title proof first movement words and things visual
Two themes prefi gured in this fi rst chapter and foregrounded afterwards in the fi lm ought to have treatment when it comes to the aesthetic strategies they employ: the Wild Ride and the hysteric. Our claims as to the methodological ele ment of Christensen’s image- making methods become clearer if we in the short term skip ahead to Häxan’s depiction from the violent meaning disorder from the Wild Ride of the witches with their Sabbats. This kind of scene shows up in Part 4 from the fi lm and is presented as a aesthetic account from the old girl Maria’s confession to the “crime” of witchcraft. We can fully evaluate the thickness of this picture in the matching chapter of the book, but also for now all of us will focus only on Christensen’s sophisticated use of pieces of art that formerly appeared in fi fteenth- and sixteenth- century texts by Hans Vintler and Johann Geiler42 in the course of creating new cinematic images in Häxan. Christensen’s pre sen ta tion of the Trip is exciting by any standard. 43
Making use of the effects available to him at the time, the fury and terror of Häxan’s feminine wild motorcyclists stands out as one of many features of the fi lm. By the early 16th century, the Wild Ride came into existence a standard ele ment of both demonological and appear u big literary accounts of the actions of witches, folding older legends of wild predators, the restless travels of the dead through the night, and reports of the Mad Horde in to the standardized screenplay of the Drive. Particularly solid in what is definitely today southern Germany and Switzerland, different versions on the misconception of the night people stored their sturdy immediacy deep into the 20th century. 44 Charles Zika claims that in its vari ous tellings the Furious Horde consisted of “cavalcades of demonic mood and spirits, especially of these who passed away before their time and liked no peace— soldiers wiped out in battle, young children, victims of chaotic acts, and so forth. ” forty-five Folded in the exegesis with the ninth- hundred years text Rule Episcopi, regarding the power of demonic illusion to deceive females into visualizing that they can travel superb distances through the night, often in the com pany of the empress Diana, the Wild Ride violently collapsed several characters and beliefs right into a par espasmo u big time and a singular image of the witch in sixteenth- century Eu string. Christensen’s personal image of the Ride compels the same failure, though one that assumes fi delity to empirical evidence in the time of the witch hunts. This really is characteristic of Häxan’s motion picture naturalism. There are many classic samples of images with the Furious Gruppe and the Ride, two in par tic u lar stand out with regards to Häxan’s individual visualization with the spectacular event.
First can be described as clear communication between a woodcut coming from Hans Vintler’s Buch jeder Tugend entitled Wild Cyclists on a Wolf, Goat, Boar, and Chair (1486) as well as the special effect of Christensen’s picture of his nurses fl ying through the air as part of Maria’s confession in Chapter four. This woodcut refl ects its roots as a characterization of Waldensian heresy (the subject of Vintler’s text), depicting the riders, males, and vehicles as mainly animals. 46 While Christensen’s image substitutes iconic things such as brooms and cooking forks for beasts and refl ects a discourse of the witch (found in Kramer in 1486) to be almost singularly female, this nevertheless takes direct inspiration from the classic woodcut in its perspective, the positioning from the riders in the frame, and the emphasis in the subjects that suppress depth of fi eld resistant to the void of an empty background. Vintler’s woodcut, chang ed naturalistically to mirror the seemingly unpleasant and impossible Wild Ride in the witch, moves in the fi lm.
