The story of the movie part 10
May 10, 2018
Witch
Häxan (1922)
Benjamin Christensen
The history of film is a flowing history. It is constantly changing. It is not the soil that is washed to the shore by the ocean tide and dried and solidified. On the contrary, it outputs a steady stream of power, which is the surging waves themselves.
Just like in 15 years, one of Asia's most important film festivals, the 20th anniversary of the Busan Film Festival, invited 73 directors, scholars, and film critics to select the list of Asia's top 100 films and top ten directors. In the "movie history" selected by this vote, we can see that the influence of the "fifth generation of directors" that cannot be avoided in the history of Chinese film has continued to weaken.
Of course, this is not a conclusive conclusion. In fact, it is a certain "freshness" emerging from the list that allows us to confirm that the history of film is still evolving, and this is always worthy of joy.
As mentioned in the previous article, the Swedish school began to go to Hollywood after Victor Sjostrom filmed "The Ghost Carriage", and the Swedish film production was about to fall into a crisis of complete stagnation. Before 1923, when Hollywood further ruled the world (perhaps Germany could be spared for the time being), it was two Danish directors who were still exporting works for the Swedish film company.
One of these two directors is Carl Theodore Delaire , who will have a very important influence in the future , and the other is the protagonist Benjamin Christensen. In fact, the prosperity of Danish films is even earlier than neighboring Sweden in time.
In the first ten years of the beginning of the 20th century, Danish film contributed to the first film star in the history of film, Aste Nelson (the American actress Florence Lawrence was earlier, but the influence was relatively limited. In the continental United States). She starred in a series of movies that have nothing to do with reality, but are still sexy and dancing after suffering a "destined" catastrophe, which was called by George Sadul as "a bitter" as a portrayal of the future Hollywood movies. I created a silhouette and provided it with two indispensable accessories, slut and kissing.
Christensen started in such a Danish film environment, but he filmed "Mysterious X" in 1913 to show that it is completely different from mainstream Danish films. This film has extraordinary creativity in lighting. , Its benefits in light will continue to Christensen’s subsequent works and become one of his symbols .
He also seemed to foresee in advance that the hollow connotation of Danish films would lead to its decline (in 1928, only one film was produced in Denmark throughout the year!). Christensen moved to Stockholm several years earlier than Dreyer. He "escaped" Denmark, and when he arrived in Sweden, the Swedish school, which had not found its own way, was still deeply influenced by Danish films. And when the Swedish school was preparing to cross the ocean to enter Hollywood and Europe "falls", Christensen was still in Sweden to rectify the name of Nordic movies.
The name rectification work is this "Witch", which was produced in 1922. This year, the father of documentary, Flahadi, completed the "Nanuk of the North" called "The Origin of Documentary". Vlahadi asked Inuit Nanuk (the real name is Arakalialak) to repeat the original hunting method (this hunting method has been eliminated by the Inuit, and the film is also full of rehearsals and fakes. dispute). In "The Witch", Christensen allowed the actors to "restore" those horrific scenes of the Middle Ages: the inquisition tortured witches to extract confessions, the baby was thrown into the pan, the witch kissed Satan's ass, the witch carried her husband and the devil's tryst .
When watching movies, I have been thinking about the impact of these images on the audience in the 1920s. In fact, many countries did encounter screening bans, and American audiences would not be able to see it until 1928. Of course, Christensen was somewhat restrained, not obsessed with creating horror scenes that scared the audience away. The film is divided into seven sections to unfold, telling his investigation on the "survival report" of medieval witches in the form of "thesis". If it is too horrible, I am afraid that most viewers will not be able to finish the movie.
And this is due to the fact that "Witch" has inherited the innovative lighting in "Mysterious X". Christensen used lighting in many scenes with exaggerated makeup and modeling to create a kind of between funny and horror. In time, a strange look and feel.
It is true to say that "The Witch" is unfolded in a thesis-like manner. This is also an image that has assumed a certain "science popularization" role with such a detailed and complex structure since the film was born. Perhaps it can be called the first well-conceived science and education film.
