Häxan. Benjamin Christensen, 1922.
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Edition screened: Criterion DVD #134, released 2001. Danish intertitles with English subtitles, no dialogue track. Runtime approximately 105 minutes.
Summary: Theatrical use of animal body parts.
Details:
1) Intertitle cards tell us we are in the “Underground home of a sorceress” (13:40-18:10), interpreted as a modest Halloween vignette with boiling cauldrons, eerie drinking vessels, and other objet d’Spencer’s. Prominent in the decor is a suspended dog skeleton and a large skull, possibly from a horse. Nothing depicted is alarming. We leave the witch’s house with our purchase (‘Here, young maiden, take a potion of cat feces and dove hearts boiled in the moonlight’), but return for something stronger 20:48-21:40, and a third time to see the witch encounter The Devil, 28:09-29:44.
2) We see ten seconds of a medieval banquet spread, beginning at 32:13, with detail shots of a boar’s head on a platter and whole roasted birds, all decorated by knives that impale the animals.
Häxan is an early manifestation of the questionable historical examinations so popular on Cable TV. The film ‘documents’ witchcraft first through expressionistic art, then through a long fictional drama, stops to examine antique implements of torture (loot from a Christian’s yard sale, not a witch’s!) and “brings it into the present” with a look at seances in the 1910s. All said, an entertaining mixture of theatrics, information and bigotry, made more interesting by color-tinting and other early filmic techniques.
The Criterion DVD also includes the 76-minute 1968 edition of Häxan usually titled Witchcraft Through the Ages, with narration by William S. Burroughs and music by Jean-Luc Ponty.