Häxan (1922)

So, this is a documentary about witches.  It's a subject I'm fairly ignorant on, though I know my thaumaturgy from my theurgy.  My limited understanding is that there are three main kinds of witch with nothing in common to one another: firstly the term is sometimes used to describe practicers of Wicca, a hippy religion that seems to have come to prominence as part of the same movement as the campaign for real ale and the revival of morris dancing, secondly people actually dabbling with demons to gain superpowers, and thirdly people accused of the second, usually without good cause (and fourthly fictional witches, of course, who rarely fit any of these classes at all).

From the film's subtitle, 'witchcraft through the ages', it sounds like it might feasibly encompass all of these in some measure.  In actual fact, director Benjamin Christensen tells the sensational story of the second kind, replete with broomstick flights and kissing the bottom of the devil, under the pretence of telling us about the less lurid third kind, the false accusations.

The pencil of judgement!

Since this is superficially a serious documentary, rather than the exercise in schlock horror thrills it turns into, it starts out quite soberly with a proto-powerpoint presentation.  We're shown pictures and diagrams of witches, familiars and hell, and a rather exciting animated model of the Earth-centred cosmos, with Sun, planets and stars all circulating, and God looking down from a photograph of Heaven.  Into these images, a pencil (or, on larger models, something like a snooker cue) occasionally protrudes to point out details, presumably, in lieu of close-ups on relevant areas.  This being a silent film, this sequence is accompanied by descriptive intertitles - though for some reason my memory keeps insisting that it was a voiceover.

The cosmos, yesterday.

I wonder whether, back in '22, this is what Benjamin Christensen thought would be the future of the movie documentary: a straight replacement for the text-book, with on-screen text broken by illustrations.  After perhaps twenty minutes of this, however, we move to a set with actors, where we're shown a witch cooking up her brew.  Just, you know, as an illustration.  Or so it seems!  In no time at all, this illustration grows into a plot, and educational intent takes a back seat.  We're led into a story about a family in which everybody, deliberately or inadvertently, implicates everybody else as witches. The inquisition turn up, as fat as you like, and torture one unfortunate for so long that she has no option but to claim to be a witch (going into lots of detail on the kissing-the-bottom-of-the-devil thing, which seems to be Christiansen's favourite part of the whole venture, and which we get to see in a blue-tinged flashback).  Of course, since she's been tortured at length and now is sure to be killed for her admissions, she drops in the names of everyone she dislikes, naming them as accomplices.

So, in short, everyone dies.  Except the portliest churchmen, of course.  And Satan, played by (you may have guessed it) director Benjamin Christiansen, who's having great fun throughout, and also turns in a wafer-thin cameo as a spectral Jesus.  His Devil makes a terrifyingly sudden appearance (aided somewhat by Bronnt Industries Kapital's excellent new soundtrack), and spends most of his time leering through windows and flicking his tongue in and out with a comedic rapidity suggestive of all the sort of x-rated antics I'm unlikely to name on this ostensibly wholesome blog.

Christiansen makes a credible point about biology

So, everybody from the main plot dies or becomes irrelevant, but the film isn't yet over.  There's still time for a convent full of nuns to totter about, jive and jitter in (no pun intended, but it sort of works here) mass hysteria.  And then on to the modern day, where, in a lively attempt to reclaim academic credibility, Christiansen shows us a few short scenes about kleptomania, hysteria, sleepwalking - that sort of thing.  The problem isn't the Devil, or so the intertitles tell us, it's that women have always been too hysterical, and the appropriate response isn't to burn them but to institutionalise them, locking them away in sanatoria for their own sake.

This seems almost as alarming, in its own way, and times have thankfully changed again since 1922, and locking people up to keep eccentricity out of society (and, we're clearly seen, out of women) is no longer seen as the wonderful modern answer.  Had it been made nowadays, the documentary might have advocated medicalisation (which I'm keen not to stigmatise, but is still a very imperfect solution, as it can occasionally medicalise the social and drug away legitimate quirks of personality).

This is what supposed witches used to look like.  Nowadays,

such enjoyably wrinkly people just get to play them in movies.

