Rage, lust, ambition, and obsession

Ahead of this Sunday's Academy Awards broadcast, in which the hit silent-era pastiche The Artist is up for Best Picture, David Denby in the latest issue of The New Yorker has a terrific piece on, among other things, the "lost style of acting":

The silent cinema hit the world like a hurricane, destroying élite notions of culture overnight. As a feature-length art form, it lasted less than twenty years, from 1912 to 1929, yet more than ten thousand features were made in that period in the United States alone. From the beginning, the silent cinema was an art devoted to physical risk and to primitive passions, to rage, lust, ambition, and obsession (silence made emotions more extreme in many ways), and it produced obsession in its huge audience. I’m hardly the first man to worship at the shrine of Louise Brooks’s careless but overwhelming appeal. “The Artist,” a likable spoof, doesn’t acknowledge that world of heroic ambition and madness—it’s bland, sexless, and too simple. For all its genuine charm, it left me restless and dissatisfied, dreaming of those wilder and grander movies.

Accompanying Denby's piece is a slide show, The Lost Stars of Silent Film. The title is a bit askew as its nine images present three of the great women of silent cinema — Greta Garbo, Lillian Gish, and Louise Brooks. One commenter there gripes that too many of the truly fine silent-film women go unrepresented altogether, and even I — who, like Denby, am reduced to bibbling tumescence at the existence of Louise Brooks — wouldn't allocate four of only nine slots to her. Still, I'm pleased to see it there.

On my iPad, the tablet version of Denby's article adds a video. It's Denby explicating Louise Brooks' backstage seduction scene in Pandora's Box. It's a scene that literally took my breath away the first time I watched it, and it still leaves me swooning many viewings later. Denby's video is not available for linking, alas. (My own say on Pandora's Box is at DVD Journal.)

In related matters...

The 16th annual Kansas Silent Film Festival starts tomorrow at Washburn University. Among the numerous delights there will be the newly restored version of Georges Méliès 1902 ur-classic, A Trip to the Moon, which featured so prominently in Hugo.

Next month, the 17th annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival headlines a new restoration of Abel Gance’s epic Napoleon, "the Holy Grail of silent masterpieces," with a new score conducted live by composer Carl Davis, at the Art Deco Paramount Theatre in Oakland. "Due to the expense, technical challenges, and complicated rights issues involved, no screenings are planned for any other American city." Hoo boy!

Finally, at We Are Movie Geeks, TCM Celebrates THE ARTIST With List Of 10 Most Influential Silent Films. I appreciate that the list does hit "most influential" rather than just "most popular/familiar."

Watching "The Artist", feeling the "Vertigo"

Last night Elizabeth and I caught a SIFF Cinema screening of The Artist, which is already appearing on a number of 2011 Top 10 lists, occasionally in the #1 slot.

I found it attractively shot, charming, and enjoyable most of the time, though it didn't Wow me as much as I anticipated given the Oscar-buzzy hype and the lustrous trailer (see below). The story is too slight and too reliant on trite melodrama conventions (and big lifts from Singin' in the Rain), which fit the time period but don't, in my opinion, fully provide sufficient substance. The screenplay is curiously thin even given the faux-"silent film" format — partly, I think, due to a number of missed opportunities, especially in the second half. (And Penelope Ann Miller needs some stern words with her agent.)

On the other hand, the three leads — Jean Dujardin as a Douglas Fairbanks-like silent screen star washed up with the advent of the "talkies," Bérénice Bejo as the bit player who achieves Hollywood stardom, and Uggie the dog as the loyal pooch who saves the day — are marvelous and must be signed for a remake of The Thin Man, pronto. Elizabeth and I had already come to love Dujardin from the two French "OSS 117" spy-film spoofs (also directed by Michel Hazanavicius and featuring his wife Bejo), and now we learn the guy can dance Gene Kelly-style too. Yet it's Bejo who's the breakout star for me. She held her own as the co-lead with Dujardin, while doing it, as they say, backwards and in high heels. Together they have an easy chemistry, and I hope the success of The Artist means we'll be seeing more of both of them, singly and together, for years. And seriously, Uggie gives one of the best canine performances in decades.

