A Film Canon

 

 

This extraordinary study of witchcraft is divided into seven chapters and three broad sections. The first section (chapter 1) contributes as much to documentry as Flaherty, and often feels closer to the contemporary form of the genre, as Christensen elucidates and analyses a number of visual sources pertaining to witchcraft, all of which are meticulously cited. This produces a calm, rational and, above all, scientific tone, encapsulated in the pointer used to draw attention to details, and proportionate to the increasing audacity of the images, which culminates with a discussion of the satanic practice of kissing the buttocks. The second section (chapters 2-6) intersperses an impressionistic narrative of medieval persecution with a series of tableaux depicting the devil and his world. Although these fantastic segments are extremely spectacular, employing a variety of cinematic (superimposition, reverse footage, stop-gap animation) and more traditional theatrical (lavish sets, costumes and makeup) techniques, they never overwhelm the film's scientific pretentions, such that the ultimate impression is of transplantation to a time when the conception of reality itself was fundamentally different, and the devil existed in the popular imagination as a tangible, everyday character, forever lurking around the next corner. This pervasive rationality - or, alternatively, Christensen's ability to imbue the film with the nuances of an argument - is epitomised by a sequence in which the concession that women may have performed witchcraft with a full belief in its effects is immediately followed by an extensive practical and historical elaboration of the torture instruments used to gain confession. Finally, the third section (chapter 7) explains the witch phenomenon from two contemporary perspectives - liberalism, which understands her as a symptom of a profound lack of provision for the poor and elderly; and psychoanalysis, which understands her as the hysteric. That said, there is no attempt to supernaturalise psychoanalysis, as occurs in German Expression - a stance that, combined with Christensen's insistence that belief in the supernatural is still rampant, produces one of the most extraordinary intertitles in all silent cinema: "The lovely old woman, who plays the role of Maria the weaver [the suspected witch in the medieval segment] in my film, once raised her tired face during a pause in the shoot and said "The Devil is real. I have seen him sitting near my bedside.""