This blog entry is part of my “movie year countdown”. To read more about that check out my first Spout filmblog entry.
Häxan
I dare say this is a very different kind of movie from everything you've ever seen, and probably anything you ever would see again. And the movie was made in what was still the relatively early years of cinema. And I still haven't seen anything quite like it that was made since.
When it first started I didn't quite know what I was watching. I thought I was going to be seeing some kind of "fake documentary" as I'd had it described. I thought I was going to be seeing some reenactments. Those did come later, but for a good part of the beginning of the film we just see a lot of still shots of diagrams and old medieval drawings with intertitles between them. For a while I wasn't sure what the tone of the intertitles was or how seriously to take them. These woodcuts of various strange scenes would be shown and the explanation for them seemed so absurd. I thought the filmmaker had just found these drawings (or maybe even made them himself) and just came up with the strangest explanation for them from his imagination. It turns out that the filmmaker Benjamin Christensen had actually done extensive research on the subject and was bringing us the true explanations for these drawings. Maybe his tone was a little facetious. It's hard to tell in the translation exactly. But there is no doubt that once you realize many of the strange things that people of the medieval period did and believed that you have run into an interesting topic.
Some of the scenes of the strange behavior of people and the depictions of the devil and demonic beings themselves are quite shocking. I mean they were shocking to me, a modern viewer. They must have been totally unexpected for people viewing this film when it first came out, and even more so for people rediscovering it many years later when censorship was at it's highest. It's not too big of a surprise that the film has garnered a cult following over the decades since it's release. There was even a cut version released in 1968 with jazz music and narration by William S. Burroughs. This may actually be the version that many people have seen although it leaves a few interesting things out. I'm not sure if the cult following is really due to the film being a masterpiece or just being so unusual and hard to categorize. The ending of the picture even tries to make some kind of association of Witchcraft with a more modern (at that time) diagnosis of female hysteria. Christensen said later that he regretted adding this part, even though after trying to determine the purpose of the film being presented in the way it was, the ending is the only part that seems to show what the argument is.
Interesting to say the least.
Rating: 9/10