Realizing the Witch

Benjamin Christensens Hxan (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, Hxan 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 Hxan 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. Hxan 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 Christensens attempt to tame the irrationality of the witch risked validating the very "nonsense" that such an effort sought to master and dispel. Hxan 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.