As a pastiche of the black-and-white "silent" cinema of yore, The Artist is appealing and good-looking (though hardly accurate-looking), with some clever touches. However, the conceit wears thin without further narrative oomph starting around the half-way mark.

Trumping much of the good stuff on display, though, is one peculiar element that sore-thumbed a key scene for me: Late in the story, when Dujardin's George Valentin has hit rock bottom, having lost his career and his chance at true love, he wanders Hollywood like the Ghost of Movies Past. What jarred me during it is the choice for its musical scoring — Bernard Herrmann's "Scene d’Amour" from Hitchcock's 1958 masterpiece Vertigo (YouTubed here).

Now, I may be just a big ol' film geek, but it's not as if Vertigo is some obscure forgotten film, or that Herrmann's work isn't one of Hollywood's more famous and distinctive movie scores. I love Herrmann's music in Vertigo and others, but it threw me right out of The Artist as I was sitting there asking, almost out loud, "What the hell is music from Vertigo doing here?" Instead of joining George Valentin in his cinelicious despondency, I had visions of Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak dancing through my head.

By my lights, that particular motif doesn't wed itself naturally to the scene in The Artist. It's hardly an ideal bit of scoring for the moment. For one thing, using it is the very definition of uninspired, even in our pop culture of mashups and creative appropriation (which I agree can be artful and inspired).

Secondly, the piece is distracting as it brings to mind a real (and better) movie made nearly 30 years after the story's setting.

Thirdly and most damningly, it's almost mawkish as it tries hard to make us feel something, thus kneecapping any earned feeling the scene may elicit. To me, it felt as though someone was trying to tap my emotional memory of Vertigo and hijack it for the scene in The Artist, rather than crafting the scene so that it generated the emotional layering on its own.

During those minutes of being kicked out of the movie's narrative, my mind wandered. I was curious whether Herrmann's "Scene d’Amour" landed there initially as some temporary scratch track filler that Hazanavicius decided he liked well enough, or else using Herrmann's music was less expensive than rescoring the scene with an original piece.

So when I got home I did what people do when disconcerted in the 21st century: I googled. Here's what I found:

A.O. Scott's New York Times review notes the Vertigo lift as one of The Artist's built-in cineaste references.

According to the film's English press kit (PDF), Hazanavicius played mood music from vintage movies on the set:

The shoot being silent, did you give your actors much direction during the takes?

What I did was play music on the set and it literally carried them. So much so that at the end, they couldn’t do without it! I played mostly Hollywood music of the '40s and '50s: Bernard Herrmann, Max Steiner, Frank Waxman, but also George Gershwin, Cole Porter... I used SUNSET BOULEVARD a lot but I also played THE WAY WE WERE and even Philippe Sarde's music for THE THINGS OF LIFE. It's a beautiful melody and I knew Jean has a particular relationship with that theme. I didn't warn him the first time I played it and I knew that by playing it on set I'd trigger something during the take. That’s exactly what happened. I did the same with Bérénice when she arrives in hospital; I played the theme from LAURA, which she loves.

In the Chicago Sun-Times, Laura Emerick's 'The Artist' is director's love letter to early Hollywood includes this unhelpful quote from Hazanavicius:

"The 'Vertigo' music is here to help shape the emotional structure of the climax.... But it's also heard in the finale [of 'Vertigo'], and the theme worked perfectly here. It helps to create a sense of resolution."

Finally, an A.V. Club interview with Hazanavicius addresses the lift directly:

AVC: Like your OSS comedies, The Artist has a Hitchcock influence—you use Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo score for a pivotal moment in the movie. Was that intentional?

MH: For The Artist, the music from Vertigo came in post. I guess all the directors in France are influenced by Hitchcock, because he’s the perfect visual director, in my eyes. So I guess, yes, certainly he was an influence, but it wasn’t a reference. I mean, I wasn’t watching Hitchcock movies, I was watching silent movies. But when I was writing the script, I was listening to a lot of classical composers, and there was a lot of music from movies in that, and the music from Vertigo was one of them. So when we were editing, I went back to the script and told the composer, "There are nine narrative blocks where we need nine big scores." So I gave him all the points of what kind of emotion the music should have. And for that particular scene you're speaking of, I wanted something special. I wanted it to be the final movement. I wanted a slow love theme, and the music from Vertigo just fit perfectly. And it's not Herrmann's score, in fact, but the score re-orchestrated by Elmer Bernstein [from 1992].

