Häxan · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A pointer taps a woodcut. The lecturer shows you a medieval engraving of Hell, names its parts, moves on — and then the film cuts, and the engraving stands up and walks. Demons peel out of the dark. Witches climb the night sky on broomsticks. A butter-churning Satan beckons with a grin that is somehow worse than a snarl. That hinge — between the document held up to be read and the document brought alive to be felt — is the whole of Häxan, and it is why a film from 1922 still feels like nothing else.

Deleuze has a name for a film that thinks instead of merely depicting: the noosign, the image of thought, the screen used as a brain. Most movies show you people thinking. Häxan thinks out loud, in chapters, assembling evidence the way a lecturer builds toward a verdict. Christensen's boldest invention is not an image but an architecture. He marshals woodcuts, diagrams, and museum artifacts toward one argument — that the woman tortured as a witch and the woman diagnosed as a hysteric are the same sufferer, that the pyre and the asylum are uncomfortably continuous institutions — and he does it decades before the essay-film had a name. The picture reasons. When you grant it that, the grotesquerie stops being a freak-show and becomes a demonstration.

That reasoning runs on what Deleuze calls the lectosign: the readable image. When the pointer hovers over the engraving, the image stops being something you watch and becomes something you decipher — it has lost the obviousness of action and asks to be read. Häxan trains your eye to read, woodcut by woodcut, and then turns that training on you. By the time the Sabbath arrives, you are decoding inversions like an inquisitor — which is exactly the reflex the film wants to expose.

Beneath the orderly medieval surface — the inquisitor's chamber, the accused woman's household, the convent of nuns — Christensen opens a trapdoor. This is Deleuze's naturalism and its impulse-image: a savage "originary world" of pure appetite erupting under the social one, everything sliding down a line of slope toward degradation. The Sabbath is that world made visible. The kissing of Satan's posterior, infants and corpses pressed into rites of inversion, the Devil churning — these are not plot. They are drives, part-objects charged with compulsive force (the fetish), an originary world filmed as if the village's repressions had been turned inside out and lit by hellfire.

The argument closes its trap in the final chapter, and here Deleuze gives us two precise tools. The symptom: an act read as the sign of a hidden drive. The gest: a posture that exposes a social relation rather than advancing a story. Christensen rhymes the convulsions of his possessed nun and his spasming accused woman with the documented gestures of the turn-of-the-century hysteric. The same body, the same seizure, staged five centuries apart — and the rhyme indicts the men watching it both times. The film's thought is carried in flesh, not intertitles.

The texture that makes all this land is expressionism in Deleuze's exact sense: a non-organic life of things conjured by the shadow-gradient. Johan Ankerstjerne models faces and bodies out of pools of black, light motivated by candle and hearth, so that objects and demons seem charged from within. Häxan is the sibling of Caligari here — the lighting idiom is shared — but where Caligari paints its shadows onto the set, Christensen lets flame justify them, which makes the dark feel found rather than designed. And against all that churning appetite, one still point: Maren Pedersen's weathered face, cast for its features and held in near-documentary close-up. Deleuze would call it a qualisign — an immobile, reflecting face expressing a single quality. Hers holds the film's pity, the human cost the argument keeps insisting on.

The lineage is a craft genealogy you can almost touch. The stop-substitution conjuring that materializes and vanishes the Devil descends straight from Méliès's Le Manoir du diable. The strategy of reconstructing Doré-style engravings of damnation as moving tableaux is L'Inferno's, repurposed for the Sabbath. The chaptered marshaling of discrete historical episodes toward a single moral thesis is Intolerance's cross-cutting recast as essay — and it leaves Häxan posing a problem (what do we do, knowing the asylum inherits the pyre?) that the film stages but cannot resolve: a true discourse-image. The same-year Nosferatu and the studio-mate Phantom Carriage share its conviction that the uncanny should be made photographically concrete — under-cranked, double-exposed, hand-built — never merely suggested.

One caution: the 1968 cut narrated by William S. Burroughs over Jean-Luc Ponty's jazz is a hip artifact of its own decade, not Christensen's film. Find the restored, tinted version — amber for hellfire, blue for night — and watch for the pointer. Notice the exact cut where the film stops illustrating and starts diagnosing. Then notice that the thing it has been diagnosing all along, patiently, with a grin, is you — watching, decoding, deciding which woman is guilty.