Explore
The Witch and the Hysteric: The Monstrous Medieval in Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan
Alexander Doty and Patricia Clare Ingham
2014
0 Ungluers have
Faved this Work
Login to Fave
Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 Swedish/Danish film Häxan (known under its English title as Witchcraft Through the Ages) has entranced, entertained, shocked, and puzzled audiences for nearly a century. The film mixes documentary with fantasy, history with theatrics, religion and science, the medieval past and modern culture. This uncanny content is compounded by the film’s formal strangeness, a mixture of quasi-documentary with fictional episodes, illustrated lectures alongside docudrama recreations and dreamscapes. Is this a documentary, a horror flick, or both? In this chapbook, authors Doty and Ingham argue that the puzzle of Christensen’s Häxan might be unraveled by attending to the film’s provocative and paradoxical medievalism, its fantasmatic rendering of the witch as a medieval monster. Such monstrous medievalism, moreover, sheds considerable light on the politics of gender and culture once the witch is rendered a female figure in a time out-of-joint.
This book is included in DOAB.
Why read this book? Have your say.
You must be logged in to comment.
Rights Information
Are you the author or publisher of this work? If so, you can claim it as yours by registering as an Unglue.it rights holder.Downloads
This work has been downloaded 394 times via unglue.it ebook links.
- 49 - pdf (CC BY-NC-SA) at OAPEN Library.
- 166 - pdf (CC BY-NC-SA) at Unglue.it.
Keywords
- Cultural Studies
- Film
- Film theory & criticism
- Film, TV & radio
- Films, cinema
- Horror
- medieval studies
- The arts
- thema EDItEUR::A The Arts::AT Performing arts::ATF Films, cinema::ATFA Film history, theory or criticism
- Witchcraft
Links
DOI: 10.21983/P3.0074.1.00Editions