After seeing that sequence cut together, our composer [Ludovic Bource] used that style as an influence for the rest of the music he created for other parts of the movie. I'll admit it's strange to have the music from another movie in your movie, but finally I chose to accept it.

Okay. So there's the answer. Not a very satisfying answer, but at least he addressed the question. I too love Herrmann's music and if I were writing a darkly moody love scene I'd have it in the background too. But it is indeed "strange" and it did toss me out of a key moment in The Artist. I recovered, of course, even if it did niggle at me until I got home and sought answers to my burning question online.

So file this post under Curiosity, qualified satisfaction of.

Happy birthday, "Papa Georges"

The release of Hugo is likely just a coincidence. Nonetheless, happy 150th birthday, Georges Méliès!

Mythical Monkey offers a bit of historical context here. Kristin at davidbordwell.net also provides some marvelous appreciation and perspective, plus plentiful links to more.

'Hugo' — Dear Martin Scorsese: Thank you for making a movie just for me

At Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL, I make a practice of not "reviewing" major studio movies currently in wide theatrical release, and I'm not about to start now. After all, the internet is so replete with film reviews and commentary that aggregation sites such as Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic will probably soon achieve their own Borg-like hive-mind sentience and enslave us all to rewrite our lives as three-act rom-com screenplays. No doubt you've already selected the professional, amateur, or webby pro-am hybrid critics/reviewers/pundits who speak to your personal cinematic sensibilities (I sure have). And — bottom line — no one's currently paying me to do so.

But I will say this much: Great Chaplin's ghost! Hugo sure in a damn fine movie.

It's the mighty Scorsese's charming, gorgeous, beating-hearts-on-sleeves love letter to "the magic of the movies" and the fun of storytelling (in all forms), and especially to the vintage cinema he has championed throughout his career. Regular readers here already know that Scorsese's and Hugo's unconcealed treasuring of silent-era greats such as Keaton, Chaplin, Lloyd, Fairbanks, and especially the pioneer at the center of the film's story, Georges Méliès, speaks right to my cinephilic lub-dubber.

Is this the Martin Scorsese we know from Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, The Departed, and Shutter Island? Arguably, no, although the sheer experienced filmcraft on display throughout Hugo is never short of masterly.

Instead, the Scorsese we get this time is the zealous collector and encyclopedic fanboy-turned-pro who for years I've found giving passionate cineaste testimonials on DVDs such as Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, The Public Enemy (wherein he appraises Cagney's performance as where "modern screen acting begins"), Jean Renoir's The Golden Coach and The River (Hugo's Monsieur Frick, as played by Richard Griffiths, looks a lot like Renoir, the scenes with the steam train engineer and his fireman quote outright Renoir's 1938 film La bête humaine, and Renoir's name appears in the closing credits list of Acknowledgements), and a dozen or more other films. And that's not including the full-length commentaries to his own movies.

Throughout Hugo, we see the love light in Scorsese's eyes, and it's flickering at 24 frames per second. 

Here's an "easter egg" I'm looking forward to when I get the movie on Blu-ray — name-checking all the period movie posters that festoon several of Hugo's scenes. I caught Fantômas and Judex (two pulp hero adventure serials directed by Louis Feuillade), Charley Chase's Why Men Work (as "Pourquoi les hommes travaillent"), a poster of Chaplin without a film title (rights issues?), a colorful illustration of Chaplin forebear Max Linder, and others panning by too quickly to capture in my memory.

Even Méliès had his predecessors in the Lumière brothers, and they receive a significant nod as Méliès recounts how he got started in filmmaking during a carnival screening of their "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station." Later, in a montage sequence, we glimpse just enough of several later films to identify them, such as the The Great Train Robbery, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Intolerance, The Thief of Bagdad, Tumbleweeds (William S. Hart's last movie), Keaton's The General, Chaplin's The Kid, and Louise Brooks in Pandora's Box.

I'd love the eventual disc to add a track that annotates Hugo's filmic homages, for they are abundant and pointing them out would create added value illumination. (Hey, if anybody on the production end wants a hand with that, just contact me here, 'kay?)

