A rational Devil

Haxan, “a creaky old movie” made in 1922, remains relevant to our times.

Ariend who knows about my love for the silent cinema and likes to rib me about it brought up the subject of archaic, dated or downright distasteful attitudes in “those creaky old films”. His ammunition: the barefaced racism in D W Griffith’s 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation. This is a landmark movie, credited with pioneering — or at least streamlining — many important cinematic techniques, but its narrative takes a rosy view of American slave-owners, even turning the violent and bigoted Ku Klux Klan into heroic figures. “It’s so typical of the insensitivity and emotional immaturity of the time,” sniffed my friend with the self-righteousness of one who tut-tuts at historical follies and deems his own age to be an enlightened one.

I wonder what he would think of Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 film Haxan, also known as Witchcraft Through the Ages, or simply The Witches. This is a remarkable movie that deals with potentially sensationalist subject matter — the witch-hunts that led to the murder of millions of unfortunate women in medieval Europe — and does so with style and inventiveness, but which is at its heart a sympathetic, dignified, rational work.

Apart from the obvious research and care that went into its making (the set design is outstanding), what makes Haxan so distinctive is its constantly changing tone: it shifts from an educational, documentary-style presentation to a fictional (but realist) narrative to outright fantasy, and I think this reflects the personality of its writer-director. Christensen comes across as an auteur long before the term was coined. In the film’s inter-titles he refers to himself in the first person, in the manner of an author writing a narrative non-fiction book. In a brief video introduction filmed in the 1940s (and included on the Criterion DVD), he provides level-headed explanations for why the witch-hunts happened and links occasional cases of mental illness (which could result in a woman being branded a witch) to “the modern, treatable ailment of hysteria”. (That the “modern” in this case refers to psychiatric theories and treatments that held sway in 1922 adds a second layer for a viewer watching this film in the year 2010, but that’s fodder for another discussion.)

But at the same time, Christensen’s contribution to the film as an actor is a deliciously over-the-top performance as Satan. There’s nothing smooth or mannered about this Devil: he’s pure satyr, repulsive to look at, bare-chested, pot-bellied and lumpy, impatiently knocking on boudoir doors and enticing young women into his hairy arms even as they lie next to their dozing husbands, or tempting nuns to desecrate statues of the infant Jesus.

You may well ask, what is old Beelzebub doing prancing about thus in a movie dedicated to the debunking of superstitions? The answer lies in the free-flowing structure of Haxan. Christensen maintains the analytical, inquiring tone throughout, but he also gives us sequences where we are made privy to people’s delusions or fantasies (such as when an old woman, under extreme torture, “recalls” her participation in witchery, including riding on broomsticks through the night and participating in a devil’s feast), and the film usually — though not always — makes clear which scenes are meant to be objective reality and which ones are fevered dreams.

But despite these interludes, the prevailing tone in Haxan is that of pity for victims of prejudice. One gets a very strong sense of how the powerful prey on the weak, often using “religious authority” as an excuse for the playing out of baser instincts. “Let’s not believe the Devil exists solely in the past,” says a title towards the end of the film, “Isn’t superstition still rampant among us?” This is an example of a “creaky old” movie that’s very relevant to our own times.

(Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based freelance writer)