Christensen also chang es and brings to existence characteristic repre sen tag tions in the Furious Horde, a super natu ral music group that was not originally connected with witchcraft at all. Again, this conjoining of witch photo to demonological discourse refl ects an empirically verifi able advent in the late medieval period and the Lso are nais sance. In equiparable tic u lar, Christensen’s long photographs of the witch’s Sabbat, unfolding in the garbled chaos from the deep forest, recalls the woodcut The Furious Horde that shows up in the 1516 version of Johann Geiler’s Die Emeis. As with the echo from the Vintler woodcut in the Trip, the perspective, framework, and make up of the image of the Sabbat in Häxan updates and transforms The Furious Gruppe, much since demonologists changed the meaning from the Horde in the invention in the sixteenthcentury witch. Again, Christensen is not only “inspired” by Geiler’s image, this individual has in the creative service of the picture si mul ta neously produced an impact that corresponds to the scientific evidence of the witch’s entering being and exhibited what Charlie Kiel has called “the pivoting value with the non- fi ctive. ” 47
Documentary elements can support, contradict, and even wholly end up being the narrative at the begining of cinema, Häxan in this impression is in line with other contemporary works in the oscillating worth of its discrete artifacts. Visually, Häxan offers development to the repre sen konstruera tion of demons which were commonly circulated in woodcuts, broadsheets, and paintings at the moment. While the interpretation of vari ous smaller demons and fallen angels was rather common, they tended to be rendered since smaller versions of the horned Satan or as crossbreed human– creature creatures with each “natu ral” kinds being traceable within the total appearance from the demonic monster (such as with the Geiler woodcut merely mentioned). Häxan does not basically reproduce these types of stereotypic photos. Instead, Christensen at times broadens his local frame of reference, drawing on works discussing witchcraft created outside of German- speaking Eu rope including Agostino Veneziano’s painting The Carcass (ca. 1518–35) pertaining to the Sabbat, or photos that represent super natu ral animals that are available in negative sixteenth- century “guides” to pre- Christian Norse myth, especially some of the woodcuts that accompany Olaus Magnus’s Cronica de Gentibus Septentrionalbis (in numerous printings from 1555), which may actually provide the ideas for the “demonic children” Maria claims to have presented birth to, revealed in her admission. Maria’s admission in Chapter 4 from the fi lm provides added examples of the breadth of Christensen’s visual assemblage with the witch and her activities.
As with the discourse of the witch in the early modern day period, fi gures by antiquity just like Saturn and Circe are also alluded to in the repre sen ta tion from the Sabbat in Häxan. In order to clarify the argument here, it is necessary to briefl y analyze Christensen’s structure of a number of brief photographs in the Sabbat that consider sixteenth- hundred years repre senta tions of Circe as well as the link that they made between your Roman goddess and witchcraft. In Maria’s confession, Circe is indirectly named because “Satan’s granny. ” forty-eight Images linked to games of chance, wagering, tricks, slight of hands, and impression were frequently part of Circe’s repertoire. The logic here was that these kinds of games, apparently minor performative elements of pop u lar tricks and entertainment, had been actually rooted in the same demonic benefits of illusion because more evident forms of malefi cium. Aspects of Christensen’s graphic here appear to be directly mentioning a number of well- known image repre senta tions of Circe in the sixteenth 100 years, particularly a woodcut through the workshop of Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff and tentatively caused by Albrecht Dürer that came out in the Liber Chronicarum, entitled Circe and Her Magical Arts Dealing with Ulysses fantastic Transformed Companions (1493). Although the literal confrontation depicted in this woodcut between Circe and her associate on the coast and Ulysses and his companion pets on a motorboat is lacking in Häxan, the fl owing beauty of Circe herself is usually echoed in the fi lm’s image and the table jumbled with tools of opportunity and magic directly corresponds to the connection Christensen is definitely intending to generate here. Various other surviving images from the time echo Häxan’s meaning below as well, although less straight.
These would include the 1473 woodcut Circe with Ulysses and His Males Transformed into Pets or animals from Giovanni Boccaccio’s Buch: Von den hochgeruemten frowen, and the pen- and- tattoo drawing The Children of Capricho from the Property book Learn or Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet (1480). The cross types animal– individual forms of the demons dancing around the “grandmother, ” the girl surprisingly young and beautiful presence, the wind whipping around her, her raised position in frame like she is florida oating in the air (she is really positioned on a ledge, yet this is very diffi cult to discern before the “grandmother” is shown in medium taken, entering a door), plus the array of objects and instruments she wields all point to the refi guring from the mythological fi gure of Circe being a power complete witch inside the ser vice of Satan. 49
Visible Strategies: Hysteria
A key component of Häxan’s thesis is that the benefits of the witch is reanimated in modern times through the signature of hysteria— a thing foreshadowed inside the fi rst section of the fi lm, and sturdy in Christensen’s complex strategy of tacking between piece of art, photography, and moving cinematic image in Häxan. The “historical framing” in the longiligne durée of his thesis in the fi rst section is taken throughout the entire fi lm. There are a number of scenes in Häxan that activate unconscious associations in the viewer between melancholia, witchcraft, and control. For example , when none of these paintings is definitely explicitly displayed in Häxan, Christensen appears to have taken immediate inspiration for several his pictures from Lucas Cranach the Elder’s famous Melencholia group of paintings. Created between 1528 and 1533, these four paintings that depict the super natu ral environment haunting a girl melancholic carry many similarities with components that Christensen brings to existence in Häxan, including the Ride, terrifyingly abnormal children, and a general impression of intimate and social disorder whirling around a placid, passive female protagonist. 60 It makes sense that Christensen would evoke Cranach as the paintings refl ect a great empirical tension of the task of the witch that featured the susceptibility of the melancholic to the Dev il’s confusion and hence to witchcraft and especially possession.
