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31 October 2024 Bielefeld (Germany)
Film + Music Festival: Halloween-Special: Häxan (The Witch)
Selke brothers, Cello and piano - Lichtwerk
Program Info: Witches' Sabbath, torture chamber, rack, pillory, pyre: As a Halloween special, a semi-documentary horror classic about the witch hunt. Due to its explicit depictions of violence and nudity, Benjamin Christensen's film Häxan sparked international protests after its premiere in Sweden, as a result of which the film was censored and mutilated. It wasn't until its director released it into cinemas again in 1941 that the original version was shown abroad.
Benjamin Christensen deals with the treatment of witches over time and in particular with witch hunts, necromancy and visions of saints. He shows how witches brew mysterious mixtures or bewitch people, how they are put on trial and finally tortured and killed. With its special effects, animation techniques and an expressionistic aesthetic that still gives gothic-loving contemporaries that eerie, goosebump feeling to this day, the film is an almost unjustly forgotten masterpiece. By the way, the director and screenwriter Christensen gave himself the role of the devil...
But beyond all calculation with spectacle and breaking taboos, Häxan is an educational film and at the same time an angry, indignant indictment of misogyny in society up to the present day.
The Selke brothers “explore textures – creaking strings, beaten wood – (…) with the intensity of a horror film.”
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