Realizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible by Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers (review)

Realizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible is an eye-opening study of the masterful silent innovative 1922 film Haxan (The Witch—the Danish word for witch is heksen). The book makes significant contribution to film studies. It will also be of interest to anthropologists, critical theorists, women's studies, folklorists, scholars of the occult, intellectual historians and historians of ideas, legal experts, sociologists, and psychologists. This book shows that the film Haxan blends spectacle and argument with use of early twentieth-century cinematographic techniques. The authors brilliantly reveal how Christiansen translates his profound insight into artistic representation. The focus of the film and its analysis in this book incorporate staged historical scenes of satanic initiation, confession under torture, possession, exorcism, and misogynistic persecution.

Christensen gathered a vast library of historical and contemporary sources together for his film. He draws on visual accounts with direct reference to writings, art, and literature on witchcraft and witch trials from the Middle Ages through the Reformation and after. For example, chapter 4 notes how Christensen draws links between diagnostic strategies for identifying nervous disease and forms of interrogation used by magistrates of the Inquisition outlined in guides such as the infamous Malleus maleficarum (1487). Such handbooks created forms of the witch stereotype by which Inquisitors could "match" their findings with the accused witch. Realizing the Witch shows us Christensen's use of historical sources. In chapter 5, Christensen draws on Johann Weyer's De praestigiis daemonism (1563) to reveal the complex nature of the sensual, if not sexual, relationship of the practice of exorcism. Chapter 6 reveals the appearance of possession, ecstasy, and insanity relating to the reach of demonic influence. The authors show how Christensen draws from the neurological writings of Jean-Martin Charcot and his followers, especially the volumes they produced in the Bibliotheque diabolique that explicitly deal with the relationship between witchcraft and nervous disease.

The filmmaker's weaving together of documents and of the culture of demonology gives the film not only the documentary power of representing knowledge of the witch with "objective criteria," but also "gives the witch life" (p. 13), according to Baxstrom and Meyers. Christensen creates an artistic work filled with irrationalities that make the witch real and plausible while at the same time tempering such representation with a psychological diagnosis of the phenomena in order to correct the errors of belief in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that led to witch trials.

Like Favret-Saada (Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage [Cambridge University Press, 1980]), Christensen provides a diagnosis of the symptoms of the viral catching power (contagieux) of the witch by bringing the powers that animate them to life on the screen. Both Favret-Saada and Christensen acknowledge that witchcraft is difficult to study because of the inaccessible materiality of the witch to anthropologists and believers, since witchcraft is usually performed clandestinely and sorcery constitutes an invisible mobile field of force. While others such as John Ernst, Jytte Jensen, Casper Tybjerg, Arne Lunde, and Jack Stevenson have examined Haxan, none have exposed, as do the authors of this book, Christensen's vision that it is not enough to think about the film but instead that "one must think with it" (p. 9).

Christensen advances the thesis that the appearance of witchcraft in Europe during the late medieval and early modern periods was actually due to unrecognized manifestations of clinical hysteria and psychosis. The symptoms of hysteria were thus misattributed to the being in league with Satan. Christensen attempts to allow the cinematographic possibility of making nature speak. Christenson thus offers a diagnosis of the phenomena of the witch as a form of nervous disease described by psychologists and its uncanny (unheimlich) abnormal behaviors. Thus diagnosis of nervous disease as a more humane way of dealing with the "witch" is substituted for the religious, superstitious, demonological thinking leading...