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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Realizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible

Realizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible

Baxstrom, Richard
Meyers, Todd

Paperback

Series: Forms of Living

OccultAnthropologyMythology & Folklore

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 082326825X
ISBN13: 9780823268252
Publisher: Fordham Univ Pr
Published: Nov 2 2015
Pages: 296
Weight: 1.30
Height: 1.00 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.30
Language: English

Benjamin Christensen's Häxan (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, Häxan 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 Häxan 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. Häxan 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. Häxan 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.

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