Plus, Hugo speaks between the frames about the creative process, both explicitly in the film's narrative and implicitly in the way it was made. I can't shake the notion that we're glimpsing Scorsese celebrating the tortuous, thrilling, clockpunky act of movie-making itself, like Chaplin using The Circus as a vehicle to comment about the often precarious art and craft of being funny.

The film aims itself right at my limbic system even in its incidentals. For instance, the whole thing is set in my own mind's-eye image of romanticized Paris at the turn of the 20th, with Django Reinhardt playing his gypsy jazz in a café where James Joyce shares a table with Salvador Dalí. We get those mammoth steam locomotives barreling through Paris' Gare Montparnasse station, so evocative since I was a kid. And suffusing the setting and storytelling — all that brass clockwork, gears within gears; visit my house and you'll see that I have a thing for old clocks.

Hugo is being marketed as a "kids film," and I guess technically it is that. Its screenplay is conventionally structured enough to attract parents looking for nonthreatening mainstream "holiday family film" fare. Sacha Baron Cohen's Inspector Gustav comes within his mustache's width of tipping over into Disney cartoon villain mode before being given some redeeming dimension when it counts.

But it's not only a "kids film." There's plenty on tap for those of us in the higher age brackets, especially those of us whose love of movies encompasses far more than the latest 'splodey summer blockbusters.

And yet I'm so glad it is a "kids film."

For one thing, here's a movie in which the plot, and therefore our two child leads, drives forward with an appreciation not only of movies — but also of books: of reading, of discovering the world and engaging your authentic self via leather-bound covers and the Narnia-like expanses of bookshops and libraries.

Precocious Isabelle (Chloë Moretz) finds joy in trying out new words as she leads Hugo (Asa Butterfield) from his clockwork warren within the Paris train station walls through the looking-glass/wardrobe/pirate ship/TARDIS that is Christopher Lee's (!) bookshop, a storefront cathedral so piled high with shelves and stacked-up volumes that he might be living in an Escher drawing. To Isabelle the shop is "Neverland and Oz and Treasure Island all wrapped into one." The fact that she can also recite Christina Rossetti gets them out of a sticky predicament with Inspector Gustav early on. Give her another 15, 20 years and there's my dream girl. (In fact, she's Elizabeth, so big win there.)

As the plot's gears start turning faster, Hugo repays her in kind by leading her into a story of their own beyond the written page. "This might be an adventure," she observes, "and I've never had one before, outside of books at least." 

While I'd say that Lee's bibliophile shopkeeper could have used a moment or two of his own for some development, he earns his keep in the film by giving Hugo the talisman he needs right when he needs it most: an edition of Robin Hood that, the man says, is innately meant to be Hugo's. It's a moment that sets in motion Hugo's act of reigniting the storyteller's spark within morose old Méliès.

When they discover the missing clues they need to solve the mystery of the heartbreak embittering Isabelle's "Papa Georges," it happens within a library. There, the adult guide they encounter to get them into Act III isn't a wizard or a talking lion or a pirate. He's a movie buff and, most crucially, an author.

And the "reading is fundamental" angle is not conveyed with a heavy hand. It's naturally integral to the narrative and not slathered on like a dose of "good for you" broccoli on a dish of ice cream.

During the showing, I observed the kids packing our audience — ages 6-13, I'd say. I was pleased to see them so engrossed and entertained. They squealed as if opening birthday presents during the recreations of the authentic "old timey" Méliès films. I was happily surprised when they fully engaged with the scene where the two leads sneak into a showing of Harold Lloyd's famous Safety Last, the kids in our audience responding to Lloyd dangling from the clockface as much as Hugo and Isabelle did. They laughed at a quick gag from Keaton's The General. (What they'd think of Louise Brooks and the entirety of Pandora's Box should probably be run by their parents first.)

And when it was all over, they applauded. 

So now I'm wondering: Given Hugo's critical and commercial success, and given its likely "long tail" staying power as a Scorsese film, is it possible that we'll now see a generation of kids grow up with more familiarity of silent-era cinema, from Méliès forward, and with a fuller understanding of where the movies they enjoy come from — than any generation since ... well, since ever, even their great- or great-great grandparents who were those first movie audiences?

