an exploration of sexual repression in relation to the church and how that might have fueled a number of superstitious beliefs and, finally, does an able comparison between behaviors and maladies that seemed to point out witchcraft way back when that seemed to have medical and psychological explanation in contemporary medicine and psychology. Though the film is broken up into chapters, there is one sustained narrative in the middle of the film concerning an old woman who has been accused of witchcraft who then turns around and accuses her accusers of being witches as well. A young mother is one of the accused and endures some of the films most brutal torture, bearing up under it until finally being broken when one of her jailers manipulates her by telling her that if only shell give him some of her witch related secrets, hell let her escape so that she can return to her baby. This is a lie, of course, and her desperate attempt to appease him only results in her final condemnation.

Christensen concludes his study through a vignette set in the modern age and concerning a sleepwalker and a kleptomaniac, suggesting that the behaviours that once made others suspect the occult were actually the result of some form of psychological disorder. Christensen doesnt get too deep into this aspect of the film and these scenes arent as compelling or interesting as the preceding vignettes, but it does a decent job at tying everything together. Since the film is broken up into sections, it never builds up a great deal of momentum but Christensen approaches the vignettes with enough energy and creativity that the individual sections are able to hold your attention. He is also able to infuse the project with enough humour that it provides a nice counterbalance to the darker moments.

Christensen is an interesting filmmaker with a very distinct style. He isnt as well remembered as his countryman Carl Theodor Dreyer whose great film The Passion of Joan of Arc also features scenes of trial by torture, for whom he starred in the film Michael, but his work holds up incredibly well and the imagery throughout the film is striking. Silent films tend to be a deal breaker for a lot of people, but this one is a very engaging piece that would ultimately be little improved by the addition of dialogue. There is, simply put, nothing like Hxan. Part history documentary, part superstition debunking, and part horror film, Christensens opus the most expensive silent film to have been produced in Scandinavia is an experience in and of itself, with visuals sometimes weird, sometimes sinister, sometimes humorous, and very often dreamlike. Hxan is bizarre, antique nightmare fuel that has aged like a fine wine and according to Carl Bennet, the film must have been shocking to the European audiences of 1922. There is, among several provoking shots, the shocking view of an infant being bled and then tossed into a cook pot. Thus, the film was heavily censored in Europe in the 1920s, if the film was passed by censors at all. Yet the film was well received in Denmark on its 1941 rerelease. The hindsight of a couple of decades and German occupation made the film a masterpiece on reassessment. When Christensen was preparing the film for rerelease, he considered removing the seventh chapter, agreeing with critics of the 1920s that it was the weakest part of the film, but decided that the film must stand as it was originally released. The seventh chapter wrap up eases the horror of the preceding footage but also attempts to reconcile the beliefs of the Middle Ages with modern knowledge. It also served to placate the emotions and rage of modern audiences.