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Realizing the Witch Richard Baxstrom & Todd Meyers Realizing the Witch Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible Richard Baxstrom & Todd Meyers Realizing the Witch Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible Realizing the Witch StefanosS Geroulanos and Todd Meyers, series editors Realizing the Witch Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers Fordham University Press New York 2016 Frontispiece: Svensk Filmindustri poster for Häxan (1922) Copyright © 2016 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be repro- duced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persis- tence or accuracy of URLs for external or third- party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www .fordhampress . com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data Baxstrom, Richard. Realizing the witch : science, cinema, and the mastery of the invisible / Richard Baxstrom, Todd Meyers. pages cm. — (Forms of living) Includes bibliographical references and index. Includes lmography. ISBN 978-0-8232-6824-5 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-8232-6825-2 (paper) 1. Häxan (Motion picture) 2. Witchcraft—Europe— History. 3. Witches—Europe. 4. Christensen, Benjamin, 1879–1959. I. Meyers, Todd. II. Title. BF1584.E85B39 2015 133.4'309— dc23 2015008857 Printed in the United States of Ame rica 18 17 16 5 4 3 2 1 First edition for Julia for Fanny Contents Introduction: What Is Häxan? 1 Part I. The Realization of the Witch The Witch in the Human Sciences and the Mastery of Nonsense 17 1. Evidence, First Movement: Words and Things 32 2. Evidence, Second Movement: Tableaux and Faces 62 3. The Viral Character of the Witch 87 4. Demonology 103 Part II. A Mobile Force in the Modern Age 1922 133 5. Sex, Touch, and Materiality 145 6. Possession and Ecstasy 168 7. Hysterias 187 Postscript: It Is Very Hard to Believe . 205 Ac know ledg ments 213 Notes 215 Benjamin Christensen’s Cited Source Material 249 x Contents Filmography 253 Bibliography 257 Index 275 Introduction What Is Häxan? Witches always claim that they do not believe in spells, object to the discourse of witchcraft, and appeal to the language of positivism. — Jeanne Favret- Saada, Deadly Words (1980) It is not living life for an art form to serve merely as an echo of something else. — Benjamin Christensen, “The Future of Film” (1921) To think is always to follow the witch’s fl ight. — Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (1991) The Wild Ride. The Sabbat. Child sacri ce. Diseases, ruin, and torture. The old hag. The kleptomaniac. The modern hysteric. Benjamin Christensen took the threads of phantasm and wove them into a lm thesis that would not talk about witches, but would give the witch life. Häxan is a document, an ampli ed account of the witch insistent on its historical and anthropo- logical qualities, presented through excesses so great that they toyed with his audience’s skepticism as much as their sensitivity. Christensen created an artistic work lled with irrationalities that not only made the witch plausible, but real. By the time Benjamin Christensen (1879–1959) began lming Häxan in 1921, he had already spent nearly three years conducting research for his lm and securing a studio in Copenhagen to accommodate his costuming and elaborate set designs. Häxan was not the Danish actor/director’s rst foray into lmmaking, but it would be his most ambitious. The silent lm was the most expensive ever produced in Scandinavia.1 The Swedish lm produc- tion company, Svensk Filmindustri, provided Christensen with funding 1 2 Introduction: What Is Häxan? (in addition to buying back the director’s own studio fac ility from credi- tors) in 1919 to make what Christensen called “a cultural–historical lm in seven acts.” With Swedish funding came a Swedish title for the lm (the Danish word for “witch” is heksen). The lm was shot in Copenhagen in 1921–22, and premiered in Stockholm in September 1922. Despite laborious planning, seemingly endless trou ble with censors, and the unprece dented scale of his project, Häxan was only the rst of a trilogy imagined (but never realized) by Christensen—the other lms in his un nished series were tenta- tively titled Helgeninde (Saints [feminine]) and Ånder (Spirits). Before lming, Christensen obsessively gathered historical and contem- porary sources for his “lecture in moving pictures.”2 His “witch” would be a visual account with direct reference to original writings, art, and literature on witchcraft and witch trials from the Middle Ages through the Reforma- tion and beyond— materials which he considered alongside and through his reading of the modern sciences of neurology, psychiatry, anthropology, and