LIVE LAB :
HÄXAN Orchestra
IZEN
Performace Art Bergen
Hilde Susan Jaegtnes
Richard Baxstrom
///
SCREEN LAB:
Benjamin Christensen
Bertrand Mandico
Katrin Olafsdottir
Angela Su
Asdis Sif Gunnarsdottir
Rikke Benborg
///
+
Arnont Nongyao
Astrid Espenhain
Bogna M. Konior & Yvette Granata
Carolin Koss
Chanhee Choi
Grupo ETC
Haruka Mitani & Michael Lyons
Helen Woolston
Kushtrim Zequiri
Leyla Rodriguez
Michelle Hannah
Peter Nelson
Piotr Bockowski & Cristine Brache
Thorbjorg Jonsdottir
+
FIXC
SKOGUL GONDUL
///
 
 
RICHARD BAXSTROM
REALIZING THE WITCH: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible / HÄXAN


Benjamin Christensen's Haxan (The Witch, 1922) stands as a singular film within the history of cinema. Deftly weaving contemporary scientific analysis and powerfully staged historical scenes of satanic initiation, confession under torture, possession, and persecution, Haxan creatively blends spectacle and argument to provoke a humanist re-evaluation of witchcraft in European history as well as the contemporary treatment of female "hysterics" and the mentally ill.

In Realizing the Witch, Baxstrom and Meyers show how Haxan opens a window onto wider debates in the 1920s regarding the relationship of film to scientific evidence, the evolving study of religion from historical and anthropological perspectives, and the complex relations between popular culture, artistic expression, and concepts in medicine and psychology. Haxan is a film that travels along the winding path of art and science rather than between the narrow division of "documentary" and "fiction."
Baxstrom and Meyers reveal how Christensen's attempt to tame the irrationality of "the witch" risked validating the very "nonsense" that such an effort sought to master and dispel. Haxan is a notorious, genre-bending, excessive cinematic account of the witch in early modern Europe. Realizing the Witch not only illustrates the underrated importance of the film within the canons of classic cinema, it lays bare the relation of the invisible to that which we cannot prove but nevertheless "know" to be there"




Richard Baxstrom is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Houses in Motion: The Experience of Place and the Problem of Belief in Urban Malaysia.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  2017
   
  INTRODUCTION
   
  PARTICIPANTS
   
  PROGRAMME
   
  SNÆ#6
   
  VENUES
   
  CONTACT
   
 
 
 
 
LIVE LAB
 
© LAND ART - PAPA WESTRAY 2010