Häxan: The Real Unreal

A horror film from a time when the category as such did not exist, Häxan is contemporary with but stands apart from the two other most notable precursors of the genre, Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu(1922). The visual design of Häxan, with its magnificent use of light and shadow, is too much a part of the detailed description of a recognizably real and lived-in world to be subsumed under the category of filmic expressionism associated with the works of Wiene and Murnau. Häxan might more fruitfully be considered a different type of film altogether. Seven years before Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera and more than sixty years before Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, Christensen invented in Häxan what has become known as the essay film. In an article written while he was at work on Häxan, Christensen stated: “I would like to know at this time whether a film is able to hold the public’s interest without mass effects, without sentimentality, without suspense, without heroes and heroines—in short, without all those things on which a good film is otherwise constructed. My films consist of a series of episodes that—as part of a mosaic—give expression to an idea.” With Häxan, Christensen created a prototype of this possible cinema by alternating between documentary and reconstruction and repeatedly speaking directly to the audience (through intertitles), in the first person.

One of Häxan’s masterstrokes is the way it places together, on the same level of cinematic depiction, fact and fiction, objective reality and hallucination. It does this with great verve and audacity, and with a painstaking eye for detail. Near the start of the film, Christensen establishes a modern, rationalist point of view—“The belief in evil spirits, sorcery, and witchcraft is the result of naive notions about the mystery of the universe”—that he will proceed to undermine for much of the rest of the film. After a lecture-with-slideshow-style prologue on ancient and medieval cosmology, diabolism, and witch-hunting, the first of the film’s narrative re-creations unfolds in a witch’s underground workshop, in the year 1488. The scene is, up to a point, objective—and then Christensen dissolves from the workshop to fantasy scenes in which the witch’s female client administers love potions to a gluttonous monk. The realism with which the fantasy scenes are staged and acted hardly differs from the style of the workshop ones, which we have had no reason not to accept as taking place within reality.

With this ambiguity, the film takes us away from a world in which recognized laws of cause and effect hold sway, leading us into a space where the irrational is always ready to intrude, in lurid forms. At times, Häxan appears to be a literal depiction of the imaginings of people in medieval Europe—the cinematic equivalent of the woodcuts of demons that illustrate the prologue. Christensen denies us cues indicating the points at which the film jumps from one level of reality to another. As a result, the incursions of the devil (Christensen himself, magisterial in obscenity) are consistent with the tonality of the film: the devil belongs to Häxan’s world even as he disrupts it by bursting into scenes through windows or from behind reading desks.

The longest sustained segment of Häxan shows how a printer’s family is destroyed when he falls ill and his wife accuses a beggar woman of having bewitched him. Christensen delineates this grim chain of events with scrupulous objectivity, until the moment when the inquisitors, using torture, at last force a long, detailed confession from their pathetic victim. Immediately—as if the film were blurting it all out with her—we’re plunged into the visualization of the beggar’s grotesque imaginings. The terrorized unconscious of the Middle Ages assumes cinematic form as the woman appears to spawn giant monsters that emerge unsteadily from between her legs, and as she joins a flying squadron of women on broomsticks to take part in a hellacious witches’ Sabbath (at the fabled Brocken in the Harz Mountains in Germany), where cannibalism, orgies, and kissing the devil’s anus are among the main events.

In the middle of Christensen’s documentary presentation of the torture devices that were used to prompt such confessions, there suddenly appears a smiling young woman in modern dress. “One of my actresses,” Christensen tells us in an urbane intertitle, “insisted on trying on the thumbscrew . . . I will not reveal the terrible confessions I forced from the young lady in less than a minute.” The tone of the next behind-the-scenes reference in Häxan is graver. During a break in shooting, according to Christensen, the actor playing the role of the doomed beggar “raised her tired face to me and said: ‘The devil is real. I have seen him sitting by my bedside.’” In the shot of the actor, she appears in her medieval costume. No doubt Christensen was conscious of the analogy between the character’s confession to the inquisitors and the actor’s confession to him, between their torture implements and his camera. By likening his own activity as a director to the deeds of the inquisitors, Christensen puts himself near the head of a self-critical tradition in cinema that would later include Jean-Luc Godard and Abbas Kiarostami.

Reserving for the audience the option of not believing in the fictions he puts on-screen, Christensen goes further: he shows that these fictions are often the projections of someone’s desire. He also argues that modern celebrities (“a famous actor, a popular clergyman, or a well-known doctor”) have assumed the hold over the sexual imaginations of the mentally fragile that belonged in the Middle Ages to the devil—a point that can certainly be extended to our own age, when the images of celebrities have become omnipresent and the acquisition of celebrity nearly instantaneous. Christensen insists that though fantasies may respond to desire, the timing of their appearance does not. As the printer’s wife is warned when she wonders where the witch is who cursed her husband with illness: “You may see that witch before you wish to.” The unwelcome untimeliness of things is a major preoccupation of Häxan, and Christensen shows himself a true filmmaker in his control over pacing, progression, and the sudden introduction of the unexpected.

In Häxan and in his other films, Christensen is also careful to delineate arrangements of space and their influence on human events. Blind Justice begins with Christensen, playing himself, showing one of his actors a model of the main set of the film. In different aspects, this prologue anticipates not only the scene with the thumbscrew in Häxan but also the cosmological model of moving spheres that Christensen demonstrates in the first section of that film. These spatial systems belong to a central metaphor of the world as a prison: situations of abduction and confinement recur throughout ;Häxan and throughout Christensen’s work (a memorable example is a spy’s accidental self-entrapment in the basement of a rat-infested windmill in Sealed Orders). The criticism of modern society expressed at the end of Häxan takes as its target the techniques that were current in treating mental illness in early-twentieth-century Denmark: institutionalization and hydrotherapy (at the end of the film, Christensen uses a dissolve to draw the rather odd comparison between a shower administered to a wealthy mental patient and a pyre on which medieval witches are burned).