psycho logy. Taking up an argument made by a long line of eminent scientists— a line dominated by the preeminent psychiatrist and neurologist Jean- Martin Charcot— Christensen intended to make a case for witchcraft as misidenti ed nervous disease and to highlight the incompatibility of superstition and religious fanat icism with modernity and science. What re- sulted was something very different; it is this productive gap between intent and outcome that forms the core of what follows in this book. Perhaps with the exception of a select group of Scandinavian lm experts and enthusiasts, Benjamin Christensen is regarded— when regarded at all— as a weirdly interloping gure, much in the way his masterpiece is seen as wild and unmoored from other parts of cinema. Born the last of twelve chil- dren to a bourgeois family in Viborg, Denmark, Christensen had been active on the Danish arts and theater scene since 1902, after having trained rst in medicine and then as an opera singer. Although highly praised for his singing ability, Christensen developed a ner vous illness that resulted in the loss of his voice, a debilitation that led to a brief career in commercial sidelines (most notably the sale and distribution of champagne for a French importer), but this did not end his artistic career. Breaking in as a lm actor in 1911, Christensen quickly moved to the director’s chair; his rst lm, The Mysterious X, also known as Sealed Orders (Det hemmelighedsfulde X ), was re- leased in 1914. The Mysterious X foreshadowed his work in Häxan and was Introduction: What Is Häxan? 3 highly praised for its innovative command of cinematic technique; it was also a worry for its producers, as the lm ended up costing four times its origi- nal bud get. The Mysterious X was followed in 1916 by Blind Justice (Hævnens nat), which was celebrated for Christensen’s intense per for mance in the tragic lead role of a man wrongfully jailed and separated from his child. Christensen demonstrated an impressive command of lmmaking well in advance of his contemporaries. These early successes established for Christensen a reputation as an ambitious, innovative, and commercially re- liable director within Scandinavian lm circles. Now a proven auteur, Chris- tensen signed with Svenska Biografteatern (renamed Svensk Filmindustri shortly after) in February 1919 and received full artistic control over his proj- ects.3 Rewarded for his previous efforts with unusually generous support, Christensen found the means to pursue the pioneering, bizarre, and lavish pro ject that is the subject of this book. Christensen’s post- Häxan struggles are hardly surprising in retrospect. After previewing an uncensored print of Häxan in 1924, Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer studio head Louis B. Mayer asked, “Is that man crazy or a genius?” 4 Banking on “genius,” Mayer offered Christensen the chance to make lms in Hollywood, which Christensen accepted in 1926. As was often the case for Eu ro pean directors who moved to the major American studios in the 1920s, Christensen found that both his creative freedom and, crucially, his monetary resources were severely limited within the Hollywood studio system. After working on three lackluster projects for Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer,5 Christensen moved to First National Pictures in 1928, directing a number of largely forgettable lms, including The Hawk’s Nest (1928), The Haunted House (1928), House of Horror (1929), and with minor praise, Seven Footprints to Satan (1929). While at times these lms display some of the spark of Christensen’s previous work, they are hardly remarkable and are today remembered only because the director of Häxan stood at their helm. Christensen, in uncharacteristically quiet fashion, left Hollywood behind in 1935 and returned to Denmark. After a period of reassessment,6 he en- tered lmmaking again, this time for Nordisk, producing four sound fea- tures between 1939 and 1942. While several of the “social debate” lms Christensen directed at this time were critical and commercial successes,7 the failure of his last pro ject, the spy thriller The Lady with the Light Gloves (Damen med de lyse Handsker), brought his lmmaking career to an unceremonious 4 Introduction: What Is Häxan? close. Not even the fêted rerelease of Häxan to theaters in Denmark in 1941 could offset this nal, humiliating disaster. After losing studio backing for an adaptation of Tove Ditlevsen’s novel A Child Was Hurt (Man gjorde et Barn fortræd), Christensen “retired” to manage the Rio Bio cinema in Co- penhagen until his death on April 1, 1959. Häxan stands as the lmmaker’s lasting contribution to the history of cin- ema.
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