In the Melencholia series Cranach composes the face of his feminine subject like a mask, the swirl of activity around her symbols of what lay down behind her placid, deceptively beautiful façade. Interestingly, there are lots of points in Häxan where Christensen selfconsciously composes similar faces, si mul tag neously hiding and disclosing the uncertainty that put behind them. In par tic u lar, later inside the fi lm we fi nd Sibling John’s troubled reverie in the face of his overpowered, oppressed, possessing desire to have the Young Maiden plus the mask/face from the unnamed hysteric that is the subject matter of most with the fi lm’s concluding section. In the two cases, Christensen draws a hyperlink between these carefully presented faces and possession, a mobile ele ment moving between the pact of the witch and the obsessed state in the hysteric. Treating Aby Warburg’s assertion that donning a mask constitutes an active make an effort “to wrest something magical from characteristics through the modification of the person, ” Christensen’s fi gures invert this polarity by appearing to get worn by the mask. fifty-one Thus, the re- membered face of Cranach’s melancholic in these photographs works as a relay between Christensen’s moving images of the witch/hysteric and undetectable, but obviously pre directed, iconic pictures of Charcot’s hysterics. This is entirely consistent with Charcot’s perception that imaginative works of demonic possession and melancholia were reliable evidence of concealed and wrongly diagnosed mental disease.
As Avital Ronell features put it, “The scientifi c imperative, the necessity in the nineteenth century for an epistemological reliable inquiry in the character of things, derives element of its power from the electricity ful competition represented by simply fascination intended for the freak and the occult, which is often on the way to technology. “52 Simply by formally building “the witch” through a cinematic iteration of metoposcopic naturalism, Christensen cannot agree even more. Although still left unsaid in the opening chapter, the very important Ronell cites is progressively etched in its appearance of the pictures the overseer produces, always be they clearly “photographed” icons or evoked as echoes and memories. Using a strategy similar to that famously implemented by his closest fi lmmaker modern, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Christensen will build from the elements on this opening part to a complex, expressive interplay of face and cadre in order to accept the witch alive in Häxan.
What Is This kind of Thing?
An image is good not since it is brutal or fantastic— although because the affiliation of suggestions is far away and proper. Pierre Reverdy, “L’image” (1918)
The fi rst chapter of Häxan draws to an sudden close, it is tone descending from the mind-boggling affective pressure of images of explicitly sexual acts with Satan. Christensen actively avoids taxing the audience with any more explanation or perhaps lecture. All of us fi nd images of witches fl ying (this time “returning home” after a “merry dance”) as a fi nal pair of title credit cards blandly state that images such as the ones the group has just found “are often found on famous witch Sabbath pictures through the Middle Ages plus the Re nais sance. ” Three even more dense pictures then florida ash in secession (it is not clear if that they show Sabbats, hell, or any combination of these on earth) and then a fi nal title credit card appears and it is held many beats longer than those instantly preceding it, having the a result of a door held to get a moment before slamming close this chapter of the fi lm. Häxan gets away to an unquestionably peculiar commence. In our watch this is due to the formal, methodological goal of the function, particularly in regard to the mindful triangulation of ontologically distinct image- objects arising out of paintings/woodcuts, photographs, and cinema.
