Representing Denmark: Häxan (1922)

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Dir. Benjamin Christensen

As much as it's a product of its era, with aspects that have dated, the uniqueness of Häxan is still rich, and the ideas are (sadly) still of importance in the current era. People who do not follow a conventional viewpoint will be ostracised. Those who are different - minorities, those of a belief opposite from the religion or atheist mindset with most influence, etc. - will be looked at suspiciously by those who do not take into account the complexities of individual personality, and not necessarily on purpose, but because of a presumed idea they are left in the vicinity of without any sense of full knowledge of it, from the accusers to the defenders of such groups. Women, regardless of the attempts of feminism, are frowned upon still in certain areas when they are too "ugly", too "weird", too independent, or even if they fit the stereotypes put upon them (pretty, sexually open, motherly) too much to the point they make it their own. Rationality and logic, based on scientific logic, or if you are spiritually or mystically inclined, is abused, both science and spirituality victims equally, when someone wants what they want done, to the point any cockamamie concept, as shown in scenes in this film, can be used as evidence against someone. And unfortunately, real people were murdered using these arguments, and considering the last century, with genocide, ethnic cleansing, and assaults against groups for their gender, sexuality, beliefs, social standing or race, we've yet as a species gotten the message we should have learnt from the witch burning. As much as Häxan is pure, phantasmagorical entertainment, it was made with an important message, and when you actually connect the  content to reality it is a grim reminder. Häxan does feel naive in its wonder of its subject of witchcraft, buts its virtuous naivety that wanted to learn from its subject, and still realised, and reminds the viewer, that what it is based on was reality.

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Separated into seven parts, Häxan is a docu-fiction silent era film about the subject of witchcraft, the persecuted witches, the beliefs practiced, and how the trials played out. As phantasmic cinema, it's still full of incredibly surreal and bizarre images, and from some of the illustrations shown, the director was likely basing it all on real concepts people believed. Women dancing with bipedal pigs, witches riding upside-down wooden benches as well as brooms, a whole manner of weird images. The primitive nature of the effects, the superimpositions and costumes, adds to the raw imagination and fantastical tone of it all, (like with Viy (1967) the Soviet supernatural film), giving it the sense of the otherworldly. However it's still carrying said important message. The recreations, particularly one about an old woman who is accused as a witch only for it to affect many others, shows the absurd and disturbing sides of humanity. That any vague notion could find someone guilty. That even the accuser could become the accused if someone got back at them or did so to save themselves from the pyre. Even if it's very melodramatic, it's still rewarding to demonstrate this through drama, with intertitles bringing additional information with them.

From http://www.opasquet.fr/wp-content/uploads/haxan2.jpg

Häxan still to this day has no real predecessor or any film which directly took from its particular melding of fiction and document. In terms of imagery, it's not surprising a sixties recut was made with William S. Burroughs narrating it. A catalogue of perverse images are seen, from pornographic use of a butter churn to a "Kiss My Ass" club for Satan long before some people required it for their followers and lackeys. But the sobering truth is still there. The last segment shows how the things women were accused of being witchlike or possession were then contemporary mental issues like sleep walking or hysteria, with even the latter eventually removed from medicine for more accurate diagnosis. It shows how so much had changed, but Christensen does leave on a note that, while no longer violent, there may not be much difference between a shower in a health club and a pyre that burns witches. Even now this causes one to step back. Even if we have care for the mentally ill, the physically and mentally disabled, the neglected or old, they're still treated as others. Even now, more so with how images paint what perfection is, those who do not stay within a web of conformity - act like everyone else - is seen as standing out usually in a negative way or as weaker. We have gone beyond use of thumbscrews, but Christensen's dramatic scenes are as much about straw man arguments, emotional blackmail, and complete cheap evidence to prove a point, which we still have. While as much a head-trip still, it shows as much now the horror of the content, the true horror, is not Satan, ridiculous and imp-like as he flickers his tongue continually and seems to be the only being who will physically love and hold the decrepit and lost. The fear of evil is the true horror because it can become evil itself. Human behaviour turns out to be scarier because without the Devil actually making his prescience known, many millions can dies under the belief of doing the just and sanctified. Häxan is still rich for a film over ninety years old, and proves to be more than a mere curio for this humanitarian morality melded alongside the incredible work to realise it.

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Videotape Swapshop Review: Les vampires (1915)

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Dir. Louis Feuillade

France

Continuing with my Videotape Swapshop reviews, this is the oldest work I have probably reviewed yet anywhere, the legendary film serial from the same creator of Fantomas (1913), which I need to reinvestigate and actually watch all the way through. This serial is excellent though by itself.

