Happy Halloween—because Halloween falls on a Saturday, the parade of demons began at midday as movie-goers dressed as zombies, witches and vampires to gather for the final “hellhouse” screenings at the Sydney Opera House, including the 1922 silent film Häxan.
This was the first year the Opera House planned a dedicated Halloween film program, drawing an audience that shared the excitement and brought film buffs, real witches and maybe a few spirits out from their usual haunts.
Häxan (Swedish for “The Witch,” also known as Witchcraft Through the Ages) is a Swedish-Danish film written and directed by Benjamin Christensen that presents itself as a hybrid “cultural history,” examining European beliefs about witchcraft, demons and the Devil. There were no English subtitles, the original Danish intertitles adding another layer of mystery to the experience.
Curator Stuart Buchanan’s premise for Hellhouse was to open up the definition of horror so that these films can be read as personal or psychological journeys of transformation.
On the big screen the crisp restored print makes the most of its inventive early filmmaking techniques—montage, elaborate models (including a beautiful moving diorama of hell), stop-motion and reverse motion—while its production, the most expensive Scandinavian silent of its era at roughly 1.5–2 million Swedish kronor, required elaborate sets, night shoots for its dark tone and extensive effects.
Häxan landed less as an examination of medieval cosmology than as a picture of a world centred around the female body—its sexuality, its suffering, and the power relations that govern it—where accused women are stripped, interrogated and forced to confess under the duress of actual implements of torture.
In one sequence an old woman under cross-examination confesses, and her words than inspire a fantasy sequence of a black mass and an orgy. In the film’s closing sections Christensen makes an explicit paralell with psychiatry and the treatment of hysteria, where medieval possession is juxtaposed with early-twentieth-century diagnoses of the same women as sleepwalkers, pyromaniacs or kleptomaniacs.
As a purported documentary, this is extremely problematic. Christensen himself appears as the leering Devil who enters women’s beds and presides over Sabbaths. His authorship only reinforcing the sense of a male fantasy projected onto the female body and framing the film as ‘research’, showing women as innocent victims, still frames them as material for male interpretation.
Because Häxan is silent, what remains is faces under torture. The women are never given spoken words that could assert an interior life or contradict that framing.
The screening was introduced by Australian contemporary composer Madeleine Cocolas, who performed her live soundtrack onstage, drawing on keyboard, drums, chimes and theremin alongside synthesisers and organ. Where the traditional pipe organ once underpinned silent-film screenings with its familiar liturgical weight, Cocolas’s score shifts between that inheritance and something more futuristic and elegiac—arpeggiating textures and spacious, Blade Runner-like atmospheres that heighten the film’s emotional cues of distress, persecution and dark camp.
Madeleine Cocolas, in her introduction, described her composition as responding to Häxan as a feminist text. Her soundtrack felt like a vital element in recontextualising the film for a contemporary audience. The score does not replace the silence but opens a parallel space for a new experiencing of the film, in which the images—especially the deliberate, bodily acts of resistance—register more directly as presence, and in which empathy for the women can surface. My favourite scene was the shot of two women squatting and pissing into pots before a house, then hurling the contents against the door as a deliberate curse.
Congratulations to the creatives Stuart Buchanan and Madeleine Cocolas, for putting this film out there to be debated and re-evaluated in a new way.
Sydney Opera House, 30 October.
Images supplied by SOH media.
