Häxan

Häx Med Room

Häxan
aka Häxan - Witchcraft
Through The Ages
Sweden/Denmark 1922
Directed by Benjamin Christensen
Radiance Films
Blu Ray Zone B

I was very happy to receive, this Christmas, the new Radiance Films ‘bells and whistles’ limited edition of Benjamin Christensens’ 1922 masterpiece Häxan aka Witchcraft Through The Ages (as the cut down William Burroughs narrated version is often known as). Alongside the many interesting extras and a beautiful 80 page booklet of essays on the film and its legacy, the package also includes five ways to watch the movie, with different cuts and many different scores and optional narrative choices. I chose to watch, for this review, the fully restored, tinted original version (uncut, so it’s technically a fair bit longer than the original release in Sweden and other countries, where censor cuts were originally imposed) with a score by Matti Bye (which is in itself quite an extraordinary work, it turns out, I’ve just ordered one of the last CD copies of the soundtrack I could find on the internet).

It’s been a long time since I watched a print of Häxan and, I have to say, I think I appreciated it a lot more even than the last time I saw it. The film, which has the director pictured in the opening... he also plays the devil throughout in quite a jolly manner (and even Christ, very briefly)... poses itself as a seven part essay on the history of witchcraft, with dramatisations of events (many obviously bordering on fictional) and it takes you from a quick history of how the world perceived itself from the times of Ancient Egypt and into, for the most part, the middle ages. Showing things like the witches sabbath, various potion preparations and a full on witch trial conducted by the Inquisition with accusations coerced, under torture, to name other innocents around a village until even the young lady who first brought the ‘witch’ to the attention of the church is herself accused and burned for her troubles.

Other sections look at, for example, instruments of torture and, although there are certainly horrors which are still very powerful within the film, there’s also a strong sense of tongue-in-cheek humour detectable throughout. When the narrator’s intertitles talk of one of the actresses wanting to try out the thumbscrews for herself, for instance, the director dangles the idea of the confessions he got out of her in ten minutes. Another sequence in the movie depicts the devil’s corruption of a nun and how it infects the whole monastery of nuns who are subsequently caught up in the hysteria (yeah, the director claims all of the film is derived from scholarly and historical accounts and, I’m pretty sure the incident with the nuns was based on a real life case). So, in a way, I guess that makes Häxan one of the early (if not the earliest?) nunsploitation movies.

As the film pushes its agenda with superimpositions and some genuinely wonderful (and often quite intentionally funny) special effects scenarios... some of which may make you think of the early cinema of pioneering film maker Georges Méliès... it also counterpoints the modern form of reacting to witchcraft, showing how women of today (aka 1922) may be diagnosed with hysteria. The thing is, though, when you start looking at all the things that the director/writer is showing and looking at the common agendas between, say, the monks of the Inquisition and doctors contemporary to the release of the film in their medical rooms, it becomes very clear that this film is very much about the way the female has been subjugated, controlled and disposed of in various different ways throughout history. So, the film can have its exploitation cake and eat it at the same time but it’s nonetheless, as far as I’m concerned, a feminist text first and foremost.

One of a few notable things found in the movie would be when two priests are trying to obtain a confession from a suspected witch (aka, already condemned woman) and the scenario of the woman between a kindly, coaxing monk and an angry one must honestly be one of the best depictions of the old ‘good cop/bad cop’ interrogation scene I have seen depicted on film. Another sequence of interest is the mechanical automaton, presumably clockwork, with its richly layered depiction of hell, obviously based on one of the woodcuts the director highlights a little earlier in the picture.

And that Matti Bye score is great, mixing traditional instruments with weird sonics and atonal, unsettling sounds and I really thought it was a first class accompaniment to the film. There’s even a scene, where a monk is scourging another monk, where Bye borrows a time honoured page from Bernard Herrmann’s playbook for Hitchcock’s Psycho, with slightly slower, high pitched notes mickey mousing the movements of the scourge.

All in all, then, the recent Radiance Films Blu Ray set of Häxan - Witchcraft Through The Ages is pretty spectacular and the most thorough coverage of the film I’ve seen to date. An easy recommendation from me and one which lovers of silent cinema should relish.