Review Link - http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/12998/les-vampires-%E2%80%93-1915-director-louis-feuillade/

A Reoccurring Curse [The Fall of the House of Usher (1928)]

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Dir. Jean Epstein

France-USA

Film #21, of Sunday 21^st October, for Halloween 31 For 31

The numerous adaptations of a single work can leave a fascinating and tangled web, the odd examples permanently disrupting the history of the original work, and the changes and similarities between them all taking the source version into different dimensions that exist in the same plane of existence, where characters can commit the same actions, suffer the same fates, but their appearance and their outcomes likely to alter depending on the decisions of the new ‘God’ who takes over the characters and reinterprets the material. Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher is a good example of this. I have already reviewed the 1960 Roger Corman version, but there is also an abstract short by James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber also from 1928, Jan Svankmajer’s 1982 short version, and as mentioned in the review of the Corman version, the late Ken Russell’s version shot at his own home, not to mention a handful more. Having also read the original story for the first time this month, the fluxuations between the versions I have seen is surprising.

Co-written by Luis Buñuel, Jean Epstein’s version strips away the American Gothic nature of the original story in favour of a more impressionist light, the closest comparison for me from my limited knowledge being the films of Jean Cocteau, but balancing between a more fairytale tone and a style that heavily evokes Soviet montage techniques. The use of sets is a key to show the vast contrast to the Corman film. With deep, delirious colours, the Corman film replicates the madness of the story in an upfront depiction as vivid as the paintings Vincent Price’s version of Roderick Usher paints. For Epstein’s earlier film, the sets are sparse, intentionally so, contrasted with specific touches of the fantastical – the depictions of the Usher family home and the burial tomb – which brought to mind the Cocteau similarities. It is less an outright horror depiction, but a fantastical work which slowly drifts into horror tangentially.

Epstein’s version also mixes material faithful from the story and completely original aspects. Corman’s version had some differences, but Epstein’s has some significant changes; with an older protagonist travelling to the house of Usher, Roderick Usher’s sister is replaced with a wife Madeleine Usher who, in a more fantasy based concept, is slowly becoming weaker and weaker as her husband paints a portrait of her that may be drawing away her life essence. With a more faithful conclusion bar the very end, the film is a very unconventional interpretation which does not necessarily make ‘sense’ at first. It does however have its own logic, Roderick Usher far from the morally slipping interpretation Vincent Price played but someone under the circumstances undermined by fate outside his hands. This film also emphasises the sense of the unknown only in a different way, the fissure within the Usher’s home wall replaced by electrical storms and trees that spark and burst in smoke outside.

The film also includes a growing sense of anxiety and fear as it goes on that, as my first Jean Epstein film, shows him with an excellent eye for using the techniques he had available to him. Superimpositions, doubling of images over each other, extreme close-ups and distance shots, and choice use of editing are all used with considerable effect; my knowledge of this area of silent cinema is still minimal, the only thing close to this outside of Soviet cinema in terms of montage and image is clips I’ve seen of the films of Abel Gance, included in critic Mark Cousins’ TV series The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011) but with none of his films available in the UK, but the clear influence and/or continuation of the cinematic effects is obvious. 

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Does the film fit Halloween though? Yes, closer to fantasy it still fits the mood of the season with its supernatural tone and the fact that the main thread of Poe’s original story, the growing madness and dread, is still that and expertly done by Epstein and his directorial style when the move to the conclusion is set up. The drastic changes still emphasise this but shifts it to a more lyrical depiction of the supernatural, poetical before pushing itself into a maddening rise in tension if you see a version with a great score like I did. Which is the better version, Corman’s or Epstein’s? I would throw in a third choice personally, James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber’s short version also from 1928, a completely avant garde version that doesn’t follow a narrative thread at all, merely conveying the moods of the story, with a use of sets and cinematic effects from the period that are still jaw dropping. With the two films I have reviewed though, the differences allow them both (and the others I’ve seen) to co-exist without the sense of redundant repetition. While the web of a source’s multiple adaptations involves repetition inherently, the duplications of narratives can become merely of interest from a curiosity’s sake rather than vested. With both versions of Poe’s story I have seen two very different interpretations which work on their own merits. To choose between them is difficult on first viewings of them each, but they connect together as different sides to the same spectrum regardless.

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The Upflow of the Earth to the Sky [Vampyr (1932)]

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Dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer

Germany

Film #18, of Thursday 18^th October, for Halloween 31 For 31

I don’t want to kick Vampyres (1974) any more while it’s on the ground, after doing so in the first review for the whole season (here). One cannot help though, as the only other film yet to be mentioned in these reviews to deal with the myth of vampirism, to admit that comparing it to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr is to compare a plain, dull sky, regardless of my thoughts on the other film, to a cosmic total eclipse. I was curious how such an emotionally charged, spiritual director like Denmark’s Dreyer would have tackled pure horror cinema, an inkling to it through Day of Wrath (1943), where witchcraft is portrayed in as a real tangible entity by the end of its drama but subtly within the characters’ behaviour. With Vampyr I encountered one of the least conventional and original horror films I have seen.