I'm not quite sure the documentary is entirely sincere on the locking-up-your-hysterical-daughter front, as by this point the intertitles have developed a dry sense of humour, which I'm tempted, without any real evidence, to describe as 'characteristically Scandinavian'.

I'll leave you with an enjoyably bizarre sequence from the torture room.  We cut away from the narrative for a moment, as the intertitles (tidy, Swedish, Times New Roman) inform us that 'one of my actresses insisted on trying the thumbscrew when we shot these pictures'.  We see the actress in question, giggling away as the unseen director tightens the screws.  Suddenly her mouth opens in an amused yell.    Says Christiansen: 'I will not reveal the terrible confessions I forced from the young lady'.


P.S. My many thanks to Decline for the recommendation.  Tune in again on the Ides of March, when I'll finally tackle a film from that most neglected of decades, the 1950s, with an obscure 'Julius Caesar' featuring a young Charlton Heston in some sort of loincloth, if that's what floats yer boat.

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It's a visually delicious piece of work, and not quite as evil as the cover would suggest.

Dr Nicholson and the Blue Diamond (1913)

I've found the silent films I've been watching for this project wonderfully diverse and refreshing, but it's quite pleasing to find one that matches the silent movie pastiches and parodies I've either seen or have been involved with.  In short, 'Dr. Nicholson og den blaa Diamant' is a melodrama, though it may not entirely realise it, and has a slimy and obviously evil villain facing off against handsome wealthy people, and somebody wears a top hat.

The premise is something along these lines.  Through one of those quirks of law that I hope only occur in fiction, Alice Kensington, an heiress, is obliged to marry before she can claim her inheritance, which is to be substantial.  She's an intelligent and independent sort, and decides to enter into a mock marriage (which is presumably a real marriage sans consummation) for one month, so as to gain her inheritance without being lumbered with a husband she doesn't want or love.  She places an advert in the paper requesting a temporary husband, as you do.

People still dressed so in 1913

Dr. Nicholson, an unashamedly villainous cad who dwells in a den, spending all day smoking a hookah and operating his electronic door (pretty swish in 1913) has a cunning plan.  He hires a down-on-his-luck duke to be the faux-husband, and intends to use him to steal the priceless Blue Diamond which I like to think might be the Blue Water Diamond from 'The Last Remake of Beau Geste' (1977), or perhaps blue is just the most exciting colour for these things, even in monochrome.

Toward the climax, Dr Nicholson climbs on top of a fast-moving train, and for an exciting moment I believed I was about to see my favourite cliche, the train-top fist-fight, born.  Alas, having gotten on top of the carriage, he postures for a while, then jumps off into a river when the train goes over a bridge.  Wonderfully, this was filmed with no more trickery than telling the lead actor to actually get on the train and then jump off.  They did these things properly back then.

Dr. Nicholson in his evil lair.  He's the one with the gun.

This being 1913 - which when you think about it is a long time ago - the plot comes to us fairly slowly, taking an hour to tell a story that might have been told in half the time had the film been made a decade later.  Nonetheless, it's fairly sensational, full of incident and high drama, though I couldn't quite call it unpredictable.

The biggest surprise, watching this film, is the absence of dialogue intertitles.  I'd always assumed that these were invented about the same time as the silent film, and that the absence of recorded sound made slides of who-said-what, the movie equivalent of speech-bubbles, inevitable.  They're wholly absent here, and the only real intertitles are used to introduce new scenes, as they were in 1903's 'Le Vie et La Passion de Jesus Christ'.  This film uses a rather ingenious replacement for dialogue: every time a character needs to say something to another character, they write to them and we see the letter.  So, rather than talk one to another, characters make a point of leaving, and then a letter arrives from them once they're no longer in the location of their recipient, and the audience gets to read long paragraphs of cursive handwriting about who's doing what, and why.  At least in the English-language print that I watched, all the characters seem to write with identical handwriting.  Handwriting so classy as to be a bit too fancy to read with any comfort.

Thankfully the letters are on screen for ages.

