Hxan (1922) Silent/B&W Director: Benjamin Christensen Born in Denmark in 1879, Benjamin Christensen had a varied career before

he ente red the Danish film industry as an actor and writer in 1912. The first two films he directed, The Mysterious X (1913) and The Night of Revenge (1915), have a vi sual sophistication that has led some historians to hail him as an innovator com parable to D. W. Griffith, Louis Feuillade, and Maurice Tourneur. Hxan (pronounce d hek-sen ), Christensen s third film, was made in Sweden at the invitation of Svensk Filmindustri and released in 1922. It s one of those legendary films that many pe ople have heard about but few have seen. It should be better known. With vivid d epictions of witch persecutions and medieval sorcery, frank physicality, and flu id and detailed mise-en-scne, Hxan surely has more chance of pleasing contemporary audiences than 95 percent of surviving silent films. In bringing together witch-finding judges, convent misdeeds, and black magic, Hxa n prefigures no less than three cinematic genres that would become popular (for an example of each, see Michael Reeves 1968 Witchfinder General, Domenico Paolell a s 1973 The Nuns of Sant Arcangelo, and Terence Fisher s 1968 The Devil Rides Out). Hx an also has ties to F. W. Murnau s Faust and later films based on the Faust legend , to demonic-possession movies like William Friedkin s The Exorcist (1973), and to the many movies in which the devil comes to Earth in human form, of which Georg e Miller s The Witches of Eastwick (1987) is a pertinent recent example. Hxan integrates fact, fiction, objective reality, hallucination, and different le vels of representation all within a first-person discourse. In the intertitles, Ch ristensen addresses us directly, saying I. The mixture of narrative modes in Hxan i s astonishing for its freedom and audacity. Early on, Christensen establishes a modern, scientific point of view, stating flatly, The belief in evil spirits, sor cery, and witchcraft is the result of nave notions about the mystery of the unive rse. After a lecture-with-slideshow-style prologue on ancient and medieval cosmol ogy, diabolism, and sorcery, the first of the film s narrative recreations unfolds in a sorceress underground workshop in 1488. The sequence that follows is, up to a point, objective. But the film soon complicates its logical flow by dissolvin g from the workshop to a scene in which the sorceress client gives a love potion to a monk. The viewer can t be sure whether the second scene is a flash-forward to an event occurring in the future or, as seems more likely, a representation of the client s fantasy. Starting with this ambiguity, the film takes us farther away from a world in whi ch 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, Hxan appears to be a literal depiction of the imaginings of people of medieval Europe the cinem atic equivalent of the medieval woodcuts that illustrate the prologue. Christens en denies us cues indicating the points at which the film jumps from one level o f reality to another. As a result, the obscene incursions of the devil (an unfor gettable performance by Christensen himself) are consistent with the tonality of the film: the devil belongs to the film s world even as he disrupts it. The longest sustained segment of Hxan shows how a printer s family is destroyed whe n, after he falls ill, his sister-in-law accuses a beggar woman of having bewitc hed him. This section of the film contains a devastating, psychologically realis tic portrait of witch-hunters. Christensen delineates the narrative with scrupul ous objectivity until the moment when the torturers finally force a long, detail ed confession from their pathetic victim. Immediately as if the film were blurting it all out with her we re plunged into the visualization of her fantastic, grotesqu e imaginings. During one of the most objective sequences of the film, the presentation of tortur

e devices used on accused witches, we suddenly see a young woman in modern dress , smiling. One of my actresses, Christensen tells us in an intertitle, insisted on trying on the thumbscrew . . . I will not reveal the terrible confessions I forc ed from the young lady in less than a minute. Extending the parallel between the cinema and earlier media, Christensen accuses his own activity as filmmaker. The tone of the next behind-the-scenes reference is more serious. During a break in shooting, according to Christensen, the actress playing the role of the beggar r aised her tired face to me and said: The devil is real. I have seen him sitting b y my bedside. In the shot of the actress, she appears in her medieval costume. No doubt Christensen was conscious of the analogy between the character s confession to the inquisitors and the actress confession to him, between their torture imple ments and his camera. Christensen s narrative freedom, no less than his anticlericalism, endeared Hxan to the Surrealists (a column called Some Surrealist Advice, which can be found in Pa ul Hammond s excellent anthology of Surrealist writings on the cinema, The Shadow and Its Shadow, urged readers to see Christensen s films rather than Dreyer s). Perh aps the film s structure inspired Luis Buuel in making his masterpiece L ge d or (1930), which also begins as a documentary, only to switch to a series of more or less coherent and self-contained fictional episodes. Buuel s customary insistence on pho tographing dreams in the same way that he photographs objective reality has a ma jor precedent in Christensen s practice in Hxan. Despite its historical importance, Hxan has been available only sporadically, usu ally retitled Witchcraft Through the Ages. Its best-known incarnation under this title was in a version prepared in 1967 by British filmmaker and film distribut or Antony Balch. This version features a narration by William Burroughs (with wh om Balch had previously made Towers Open Fire and other short films) and a score by a jazz group led by percussionist Daniel Humair and featuring violinist Jean -Luc Ponty. Under any title and with any modifications, Hxan endures because of Christensen s t remendous skill with lighting, staging, and varying of shot scale. The word paint erly comes to mind in watching Christensen s ingeniously constructed shots, but it is inadequate to evoke the fascination the film exerts through its patterns of m ovement and its narrative disjunctions. Christensen is at once painter, historia n, social critic, and a highly self-conscious filmmaker. His world comes alive a s few attempts to recreate the past on film have. 1922 87 min Black and White 1.33:1 Media Info: General Complete name : axan (1922)[DVDRip][big_dad_e].avi Format : Format/Info : File size : Duration : Overall bit rate : Video ID Format

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Format profile Format settings, BVOP Format settings, QPel Format settings, GMC Format settings, Matrix Codec ID Codec ID/Info Codec ID/Hint Duration Bit rate Width Height Display aspect ratio Frame rate Standard Resolution Colorimetry Scan type Bits/(Pixel*Frame) Stream size Writing library Audio ID Format Format version Format profile Codec ID Codec ID/Hint Duration Bit rate mode Bit rate Channel(s) Sampling rate Resolution Stream size Alignment Interleave, duration File Scan: Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware 1.46 www.malwarebytes.org Database version: 4943 Windows 5.1.2600 Service Pack 3 Internet Explorer 8.0.6001.18702

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