Though in many ways considerably ahead of its time - wielding considerable influence both on surrealism, and on decades of movies both highbrow and low - Christensen's The Witch doesn't live up to its exalted reputation. An ungainly mix of dry documentary and stagey dramatisations - spiced up with the occasional splurge of delirious excess - it purports to be a solemn lesson in history and anthropology, investigating various facets of witchcraft over the centuries. But so plodding is its execution that the film only very intermittently flares into life - briefly taking off when writer/director/star Christensen (who plays Satan in certain scenes) lets loose his imagination and envisages frenzied, atmospherically bizarre occult rituals.

Though individual images are often striking, far too many scenes have dated badly: early sections examining various civilisations' cosmology are especially heavy going, while the episodic, stop-start pace makes the picture seem interminable. Concluding sequences, in which misogynistic ancient superstitions are speculatively "explained" - via equally misogynistic junior-level psychiatry that draws parallels between medieval witches and the travails of 20th century housewives - are silly and patronising, and sound (like much of what's gone before) like the airy theorising of a film-maker who's made only the most cursory study of his subject. Indeed, Christensen seldom comes across as particularly interested in witchcraft per se, instead using it merely as a flimsy pseudo-intellectual framework to support sensational and exploitational material. Of course, such a heady brew of anti-clericalism, nudity, torture and generally taboo subject-matter must have been jaw-droppingly daring back in 1922.

But any comparison between The Witch and, say, F W Murnau's genuinely eerie and nightmarish Nosferatu - released in the same year - will reveal the glaring inadequacies of Christensen's desperately slapdash, scattershot approach. And whereas his countryman Carl Theodor Dreyer's witch-hunting classic Day of Wrath (1943) is in some ways an extended hommage to Christensen's film, it traverses similar terrain with the kind of grace and intelligence so sorely lacking in this gaudy grab-bag of half-digested ideas and gratuitous phantasmagoria. Audiences in search of a more plausible, convincing and persuasive evocation of 'sabbat fever' should seek out the astonishing Pagan Holiday segment (aka The Holiday) of Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev, which contains more magic in 20 minutes than The Witch manages to conjure up over its entire running-time.

Neil Young
4th May, 2007

THE WITCH : [4+/10] : Häxan* : Sweden (Swe/Den) 1922 : Benjamin CHRISTENSEN : 104 mins (approx)

seen at Hebden Bridge Picture House, Hebden Bridge (UK), 3rd May 2007 - public show (paid £8.00) - DVD projection (unsatisfactory) with live accompaniment by Geoff Smith on hammered dulcimers

* NB : this screening was advertised as Häxan : Witchcraft Through the Ages, which is the most widely used title for this film. The title Witchcraft Through the Ages, however, properly refers only to the truncated version released in 1967, running approximately 76 minutes and featuring a jazz score by Jean-Luc Ponty and narration by William S Burroughs. The Swedish word Häxan, meanwhile, is correctly pronounced "Hex-an", with the stress on the first syllable - and not as "Hack-saan."