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| surely someone remade this as an album cover in the 80's |
Watched: 10/19/2024
Format: Criterion
Viewing: First
Director: Benjamin Christensen
What an incredible film.
I mean, obviously. This is a silent film that has thrived well into the modern era, so I'm no genius for noticing that it's pretty good.
Essentially a documentary/ presentation about the history of what we consider witches and witchcraft, the film feels a wee bit like an early Powerpoint at first, but it has a lot of territory to cover - like explaining how people a few hundred years ago thought the universe was constructed and the way in which that informed their entire worldview. If you literally believe Earth is the center of all things, flat, and God is sitting beyond line of sight directing celestial bodies for fun and profit, and Satan literally sits in a spot in a hole in a firey hole in the Earth, then you're going to be willing to believe he's also in your neighbor's house making it with the old lady who lives there.
The film doesn't just have fascinatingly well-constructed arguments, it's a prime example of the imagination, visual artistry and astounding craft of film by 1922. If you ever think silent film was primitive - my dudes... The movie creates scene after scene with unbelievable art and set design, costuming, lighting, optical and practical FX... many positively surreal. They show the cosmos at work from a Christian cosmology perspective, what people imagined was happening at Black Sabbaths, complete with the devil in many forms and troupes of demons alongside him, recreate scenarios for how a witch hunt could begin... And they also show very practical demonstrations of torture devices, etc...
It's hard to explain how incredible these visuals are, so...
The movie is scary, but not in the "ooOOOooo... witches!" way. Instead, it's a reminder that humans are terrible, the world is drowning in abuse of power and misogyny, and religion is used as an excuse to do all sorts of things your deity of choice would really frown at, especially done in His/ Her/ Their name. Basically, the film is about how we decide to abuse power, mostly for no reason, other than that we have a hard time seeing certain kids of people *as* people, and we fucking love to punch down.
They also discuss how the very world that people lived in, and the rules they believed they lived by - ie: Satan could just pop up, sex you, and now you're evil (I don't know, man) likely had profound psychological impact on people and led to all sorts of weirdness in the Middle Ages (for an example, we can look at Ken Russel's film The Devils, based on a true story). And led to nonsense like Salem.
Not so curiously, by the film's end, they leap to the modern era (of 1922) and rather than say "but we're so advanced now", they say "look, this is how we do the same shit now, only we dressed it up for polite society" by showing similar treatment of women in the modern era. Remember - 1922 is also when we'd, like, lock up our wife in an asylum for getting sick of our shit and talking back. And while there are plenty of 2024 examples, these are the good old days a whole lot of people think they want back because their context of the past are glimpses of old TV shows.*
Anyway, reality is a hellscape of terrors inflicted on each other for reasons that don't seem to make much more sense than believing our omnipotent friends would have us do that, and/ or we're really sickos who found ourselves in a position where we could abuse the shit out of people and make money doing it.
Never trust anyone who desires power.
Happy Halloween!
*the past mostly sucked, and the desire to go back to any period before a Star Trek future makes absolutely no sense to me. Unless you get to have a candlelit dinner with Myrna Loy. Then it makes sense.
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