Christensen is trying to help make the power of the witch real in a way that appears impossible through a fi lm. Invading the domains from the human savoir, particularly those of the art historian plus the ethnographer, Christensen will not continue to be content to consistently reproduce remnants of the past, devoting the rest of Häxan to ready a new existence into text messaging and images. The director’s “atlas of photos at work” strategy can be strikingly reminiscent of the methodological innovations of Aby Warburg, particularly regarding Warburg’s unfi nished Mnemosyne pro ject. 53 It truly is worth quoting Philippe Alain- Michaud’s summary of Warburg’s scheme in length:
In Mnemosyne, photographic duplication is not merely illustrative but a
basic plastic channel to which almost all fi gures are lowered before getting arranged
in the space of a panel. This way, the viewer participates in two effective
transformations from the original materials: different types of items (paintings
reliefs, drawings, structure, living beings) are unifi ed through photography
just before being established on the -panel stretched with black towel. The -panel is in
turn rephotographed in order to create a one of a kind image, that is inserted
in a series designed to take the form of a book. The atlas, then, does not
limit itself to describing the migrations of images throughout the history of
repre sen tag tion: it reproduces them. In this sense, it is based on a cinematic
mode of thought, the one which, by using fi gures, is aimed at not articulating meaning
although at generating effects.
Heightened by the effect in cinema that everything in frame seems to be alive, the strategy can prove to rupture the very awareness of “deadness” or “pastness” that allows the current viewer to evade the power of the witch that Christensen will forcefully assert remains to be with us. The time of the witch, in all its multiplicity and exigency, will be presented of the earlier and into the pre directed by showing to register the proper execution of lifestyle itself on fi lm. 55 Thus, the powerful distance of both the objects presented in Häxan’s fi rst part and the heroes they label is necessary to start with, as the task of the fi lm now becomes the closing of the distance involving the two- dimensional surfaces of photographs and celluloid as well as the threedimensional perception of resided experience. Similar to Robert Wiene’s The Cupboard of Dr . Caligari (1920) in this cabeza de ganado pect, Häxan shows a great affi nity with the Cubist art modern to their release in the tension it strategically heightens by ignoring or contravening the perceptive “rules” of formally distinct image artifacts. 56 In later sobre cades, performers and fi lmmakers including Gerhard Richter (Atlas, 2006) and Jean- Luc Godard (Histoire man cinema, 1988–98) have taken up Warburg/Christensen’s methodological logic in their own tries to hyperlink the dimensions of the image with your life.
Within the arc of this movement in Christensen’s fi lm, the objective knowledge of witchcraft is opened to the perception of otherness inside the witch, the demonologist, the hysteric, and ultimately the scientist by way of a visible oneness of the sensory faculties unique towards the director’s method. “The ethnographic surrealist, ” wrote Adam Clifford, “unlike either the typical art critic or anthropologist of the, pleasures in cultural impurities and disturbing syncretisms. “57 Were not claiming that Häxan is ethnographic in its formal approach, yet Clifford’s explanation does replicate the links we could drawing here between radical approaches to the in artwork and subversive methods used in recording the real which were roughly modern to the fi lm. 54.99 The transgressive approach to the archive, to classifi cation, and to expression that the fi lm shows also is akin to methods implemented in the log Documents (1929–30) nearly a de sabine later. Modified by Georges Bataille, Papers willfully transgressed institutional genres through its “subversive, nearly anarchic documented attitude, ” an attitude that Christensen plainly shared. fifty nine What known Documents coming from Warburg’s Mnemosyne and Häxan is that the ex – seizes clichéd objects after which systematically empties them in the span of its own expressions. Bataille wonderful contributors searched for to defamiliarize the clichés, disturbing the placidly misleading surface in the mundane in their fragmentary, juxtaposing methods of critique and pre sen tag tion. In contrast, Warburg and Christensen begin by collecting mythological, fi gurative givens relatively quite distant from the ” really” actual. Starting by radically several places, the outcomes of these tasks converge on a single nodal point— unsettling ranges between misconception and the everyday that consequently produce significant works which can be themselves quite unsettling.
It truly is obvious because of this distributed methodological aspiration why the surrealists could take inspiration from Häxan, brazenly (and unfairly) advocating Christensen more than Dreyer while the Scandinavian fi lmmaker of notice in the twenties. 60 David Bordwell teams Häxan, along with Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Leaves by Satan’s Publication (Blade af Satans Swamp, fen, marsh, quagmire, 1921), Maurice Tourneur’s Woman (1918), and Fritz Lang’s Destiny (Der müde Tod, 1921) within a tradition of “episode fi lms” inside the classical length of silent cinema. 61 This really is consistent with our argument regarding Christensen’s fi lm, while all of these cinematic works weave together episodic fragments in order to draw parallels and correspondences across circumstances and heroes. More explicitly than the others, nevertheless , Häxan likewise deploys the techniques associated with Warburg’s Mnemosyne and Bataille’s Documents pertaining to purposes of affectively focusing the dark, chaotic forces that creep under the clean surface of the everyday. The parallels Christensen draws happen to be therefore not simply between character types or conditions but across domains of sense that cut across time. Hence, the episodic structure of Häxan not merely allows personas seemingly away of a dead past to live again, additionally, it draws the phenomenology from the hysteric plus the work’s very own contemporary the perfect time to the surface.
