Benjamin Christensen's Häxan: witchcraft through the centuries
The 1922 Danish-Swedish essay film that reconstructed the witch hunts through engravings, the Malleus Maleficarum and psychiatry: a unique work.
Among silent films devoted to the supernatural, Häxan holds a place of its own. Made by the Danish director Benjamin Christensen and produced in Sweden by Svensk Filmindustri, it was released in 1922 after a long and costly production. It does not tell a single story but alternates reconstructions, period images and commentary, like an illustrated essay on witchcraft from the ancient world to the early twentieth century. The title is simply the Swedish word for witch.
A documentary before the documentary
The film is divided into seven chapters. The first shows engravings, woodcuts and miniatures, including images of demons and the sabbath taken from printed books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, commented on by the intertitles in the tone of a university lecture. Christensen had studied the sources at length, among them the Malleus Maleficarum, the witch-hunting manual published in 1486 by the Dominicans Heinrich Kramer and, according to a traditional attribution now disputed, Jacob Sprenger.
The following chapters use actors to reconstruct the life of a medieval village: an old woman accused of witchcraft, the inquisitors, confessions extracted under torture, trials that multiply by contagion. Christensen himself plays the devil, with grotesque make-up, poking out his tongue and shaking his horns. The sabbath scenes, with dances, banquets and processions of demons, deeply impressed audiences of the time.
The thesis: from witch to hysteria
The final part of the film brings the story into the present of 1922. Christensen compares the witches of the past with the women whom the psychiatry of his day diagnosed as hysterics, confined in clinics or put under treatment. The thesis, questionable in the light of later research, was that phenomena once read as possession or witchcraft were misunderstood nervous disorders, and that modern society had merely replaced the stake with the hospital.
Historians of the witch hunts today prefer more nuanced explanations, linked to religious, legal, economic and social factors. Yet Christensen's approach, a child of positivism and of Charcot's psychiatry, remains a valuable record of how the early twentieth century looked at its own magical past, with a mixture of rationalism and fascination, without managing to hide the visual pleasure with which it reconstructs the very things it seeks to unmask.
Censorship and revivals
Scenes of nudity, torture and desecration led to the film being censored or banned in several countries. It nonetheless remained a cult work among filmmakers and scholars. In 1968 a shortened version was released with a jazz score and the narrating voice of the writer William S. Burroughs, under the English title Witchcraft Through the Ages, which introduced it to a new generation of viewers.
Häxan is still striking for the freedom of its form: it mixes art history, theatre, documentary and nightmare, and treats old images as sources to be questioned. For anyone studying the presence of esotericism in the arts it is an exemplary case, because it shows cinema not only as an instrument of wonder but as a means of reflecting on the beliefs, fears and persecutions of Europe's past.