Films: 1920s
(1922) Haxan
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Haxan
Director: Benjamin Christensen
Release: 1922
Christensen employs various techniques that set "Haxan" up as a sort of visual essay. He divides the film up into seven chapters, each designated simply by a number.
The contents of the film itself fall into one of three categories: filmed artwork, inter-title narration, and narrative vignettes.
The artwork, rather than serving to reinforce the narration, often seems to provide a subject of analysis for the narration, like a primary source in writing.
For example, Christensen films a piece of art, uses a pencil or pointer to direct the audience's attention, and makes the following comment: "All witches had to show the Devil their respect by kissing his behind."
The written narration itself takes a personable tone, similar to an investigative article in a magazine. Sometimes informal ("During the witchcraft era it was dangerous to be old and ugly, but it was not safe to be young and pretty either"), sometimes conversational ("You and I could also be driven to confess mysterious talents with the help of such tools. Isn't that so?' At times, they even take on a poetic and irreverent quality: "Is it from the eternal fright of the pyre that you get drunk every night, you poor old women of the Middle Ages?"
The narrative vignettes seem to be stories written specifically as examples by Christensen, rather than reenactments of actual stories. Although these vignettes, in form, bring to mind modern documentaries, they still include that subjective quality that characterizes "Haxan." The most obvious example is Christensen's use of close-ups of devastated faces for dramatic effect.
The narrative segments are also often surreal, including extended special effects sequences of witches flying, superimposed over mysterious backgrounds.
Christensen's choice of music, a secondary element, adds to the confusion of the film's documentary aspirations. It often calls attention, in sensationalistic fashion, to otherwise serious elements of a documentary on witchcraft. Convent scenes, described in the narration as piteous stories of hopeless nuns, are transformed by joyous music into scenes of playful anarchy.
Christensen also occasionally steps out of the film to take a self-reflexive stance. In a scene showing a woman demonstrating the thumbscrew, the titles read: "One of my actresses insisted on trying the thumbscrew when we shot these pictures. I will not reveal the terrible confessions I forced from the young lady in less than a minute."
The woman then opens her mouth in agony. This attention to process presages postmodernism.
The mixing of narrative and documentary, the surreal genre scenes, the ironic music, and the self-reflexivity all bring to mind later experimental and independent films, from David Lynch to Dusan Makavejev, Kubrick to Jack Smith, who would use them for social and political commentary.
The final chapter, discussing the parallels between medieval witch-hunts and the present day, crystallizes Christensen's commentary. He makes an in-depth comparison between accused witchcraft and hysteria, tying it up with this observation: "Poor little hysterical witch! In the Middle Ages you were in conflict with the church. Now it is with the law." He continues to draw lines between medieval and present-day superstition; the suffering of the old and the poor, detainment of the mentally ill. Echoes of Michael Moore, even if the final comparison between a burning pyre and a hot shower in a clinic for the mentally ill reminds us not to take "Haxan" documentary too seriously.
Adam Balivet
Cinescare Correspondent
Haxan, 1922
The costumes, particularly those of the Devil and characters turning into animals, add bizarre and fantastic elements to the narratives. And the visual sexual innuendos, like the Devil's frequent tongue wagging, further distinguish the narratives from objective documentary reenactments.