After all this, I'm inclined to venture the dialogue intertitle as my favourite innovation in the development of cinema.  More useful to the telling of the story than audio or colour, and more charming too.  The typefaces have been a delight, wherever I've seen them: a typically soviet-looking font for 'Battleship Potemkin' (1925), tidy serifs for Swedish films, and gothic script for the dark German folk-tales.  I wonder how much of the association of certain typefaces with different nations and their cultures hails from the silent film era.  Until I see more early Danish films with proper intertitles, I shall assume that Dansk is properly spoken in elegant and highly italicised penmanship, and carries over long distances.

Anyway, you can quite lawfully watch the film here, and it's quite interesting to do so to get an idea what people were capable of filming a complete century ago.  It seems bizarre, somehow, that the movies can have been going on for as long as that, but, as I've learnt, cinema was already very advanced by this point, and was already pretty complex and ambitious a full decade earlier.  If I ever get to the end of my hundred years project I'm sure I'll go mining into the 1900s and 1890s to try to grasp how films really got started - but I'm keen not to make an unwieldy project any bigger than it is at present.

P.S. My thanks to JillBob for poining me towards this film, and also for recommending 'Brick' (2005), and 'Goodbye Lenin!' (2003), all of which I've been glad to see.

P.P.S. Thursday will bring a post about 'Häxan' (1922), a rather exciting Swedish/Danish documentary about witchcraft through the ages.  I'll try not to spend too long examining its intertitles.

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

There was a film about Bob Dylan a few years ago (I'm Not There, 2007) in which a cast of fairly notable actors played different aspects of the real man in different settings and eras.  Cate Blanchett seemed to me the most obviously excellent, though since the Bob Dylans also included Heath Ledger, Ben Whishaw and Christian Bale it seems wrong to single only one out for praise.  It seemed a very good format for a biopic about anybody complicated, or who gathered many stories.

I thought afterwards that you could use a similar set-up for a film about Jesus - except, I thought, dividing him up (as he were Earth in the time of Peleg) and relocating his portions throughout time and space would necessarily mean telling the stories of various Christ-like people (which is already done in the movies, lots), as to do it properly you'd end up showing your audience several only-son-of-Gods in places less appropriate than 1st Century Jewry, and it would just look odd (or, you know, really Mormon).

'La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc' (to give its French title, though it seems to be claimed equally by the French and Danish, with the actors silently voicing one language while the intertitles use the other) would fit well into such a biopic of myriad Jesuses.  As a glimpse at the title and screen-caps will tell you, this is a story with an extraordinary similarity to Jesus' last hours before his crucifixion.

With its script drawn from contemporaneous reports of the trial, this is the story of Joan of Arc's condemnation and execution by the fifteenth century version of the Sanhedrin.  She's questioned, mocked and condemned, and she holds to the truth, or to silence, refusing to speak the answers that would easily save her life - holding tight to a hope of the resurrection.  It's a harrowing film of extreme close-ups, as we watch horror, fear and alarm creep across Joan's gaunt face.  There's really no hope that the trial will end anywhere but death.

When I was watching German talkies of the 1930s, I wondered at the static shots, and speculated that moving cameras may not have caught on so early as that.  It was a surprise, seeing this film from half a decade earlier, to find the camera moving ceaselessly, tracking over the long bench of the prosecutors, pursuing faces, swinging up and down to follow maces thrown down from a window in the violent finale.  It's a visually interesting film, with the trial conducted and guarded by scowling lawyers and characterful grotesques, set against the plain, androgynous face of the suffering Joan.  Though the locations and characters are few, the camera never shows us anything that isn't worth seeing and examining.  An extraordinary performance, and a horrible occurrence.

P.S. I worry sometimes that my posts are growing unreadably lengthy - and since this is one of the first I watched and wrote about (though held off in a backlog) it's mercifully shorter than some, though it occurs to me I've only dedicated two paragraphs to the film itself.  Whoops!

P.P.S. The next film I'll post about here will be 'The Lord of the Rings' (2001-2003), and the next film I watch?  Gosh, I've no idea.  I'm spoilt for choice.  'King Ralph' (1991), perhaps?  Yes, I like that idea.

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It's a fascinating film, and in pretty good nick.  If you fancy trying a silent film I'd recommend this as a fine start.