Häxan (a.k.a. Witchcraft Through the Ages) (Aljosha Production Company, Svensk Filmindustri, 1922)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9:15 Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase” featured a truly odd movie from Danish director Benjamin Christiansen in 1922 called Häxan, ostensibly a documentary on the history of witchcraft and its persecution in medieval Europe. The title is simply Danish for “The Witch,” and I’d actually seen it before in 1971 on a double bill with a Russian movie called Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, an abstract love story set in Ukraine in which a young man named Ivan unknowingly falls in love with the daughter of the man who murdered Ivan’s father. The version I saw in 1971 was actually produced in 1968, was retitled Witchcraft Through the Ages and eliminated the silent-film intertitles. Instead it contained a narrator – William Burroughs, of all people – who explained the plot as it was going along, much in the manner of a 1970’s documentary. It also had a newly composed musical score featuring jazz violinist Jean-Luc Ponty, which the version we saw tonight (a restoration from 2001 supervised by Gillian Anderson for the Criterion Collection) replaced with the compilation of classical music pieces heard at the film’s premiere in Copenhagen. Among them were the famous slow movement from Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata, the Bach-Gounod “Ave Maria,” the Pilgrim’s Chorus from Wagner’s Tannhäuser (ironically used inappropriately to underscore scenes of witches consorting with the devil – Wagner meant this music to symbolize the opposite: decorous love and Christian piety) and other pieces that sounded familiar even though I couldn’t place them.

The Criterion version also retained the original color tints – which forced us to watch much of the movie through an eerie red glow which only added to the film’s overall incomprehensibility – and it restored famous scenes that were cut from the original by censors in various countries, including one particularly gruesome shot in which a witch pulls the finger off a severed hand, which she’s obtained from the corpse of a murderer who’d been hanged, tries to boil it for one of her potions, but finds it’s too dry for use as she intended. I found this version of Häxan almost totally unwatchable – I kept nodding off through much of it and I suspect I would have been more entertained by the 1968 version with Burroughs’ narration. (The online sources don’t say whether Burroughs actually wrote the narration or just read it.) I’ll say one thing for Benjamin Christiansen; his film eerily anticipates the Ken Burns style of documentary filmmaking, with its extensive use of on-screen texts. Many of the shots are printed books from the Middle Ages, or more likely modern-day reproductions of them, with a literal pencil point showing us the relevant portions.

As it stands, though, Häxan is a rather lumbering mixture that has some powerful individual scenes – including the ones in which witches literally kiss the ass of Satan (played by Benjamin Christiansen himself!) as a gesture of fealty – but is pretty dull and slow-going as a whole. In fact, that’s a common failing of a lot of silent-era documentaries; first-rate filmmakers like Robert Flaherty (in Nanook of the North and Moana) and the Merian C. Cooper-Ernest Schoedsack team (in Grass and Chang) were able to make tightly focused and incredibly beautiful and moving true-life films in the silent era, but for the most part silent documentaries were deadly dull for the same reason Häxan is: it’s just a written lecture on title cards interspersed with scenes that kinda-sorta illustrate what the lecture is about. Christiansen went on to a rather checkered career as a director; for a time in the late silent era he worked in the U.S. and made a few films, most of which are lost. One that survived was Seven Footprints to Satan (apparently Christiansen had a “thing” for movies involving the Devil!), which Charles and I saw decades ago, albeit in a really bad VHS bootleg with awful image quality and titles in Italian. (Apparently the one print that survived was from Italy.) That was the same source from which we got some other films, including a 1965 movie called Who Killed Teddy Bear? featuring Sal Mineo as a serial killer, and the 1931 version of The Black Camel (the only one of Warner Oland’s first five Charlie Chan films that survives, and a great movie and one of the best in the Chan series), and The Black Camel managed to come through even without the benefit of the pristine professional transfer it later got in Volume 3 of the 20th Century-Fox series of Charlie Chan boxed sets.