Häxan (1922) dir. Benjamin Christensen
It's not often that I feel compelled to use the word "scholarly" about a documentary. But I want to call Häxan scholarly in its approach to its subject matter, and almost feels like a visual thesis on the subject. But maybe that's just me being buried deeply in my own masters thesis, that I've started seeing it everywhere. There's no doubt Christensen has been very thorough when preparing this movie, and he has obviously done a lot of research into witches and superstition in the European middle ages and the renaissance. He even goes as far as naming sources in the intertitles, which is something I don't think I've ever seen before, but gives a certain credence to what's being presented. Apparently the original playbill also contained a bibliography. He starts out the movie with a very theoretical chapter, where he goes through the basics, and presents the beliefs of witches, demons and other supernatural existences. He accompanies this with their depictions in art at the time. A short but interesting opening to the film, and gives the viewer the needed knowledge to comprehend the later parts of the movie. Christensen then moves into examples of these beliefs, with short narrative vignettes showing what was believed back then. Such as a woman being lured away from her husbands bed by the devil, or another woman buying a love potion from a witch. The kind of stories that would surface when someone was being accused of being a witch, or having made contact with the unholy in other ways. From there we go onto seeing how these accusations would develop in the real world. As an old woman is being accused of being a witch by the family of a dying man. She is captured by the clergy, imprisoned, tortured and interrogated until she confesses to being a witch, not unlike Joan of Arc. Unlike Joan of Arc however, she drags others down with her, such as one of the women in the family of the dying man. The last part of the movie, Christensen becomes more reflective, what caused these beliefs to flourish, and where did they go? Are they gone today, or have they developed into something else? He comes with a nice theory that a lot of would be witch cases, was now, or had been in recent times, been classified as hysteria. Another bogus diagnosis. So we shouldn't been too quick to believe ourselves better than those of the past, or we might quickly fall into similarly shaped traps.
Maybe it's because I don't know a whole lot about witches and stuff. But I felt enlightened by watching this movie. I felt like I learned something new, and that's always a great experience when watching a documentary. The knowledge presented didn't feel outdated, despite the movie nearing in on 100 years. Maybe because the study of medieval witchcraft beliefs isn't an area of study where there has been major landslides in that timespan. To me it still holds up as a documentary, and not just as a showcase of some of the best filmmaking technique of the 1920s. Because it is also that. It's look ominous, creepy, and it looks and feels like horror. It's on par with or even above the best horror movies coming out of Germany at the time, like Murnau's Nosferatu. It's apparently the most expensive Scandinavian silent movie ever made, and it shows. The sets made are amazing, the look lifelike when they need to be, and supernatural when the movie calls for that. Much of the time it doesn't feel like sets either, but real places.
There are many technically great films from the same time period as Häxan. I can appreciate them from a technical point of view. But there are many where I have a harder time with appreciating the actual content of the films. But for me Häxan is one of those that still holds up in both areas equally, and that made it really enjoyable to watch.