Shadowed by the specter of an every day fractured simply by mechanized global war, Häxan in turn brings its witches, inquisitors, and hysterics alive in the haunted now in the fi lm’s reception. sixty two In short, Häxan is promiscuous. It is not wholly artsy nor scientifi c. This aspires to seize a good Ulrich Baer granted simply to photography if he wrote, “Films fail to captivate in the same way since photographs perform, because that they invite the viewer to speculate on the future— even when irresistibly tempted to do so— simply on the level of plot or perhaps formal set up. Photographs force the creativity because they remain significantly open- ended. ” 63 Häxan cell phone calls Baer’s affirmation into issue. The beginning chapter will not offer a rumours as to the long term. It disorients the viewers, leaving her with the insistent, fundamental question, “What is thing? ” It tulle times past and upcoming into a series of clichéd images that traverses the steep slope between earlier and long term in the form of a conference.
This is not a plot. Somewhat, it is a strategy to “compel” the viewer, even though we would not limit this kind of compulsion for the imagination alone. In other words, the shortcoming to instantly categorize Häxan emerges out of a formal strategy rooted in an epistemic virtue. In science, this kind of virtues demand that the subject know the world and not necessarily the do it yourself, Häxan’s require is increased in its personal way since it demands the two. 64 Therefore, while Christensen never backs away from his claim that Häxan offers a truthful study of the witch that can stand up to the test, this individual also deploys strategies of evidence making that would have been familiar to the subjects of his fi lm. As Joseph Leo Koerner puts it: “In the afterwards Middle Ages, in practices including persecuting witchcraft to meditating on Christ, techniques had been developed to draw distinctions among visual phenomena, distinguishing, say, physical objects coming from fantasies, dreams, and satanic or artistic deceptions. Some of the best testimonies on this sorting operation come from designers. This is not surprising given that image- makers specializing in manipulating one thing (their materials) in order that a viewer ought to see something more important. ” sixty five While Christensen’s materials has been radically different than those of a great artist in the late Middle Ages, his aim to shape these supplies in order to make some thing invisible noticeable is consistent with his is designed. This description, of course , may be applied to fresh scientifi c techniques with little alteration towards the stated is designed of checks taken beneath the signature of such professions.
For Christensen, objective expertise itself has been possessed by uncanny, object rendering “imagination” or “reason” by itself inadequate to bringing the witch to life, to forcing her to speak to what is already known in her pathological vocabulary of diabolic proofs. The witch must be experienced in her individual milieu, a satanic biome that we will certainly presently argue is the one that Christensen symbolizes as her state in nature. As it moves from the fi rst chapter towards the second, Häxan constitutes action from the methods and virtues of Mnemosyne to those of the nature fi lm. Basically, the fi rst section of Häxan is the pre sen ta tion of any series of clichés— visual clichés and ste reo types of the witch, fragments which are most likely previously familiar towards the viewer. This really is hardly a waste of time, nevertheless , as these clichés (what Deleuze terms fi gurative givens) will not only give you the empirical data for Christensen’s thesis but actually will also provide mass media from which the director will certainly conjure the power of the witch. It is i am por tant to note that Deleuze talks about fi gurative givens in comparison with painting, certainly not cinema, as a result, the concept would not seem to quickly apply in this article. 66 However we suggest that Christensen is attempting to take a step quite paradoxical, which is to relieve the motion of the art work and the woodcut through the motion picture image. Indeed, as we undertake the fi lm, we cumulatively gain the impression that Häxan is a living tableau. This can be by no means a major accident. The fi lm does a great job in rendering the ground in this sense, obtaining the viewer through the immediacy regardless of whether the viewer rationally knows that the represented celebration is already in the distance. This kind of quality models Häxan separate.
