Häxan
About Häxan
Benjamin Christensen opens with a lecture on demons, using pictures, statues, and models of the solar system and of hell. He then stages medieval scenes: Satan tempting a woman, a love potion bought from a witch, and a dream of a sabbath. In the middle chapters Maria the weaver is arrested, tortured into a confession, and names other women; Anna is seized, and the accused are sentenced to the stake. The last chapters set a nun who desecrates a host, and modern cases of sleepwalking, pyromania, and kleptomania, beside the old stake and the asylum.
Cast & crew
More about Häxan
Svensk Filmindustri paid for the film and Christensen shot it in Denmark in 1920–1921. He wrote it partly from his reading of the Malleus Maleficarum. The Swedish Film Institute times its restoration at 105 minutes.
Themes
Background
He argues that the confessions came from fear of torture and from illnesses his own century was starting to call hysteria, not from a pact with Satan.
Making
Christensen built the medieval sets at the Astra studio in Hellerup rather than on Swedish stages. The shoot ran long enough that the picture became the costliest Scandinavian silent to that date.
Look
Johan Ankerstjerne shot the staged trials and the sabbath at Astra, in Hellerup, against painted medieval sets.
Music
The silent release used an accompaniment drawn from Schubert, Gluck, and Beethoven. Daniel Humair wrote the jazz score for the 1968 re-edit; Jean-Luc Ponty played violin in that quintet.
Preservation
The Swedish Film Institute made tinted photochemical restorations in 1976 and 2007, then a tinted digital restoration in 2016.
Notes
- Christensen plays the Devil. Maren Pedersen plays Maria the weaver.
- Copenhagen opening was November 7, 1922. Denmark put the film out again in 1931.
- Censors in Germany, France, and the United States objected to the torture, the nudity, and the attacks on the clergy.
- In 1968 Metro Pictures cut a 74-minute American version, Witchcraft Through the Ages, with William S. Burroughs narrating.
- The Swedish title Häxan means "the witch.
Scenes
- Christensen demonstrates hell with a physical model after the woodcuts.
- Maria, under torture, names other women as witches.
- A nun desecrates the host.
- Sleepwalking, fire-setting, and theft are played next to the burning at the stake.
Influenced by
- Malleus Maleficarum
Also available
- Internet Archive (Haxan_tinted_and_subtitled)
- DVD: Criterion Collection (2001), with Witchcraft Through the Ages
- Blu-ray: Criterion Collection (2019), the 2016 restoration