I'm going to click Publish Post hoping so.

Thanks, Mr. S.

Music: Django Reinhardt
Near at hand: Gifts from London for Judy and Dan

Octoberfilms: Häxan / Witchcraft Through the Ages — Danish diabolism

So far, my Octoberfilms posts this year have focused on the movies of Vincent Price, in honor of his centennial, starting with The House on Haunted Hill, The Abominable Dr. Phibes & Dr. Phibes Rises Again, and continuing through his cycle of films for Roger Corman and AIP loosely inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe. (I'll be coming back to those shortly.)

But my loyal readers here also know that I'm a fan of movies from the era before sound technology changed cinema forever in 1927. You all know that I'm a regular fanboy of the silent-era comedies, notably (but not exclusively) those of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd. Both Lloyd ("Haunted Spooks," 1920) and Keaton ("The Haunted House," '21) offered their own twists on Halloween-worthy tales, though naturally in shorts showcasing their distinctive comic spins.

On the other hand, some of horror film history's great features likewise come from those years. I'm talking such genre-shaping classics as The Golem (1915/1920), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), John Barrymore's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), Nosferatu (the first "Dracula" in 1922), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), The Cat and the Canary (1927), and The Man Who Laughs (1928).

So I'm going to pick one I haven't pulled out of the DVD shelves for several years. Out of all of them, it's the film that probably best falls under the subgenre category that cinema historians and academics classify as Holy Crap WTF That's Weird. It's from Sweden, 1922.

And yeah, what was it about 1922 anyway? The same year Murnau's Nosferatu showed the world how to make a vampire movie, and Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse took a near-supernatural journey to Berlin's criminal underworld, a film opened in Sweden that was to become notorious for its bold depictions of torture, madness, carnality, and — most memorably — horrific acts performed by and for bestial, nightmarish demons, including Satan himself. But while Nosferatu, The Phantom of the Opera, and all the others presented their stories as fiction, filmmaker Benjamin Christensen's Häxan appeared in the guise of a documentary, its very realism at the heart of its hypnotic allure and its scandalous notoriety.

Officially banned outside Sweden for decades due to graphic imagery and an unabashed anti-clerical theme, Häxan has grown into a culty sort-of-classic that for over half a century you might hear about but rarely, if ever, got a chance to actually see.

Is it true that it displays witches cavorting naked with lusty devils? Is a baby really drained of blood before it's tossed into a stew pot? What's this about women lining up to kiss Satan's bulbous ass? Inquisitional torture? Flying on broomsticks? Hysterical nuns? Sacrilege and perversion? Demonic orgies? Otherworldly monstrosities emerging from between an old crone's legs? And it's a documentary? And is there really a version narrated by Beat generation writer and hip icon William S. "The Naked Lunch" Burroughs, complete with acid jazz soundtrack?

It's all true. Häxan (pron. "hexen," meaning "witches") was long available only in rare, diminished forms, the most well known being a 1968 re-edit given the title Witchcraft Through the Ages. That abbreviated version sports the add-on Burroughs' narration and an anarchic musical score featuring jazz violinist Jean-Luc Ponty. 

The best way to check out this infamous curio is the DVD under the Criterion Collection logo. Criterion's disc offers a strikingly beautiful print of the fully restored and re-tinted Häxan, pairing it with the Burroughs version. Its superb audio track features a new score recreated from the film's original list of musical cues.

Plus, Criterion maintains its reputation for delivering a generous assortment of supportive supplemental material — including an audio commentary by Danish silent film scholar Casper Tybjerg, outtakes and test shots, and click-through selections from the centuries-old documents writer/director Christensen used for his diabolical source material.

I'll get into those later on in this post. For now, though, let's pull back the cowl on what I like to call...

The Reefer Madness of devil-worshipping witchcraft movies

It should be stated that Häxan is a documentary to roughly the degree that Citizen Kane is a biopic of William Randolph Hearst. Ostensibly an exposé of religious persecution born from ignorance of science, Häxan can be easily classified as a masterpiece of silent horror — or, when filtered through the bong water of the psychedelic '60s to become Witchcraft Through the Ages, as a trippy exercise in surreal pop filmmaking extravagance.