The seven chapters of the film can be roughly divided into three parts according to the theme.
The first three chapters outline the world view of early humans, as well as their imagination and cognition of witches. The film is interspersed with a lot of physical evidence of woodblock prints to prove the magic and crime of the witch: flying on a broomstick Specials), make aphrodisiacs for old women to control fresh meat and burn down the city. Of course, the source of magic comes from the devil.
At that time, people’s fear of the devil and hell reached an unimaginable level. When reading a certain Christian writer’s work many years ago, he also talked about even entering the Puritan era, the priest in the church tells the sinful nature of man’s total corruption, God In the time of holy anger and the horror of the devil and hell, many listeners were still terrified and fled from the crowded church. In the Middle Ages, this fear will only worsen.
The middle three chapters are based on the previous social environment discussion, telling the story of how witches were identified and "dictated" in that era. In the story, a family member is suspected to be a witch because of the illness of a member of the family. An old woman happened to come to beg. The family falsely accused the old woman of being a witch. After the Inquisition took over, she used coercive and profitable inducements to extort a confession. . The woman was forced to confess her guilt, and she even dragged down some people who used to insult her, and framed these people as her accomplices (although there is no such religious background, the Chinese should feel the same for this set of stories).
Around this story, two other examples were added: some young monks and women who had been ascetic for many years had only a little physical contact with the women, and they burned with lust, and they were also determined by the older monks to be the result of the witch's spell. Another example is that the madness of the nun often caused panic among the monastery companions, who often confessed to the result of the devil's temptation and coercion.
During the unfolding of these three chapters, the biggest surprise is undoubtedly the discovery of the old woman’s helpless confession, the use of close-up shots and the image of the old woman’s expression in "The Dilemma of Joan of Arc" which was born six years later. Here, Joan of Arc's tears is a classic scene in film history. There is no doubt that Christensen enlightened his fellow Danish compatriot Dreyer. Gombrich once said that the development of art forms is not the slave-like copying of original images, but the "modification" of original images before him. The artist will change the way of telling stories according to the existing new technology, and adjust the political concepts and emotional trends. Christensen’s original and Dreyer’s rewriting provide such a classic example.
The seventh and final chapter of the film is an analysis and summary of the tragic story told before. The director used some modern scientific cases to prove that the tragedy was caused by fear of the unknown, superstition and lack of tolerance. Christensen cited data that as many as 8 million witches were executed by the Inquisition in the Middle Ages. This number now seems to be a big fallacy.
According to the information I have read, the facts of historical research represented by Thomas Madden in the past 20 years show that the number of capital punishments imposed by the Inquisition is far lower than that of the secular courts, and even many "smart" criminals will deliberately do it. Desecrate words and deeds (or admit that you can use witchcraft) so that you can escape from the secular court and be transferred to the religious court. According to Madden, "the Inquisition has saved many innocent (or even not so innocent) people who might have been the victims of secular territory or mob rule." It's really interesting, it's a discourse almost completely different from the movie.
But it’s not a big deal. When the film is loaded with "content", it is inevitable that mistakes will be made. We all live according to the rule of "talking too much" and making films with "zero concept". Will watch a movie.
After making this thesis-like film "The Witch", Christensen first went to Berlin to be an actor, and then, like most outstanding European directors, went to Hollywood. It only exported a few mediocre movies in Hollywood. work. This reminds us again that Hollywood is no longer an unnamed village outside of Los Angeles, and its era of world domination has come.
Section 2 The Narrative Function of Early Films (1903-1918)
1 Cabilia (1914), Giovanni Pastrona
Intolerance (1916), D·W·Griffith
3 Ghost carriage Körkarlen (1921), Victor Sjostrom
4 Witch Häxan (1922), Benjamin Christensen
Image View of Dong Feiyu · WeChat ID: hickokjeans
View more about Häxan reviews
