“Seven years before Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera and more than sixty years before Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, Christensen invented in Häxan what has become known as the essay film.”
Chris Fujiwara, Criterion Collection

Häxan is the cinematic manifestation of filmmaker Benjamin Christensen’s extensive research into the evolution of witchcraft through the ages and the psychological impact on those accused of being witches. Often cited as a horror film before the genre existed, Häxan can also be considered to prefigure another genre: that of the essay film.

In the early years of cinema, Christensen challenged what the role of a film could be beyond characters enacting a scene, instead asking how a film might materialise a thought. In his words, “my film consists of a series of episodes – as part of a mosaic – give expression to an idea.” Both fact and fiction are presented as reality, and the film is self-reflectively a film. Through visually stunning vignettes, Christensen shifts between documentary and reconstruction, addresses his audience directly through his intertitles, and even implicates himself in the moral fabric of the film by appearing as the Devil. A wild ride now as it was over 100 years ago!

This late-night screening of the cult silent film will have live sound performed by members of Sticky Buttons records.

GB