Christensen drew information and inspiration from the dreaded Malleus Maleficorum (The Hammer of Witches), a 15th century how-to manual on the detection, persecution, and torture of witches, a book Christensen called "the most scurrilous document in the history of the world." Häxan blends documented fact, outrageous fiction, objective observation, hallucination, social commentary, and different levels of representation to keep us from ever being too certain what the director is up to.

Christensen opens the film with a calculated deception titled "Chapter 1: Sources," a dry lecture complete with slideshow of medieval woodcuts and a pointer stick entering the frame to guide our education. So for the first thirteen minutes or so, we're given a classroom course in the cosmology, mythology, and social orders that generated witchcraft hysteria, a contagion that ravaged Europe like a virulent plague throughout the Middle Ages. The approach is academic and condescending toward the ignorance and pious malice that turned harmless ancient folk beliefs into powerful tools for repression and Church-sanctioned mass murder.

But that's just the canny set-up for Häxan's first twist. "Chapter 2: 1488" dramatizes a witch's lair in the darkest of Dark Ages. The decomposed corpse of a hanged thief is relieved of a finger ring — and the finger — as the witch comments that from the odor it's clear that the poor bugger was left swinging a bit too long. She then drops the finger into a potion vat. Various acts of witchery and deviltry play out on elaborate sets and with clever special effects (including stop-motion animation).

The intertitle cards continue a sense of the lecture mode, but soon the film slides into audacious theatricality, replacing a lecturer's notes with boldly visualized vignettes that pull us into a medieval world where demonic beings and profane witches' Sabbaths are as real as the filth, diseases, and squalid conditions that marked European life for centuries.

Christensen goes to great lengths to underline the fact that to the medieval mind sorcery and Satanic presence were not mere superstition. This deeply rooted belief in the existence of witchcraft and its heretical nature bred an "antidote" that was in reality every bit as pernicious as the Hell-spawned forces were believed to be.

So in "Chapter 3: The Trials" and "Chapter 4: The Torture" we witness a clerical tribunal employing brutal confessional aids on an old woman. It's her forced confession that springs the viewer into the most eye-popping and famous scenes in Häxan. As she describes giving birth to demonic "children" — nightmarish insectoid beings straight out of H.P. Lovecraft — and a Satanic Sabbath, women young and old revel in gleeful desecration of holy symbols and partake of unholy acts that include flying through the air on broomsticks, feasting on toads and unbaptized babies, and cheerfully having sex with hideous demons.

Subsequent chapters — there are seven in all — further the roles of the witch-hunters. These religious zealots moved in packs from village to village, ready to perform the most extreme penalties on anyone considered the least bit suspicious or deserving. A victim's innocence was at best an inconvenience difficult to prove, and even that proof might come via methods that left the accused just as dead as a confession would leave her.

As if the devils Sabbath scene wasn't sufficient, Christensen guaranteed Häxan's notoriety by depicting the Church's holy officers as fat, leering, deceitful barbarians more interested in sadism than in dispensing their Lord's benevolent justice. This anti-clericalism may have endeared Häxan to the Surrealists, but in predominantly Catholic countries it helped arm the censors with further ammunition to use against it.

Not even convents are immune to Satan's devastating influences, even though flagellation and self-torture were means of purifying oneself against the rampant diabolism. When Sister Cecilia is overcome by his tempting power, the entire nunnery is immediately gripped by madness, blasphemy, and a frenzy of dancing, a scene that's as humorous as it is unnerving.

In Häxan's final scenes, "Chapter 7: 1921," Christensen returns his narrative to solid documentary mode. He parallels the medieval practitioners and victims of witchcraft with modern victims of mental disorder, Freud's concept of female hysteria, and other more (relatively) enlightened social stigmas. The pop psychology and real-world flatness of this section render it less engaging than what came before, and sometimes Christensen's reach for meaning yields unintended results — a statement that witches no longer fly on broomsticks cuts to a woman pilot taking off in her biplane. Similarly, a sauna is equated with a witch's cauldron.

So, yep, there's a taint of 1920s misogyny here. It's mild and even rather quaint now even as it accidentally sets up some parallel between the horrific misogynist hysteria of the Middle Ages and the more antiseptic yet still harmful attitudes prevalent five centuries later.

