Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages

Year: 1922
Genre: Drama
Directed: Benjamin Christensen
Stars: Maren Pedersen, Clara Pontoppidan, Elith Pio, Oscar Stribolt, Tora Teje, John Andersen, Benjamin Christensen, Poul Reumert, Karen Winther, Kate Fabian, Else Vermehren
Production: Svensk Filmindustri

The concept of Haxan is deceptively simple. It's a dramatization of witchcraft throughout the ages providing reenactments largely based on the Malleus Maleficarum a 13th century witch-hunting manual. There isn't really a formal narrative though director Benjamin Christensen himself becomes the reoccurring character of the devil throughout the film's various vignettes. It's split into four acts: one setting the standard for what witchcraft is, two giving the audience rhetorical and increasingly surreal "evidence" of witchcraft and the last giving us a pat explanation for witchcraft in a modern context.

What sets Haxan apart from other surviving films of the silent era is it's attempt to construct a central argument and support it with "evidence" in the form of its reenactments. It doesn't work but the visual intelligence and editing of Haxan is leaps and bounds above anything Edison Manufacturing ever released. The comparisons between D.W. Griffith and Christensen are certainly well founded as Christensen provides coherence and insight amid the film's proto-surreal cinematography. He even provides some silhouetted animation that channels Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926).

Yet just like Luis Bunuel's L'age d'Or (1930), Haxan sells itself as a documentary of sorts. The first act of the film struts across the screen with all the authority of an anthropology professor, dully pointing at this and that as evidence of witchcraft. There are still images of paintings and woodcarvings in addition to a moving diagram of the heliocentric solar system; all signalling to the existence of witchcraft in all its ugly, foul and murderous forms. As the other acts take over, so do our emotions. Only the "bad guy" as it were, becomes hypocritical clerics and gullible townsfolk. Are these poor desperate women victims of the times or are they truly accessories of the devil? It's clear the film wants to have it both ways.

The film ultimately deconstructs the act of witchcraft from one of maleficence and devil worship to one of mental illness; cheer-leading for the current time's rational thinking winning out against superstition. It's this last act's classroom lecture-like prognostications, that stringently frames what we just saw in an un-disputable context, that ruins the film. It's as if we were put into a somnambulist trance; images of an almost existential nature filling our head with complex thoughts. Then like a blunt hammer, the film knocks us into reality and asks "what did you learn?" Plus, considering the film was released in 1922, we're experiencing a "modern" rationality that included the concepts of hysteria and electroshock therapy so Haxan isn't exactly the bastion of progressive thinking it thinks it is.

From a historical perspective, Haxan is an interesting little relic that provides some stunning visual tableaux that rivals Nosferatu (1922) in the horror genre. Yet as a narrative, the film is an absolute mess. It ruins any credibility it has by constantly employing heavy-handed metaphor, and at times outright saying "look how backwards we once were."


Final Grade: D+