Right, so. Danish film is something that I know absolutely nothing about so it’s a shame that I already have plans (Let Them Tweet Cake!) on the evening the Louisville Film Society is bring an expert on Danish film to town. Just in time for Halloween he’s going to be discussing 1922 Danish docu-drama (one of the very first docu-dramas I’m told) called Häxan: A Witches Brew of Fact, Fiction, and Spectacle.

Benjamin Christensen’s macabre masterpiece from 1922, Häxan:Witchcraft Through the Ages is the first true `film maudit’ (literally a `cursed film’) and can justifiably be considered the world’s first cult movie. This taboo-shattering work occupies an exclusive niche in the annals of horror cinema. It was one of the first drama-documentaries, integrating fact and fiction, and Christensen’s experimental style endeared it to the Surrealists. A brew of the horrific, gross, and darkly comedic, Häxan chronicles grave robbing, repressed eroticism, possessed nuns, and a satanic Sabbath, as the director asserts that the ‘witches’ of the Middle Ages suffered the same mass hysteria as did the mentally ill centuries later.  Häxan retains a powerful and shocking contemporary resonance, and emerges as a moving, disturbing but ultimately liberating study of the persecution of the mentally ill, women, the poor and the elderly.

Greeted by angry protests upon release, it was censored, banned and condemned everywhere. To `decent folks’ it was the most morbid and perverse film ever made, while others hailed it as a sober and scientific yet thoroughly human document. To Christensen it was the consuming obsession of his life, the film he was put on earth to make. It was a labour of love that would win him immortality of a sort but would also hang over the rest of his career like a dark shadow.

Jack Stevenson in 2006 published (with FAB Press, UK) the thus-far only book about the film, WITCHCRAFT THROUGH THE AGES:The Story of Häxan, the World’s strangest film, and the man who made it. An American living in Denmark since 1993, Stevenson has written extensively about Danish film subjects (including a book about Lars von Trier for The British Film Institute in 2002), and for Witchcraft… he has drawn heavily on the original Danish source material. Even for those who already know the film, this program will be sure to break new ground and touch upon heretofore unexamined aspects of the story.

Häxan: A Witches Brew of Fact, Fiction, and Spectacle
Narrated by William S Burroughs / electric jazz-fusion score by Jean Luc Ponty
Presented by Author Jack Stevenson

Thursday, October 16, 2008
8 PM

Floyd Theatre in the Student Activities Center
University of Louisville