It's all mesmerizing, voyeuristic, and often more than a bit goofy. The film's uneven flow and varying tone range from ribald humor to macabre excess to coldly objective scientific study. Often it's so bold even by today's standards that it seems as though Christensen was curious to see how much he could get away with. And fortunately it has all aged remarkably well.

The Devil's in the details

Christensen is one of the unsung technical masters of the silent era. Born in Denmark in 1879, he had a varied career before he entered the Danish film industry as an actor and writer in 1912. His early films have a visual sophistication that has invited comparisons to D.W. Griffith and other renowned innovators.

In Häxan, Christensen's dense atmosphere of gloomy superstition is bolstered by an expert use of light and shadow. Silhouette, tableau, and framing are often used for stark theatrical effect. This mastery of lighting effects, combined with beautiful — some might say painterly — compositions, found expression in Richard Louw's remarkable scenery and the photography by Johan Ankerstjerne, Svensk Filmindustri's chief cinematographer. In its day, Häxan was notorious within the Swedish film world for its abundant use of close-ups, then considered improper because the technique blew up the human face in all its raw nakedness to unnatural proportions.

To modern eyes, the special effects are crude but no less effective for it. The demons are masterworks of design and makeup effects. The massive, tongue-wagging Satan — played by Christensen himself — is a realistic depiction of medieval imagery, masculine and lustful and obscene. A skeletal horse walking through a demonic bacchanal is clearly an old-fashioned panto technique, but it's damn creepy all the same. A miniature stop-motion demon clawing through a door remains a startling sight, the camera dispassionately observing its work as if we're watching a documentary on termites.

As an early exercise in near-surrealism, atmosphere, and imaginative techniques, Häxan's influence on 20th century filmmakers, notably Luis Buñuel and Val Lewton, should not be underestimated.

After Häxan, Christensen's reputation rested mainly on his (note the title) Seven Footprints to Satan (1929), an American-made satire of — get this — Hollywood musicals.

William S. Burroughs and Witchcraft Through the Ages

The best-known incarnation of Häxan is the shortened re-edit titled Witchcraft Through the Ages and narrated by William S. Burroughs, of The Naked Lunch fame. This 1968 release was prepared by British filmmaker and distributor Antony Balch, who had previously worked with Burroughs in making a number of short films. Percussionist Daniel Humair wrote the chaotic '60s-bop score. The jazz combo features, among others, Jean-Luc Ponty on violin.

Burroughs' voice opens Witchcraft Through the Ages with a droning incantation against a black screen. His one-note monotone sets the style for the remainder of his narration, which consists primarily of English translations of the original intertitle cards. (The few intertitles that remain are in an English translation.) It says something about the power of silent cinema that Burroughs' narration adds nothing to the goings-on unfolding on the screen. Indeed, it detracts from the full scope of Christensen's work

Still, it's a memorable curiosity that remains evocative of the 1960s and an era of experiments in expression. The score fits the imagery quite well, though it may come across as harsh or abrasive to modern ears.

Witchcraft Through the Ages clocks in at an hour and 16 minutes, compared to Häxan's hour and 45. Possibly still popular on college campuses, Witchcraft Through the Ages might just be best viewed through a haze of sweetly scented smoke.

About the Criterion DVD

Criterion's disc presents the Swedish Film Institute's restoration of Häxan, which began with the creation of a fine-grain master from the original camera negative. The intertitles, most of which had been lost, were replaced with new film titles. They're presented here in the original Swedish with optional English subtitles.

Then the SFI recreated the tinting that had originally been present in theatrical prints of Häxan, bringing this version much closer to what audiences might have seen at the time of its original release.

Naturally some defects in the film stock remain. Expect minor speckling and a little wavery framing on the left-hand side. Nonetheless, this print is superb. Detail and depth are remarkably crisp. The black levels — vital in this film — are solid and true. The tinting tones, chiefly dark blues and ambers, enhance the visuals without appearing oversaturated.

In a word, it looks great.