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A traveller Allen Grey visits an old inn only to encounter evidence of the supernatural. Everything beyond this is the breaking down of a horror story into an almost purely visual abstraction, compiling together the short stories of J. Sheridan Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly in one single work, in which Grey, a figure who mostly watches the proceedings around him, is faced with the effects of a vampire and her human minions. The work of Dreyer decided to take with this is the complete opposite of the films I have seen of his in tone – his later, minimalist evocations such as Ordet (1955) – influenced by Un Chien Andalou (1928), the projection of spiritualist and the eerie nature of horror fiction played out without the hesitating plot structures that still undermine films today. This first viewing is still one of immense surprise at the results of what I have seen, to which I intend to rewatch this film as soon as possible for my benefit, but without leading into pointless vagary Vampyr felt like a full, perfect construction rather than a failed one.

It took until near the end of the film for me to realise and ‘get’ its design, a film of intentional tangents and loose ends where we are in the middle of the ever changing events as Allen Grey is, his mind hallucinating images of death, including the most startling of horror cinema involving a casket. From a stripped down story, Dreyer instead attempted to convey it as a purely visual work, the scenes of the bodiless shadows that Grey sees move on their own free will establishing his intentions early. That the film ended up having dialogue, to concede with the push for sound cinema in the era, creates a further air of the abstract; a film that feels like a silent work in its emphasis on the visuals, and because of its dialogue being post-dubbed into multiple languages, creating an state of half-life and half-intangible reality to the whole picture. Attempting to explain the rich, dreamlike state of films like this, especially when only viewed once, is difficult but there is at least a sense I can grasp that Dreyer wanted to push the idea of art – clear as he directly took inspiration from painters such as Francisco Goya – that by using visual motifs and space on his ‘canvas’, he could encapsulate the terrors of the unknown in the viewer through this indirect evocation. Shadows are not only individual beings but also flux in shape and pass through the narrative without being involved in it, the sets are decorated with objects to illicit emotion and are filtered through three dimensional shape, and the camera follows its own course in and out of the world on its own whim. So many plot strands and images are completely unexplained, and there is too much information for me to try to understand now, but it is the same as Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) in that, unless one starts to dissect and decode the pieces slowly, one has to describe the immediate reactions one feels as you view it instead. Visceral imagery usually denotes gore or car explosions, but it probably closer lies to films like Vampyr.

And thinking about Vampyr it fully links to Dreyer’s films from what I have seen, not just for the potential religious ideas – and yet there are no crucifixes in the film, completely remove a basic tenement of vampiric lore – but that from this to his last film Gertrud (1964) he believed in portraying emotions in their fullest depth by what he used light and visuals and dialogue for and how, a specific style of his which could link to Ingmar Bergman as fellow Scandinavians but clearly following a quieter and subtle expansion of thoughts opposite to Bergman’s more literary and full-front expansions of the emotions. Even the upfront and stylistically bold Vampyr is quiet and subdued to what Bergman would do in films like Hour of the Wolf (1968), and other baroque horror films and experimental work in the ages, directing itself to tackling the concept of unknown fears methodically as a film like Gertrud and its view on the pains of wilting love. And the more I realise it too, despite the vast contrast, the more I see how striking and rich the later minimalist films are visually but through different ways, only in them the changing expressions of the actors’ faces being far more emphasised as being as deep as the settings around them. I wonder as The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) finally is available in the United Kingdom by the end of the year, how the silent visual techniques of Vampyr and the emotions of the human face meld and I can finally see Maris Falconetti’s Joan and her face in its fullness outside of still images. This year has been, amongst other bookmarks in my cinematic interest, the one where I properly introduced myself to Dreyer’s work, outside of seeing Ordet years ago, and the backwards drift into his silent films will build the foundations from how Vampyr and Getrud can exist in his same crafting hands as they already have been proved to be.

When I finally ‘got’ Vampyr it also became a true horror film, my heart pounding and a sense of unnerved energy to the film taking over. Dreyer just want to make a vampire film because he could, and the idea of a future auteur praised by critics willingly, and with great interest, stepping his toes into a much spat-upon genre and working at his hardest as with his later dramas is a wonderful image. That it is made by Carl Theodor Dreyer at his most experimental means that, even if the characters are surface level only, most of the baggage that ruins genre’s purity is obliterated as he instead provides a full depth to the proceeding’s images. A talented director of light and space, the environments fill in the depth just as much, the continuation of what Robert Wiene did in The Hands of Orlac (1924) (review here) in using places around the human (or unhuman) figures and making them as much part of the characters. Like German Expressionism, I cannot fathom a Dreyer film in colour even if it could be exquisite. In beautifully startling black and white, the damage and scratches dealt to Vampyr by history and terrible fate, only surviving in German and French language prints, does not stop its visuals from being overwhelming. Said damage could also add to the film; its mist and fogged atmosphere the result of an accident with the film that inspired Dreyer to thread the choking greyed look of the film. Again, this first viewing is clearly not enough for me to fully comprehend what I saw, but I feel that it’s a film of true worth, certainly for the season of written reviews the kind of discovery one hopes for as well as the reliable favourites you rewatch. I will have to deconstruct and enjoy the film further and see if I will write a deeper review another day down the line.

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