The musical score

Silent films were seldom watched in actual silence. Huge cinema "palaces" often featured chamber orchestras. For this Criterion Collection release, film music specialist Gillian Anderson attempted to recreate the music played at Häxan's Danish premiere on November 7, 1922. She based the score on a list of musical cues printed in the theater's weekly program notes and conducted an 11-piece ensemble from the Czech Film Orchestra in Prague in June 2001.

A menu item called The Häxan Score provides notes on the score plus a playlist of the 18 titles used to recreate the original music. Familiar titles include segments from Schubert's Unfinished Symphony and Rosamunde Overture, Wagner's Tannhauser, Mozart's Titus Overture, Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, and Ave Maria. For a nifty feature, click the music title to jump to the segment in Häxan that features the music selected.

The score is available in Dolby Digital 5.0 and Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo. Clean, solid, and free of distortion, both options sound fine.

Witchcraft Through the Ages is also presented in its original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.33:1 and likewise was derived from a 35mm fine-grain master. It's untinted and displays a great deal more wear than the restoration of Häxan. But it looks and sounds fine. Its Jean-Luc Ponty soundtrack is available only in Dolby 1.0.

The supporting supplements

The scene-specific audio commentary track is provided by Danish silent film scholar Casper Tybjerg. Erudite and with an encyclopedic knowledge of things Christensen, Tybjerg may not be the most riveting audio-track scholar (Dr. Mabuse's David Kalat having set a gold standard), but he keeps his commentary moving forward and doesn't permit the great gaps of dead air that dog the commentaries of some other "historical" discs. He has a pleasing voice and does a thorough job of fleshing out the context of Christensen's work, illuminating the production itself, and detailing the sources that Häxan was built from. Among other worthwhile moments, Tybjerg soundly refutes the common figure (used in Häxan) of eight million women put to death during the era of the witch hunts. Explaining where that figure originated, Tybjerg gives us a more accurate figure of some 40-50 thousand women murdered — still a ghastly sum by any measure.

In 1941, Christensen filmed an eight-minute Director's Introduction for a re-release of Häxan. It's offered here in Swedish with English subtitles. Addressing his audience on a small set that looks more like a doctor's office than a movie studio, Christensen notes that even in our era of sound technology adding a vocal track to Häxan would diminish its effect. He then offers a preamble for things to come with the intellectual objectivity of a genial scientist introducing a biology lecture. One of the highlights of this segment is a plausible theory behind the common witches' trope of flight through the air.

Bibliothèque Diablolique provides an annotated click-through tour of the centuries-old woodcuts, church wall paintings, and other illustrations Christensen used in "Chapter 1: Sources." The illustrations and commentary occupy roughly 115 frames, including an extensive bibliography by Casper Tybjerg. Fans of The Exorcist will recognize the ancient Near East statue of a winged demon seen in that movie.

A click-through stills gallery contains 40 photographs from the sets and production of Häxan.

A four-and-a-half minute collection of Outtakes gives up footage from a reel of test shots that include pre-production footage from the convent set, rehearsal close-ups of an actress playing a nun "trying out a variety of ungodly titters," and test shots for the scenes of witches in flight — with Christensen himself playing the flying witch.

Finally, the keep-case's pull-out liner notes booklet (reproduced at Criterion's site) is a handy compendium of facts and commentary by Chris Fujiwara, who writes on film for Hermenaut, The Boston Phoenix and other publications. He details Häxan's history and influence in a casual yet scholarly manner. The booklet also includes two pages of insight into the music of Häxan, prepared by Gillian Anderson.

Nightmares before Christmas

Whether as a unique feature of your annual Halloween video fest, or as an addition to the growing collection of silent classic restorations becoming available on DVD, or if your aim is to induce a lifetime of nightmares in small children, this is the disc you're looking for. As an exegesis on the damaging effects of superstition and religious distortion used as a pretext for harming others — sadly, a sickness still prevalent throughout the world today — it makes a fine companion to Carl Sagan's excellent treatise on pernicious fantasies both ancient and modern, The Demon-Haunted World. And as another example of the work that The Criterion Collection is doing for us cinephiles, this restoration of a remarkable work by a filmmaker who deserves greater name recognition gives, you might say, the Devil his due. (All apologies to Peter Cook.)

Music: Susannah McCorkle
Near at hand: The Film Director's Intuition by Judith Weston