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Between grave compassion and zesty exploitation, "a presentation from a cultural and historical point of view." Sliding cards for the lecture on a fear as old as humanity, engravings and animation and dioramas are all part of the strikingly modern heterogeneity of styles. The Middle Ages as a conscious studio invocation (cf. The Seventh Seal), a harsh time for crones and maidens alike. Humorous interludes at first, a severed finger from a corpse to give the love potion just the right taste, "cat feces and dove hearts" have the rotund friar chasing his servant around a table. Then the fall of a household and the Inquisition at work, a circle of superstitions and accusations to stoke "the spiritual plague." Distraught wife (Karen Winther) and emaciated beggar (Maren Pedersen), both finally in chains before judges lasciviously bent on proving and punishing their sorcery. Benjamin Christensen, definitely a sire to Lars von Trier, contemplates the whole thing analytically, sardonically, ferociously: "And I see in front of me some scenes, which I do not find pictured too darkly here, on the white screen." The director himself turns up as a hirsute, gleeful Beelzebub, tongue perpetually flicking, the horned ringmaster of the remarkable Witches' Sabbath at the center of this maelstrom: damsels joyously stomp on crosses and plant their lips on satanic rumps, flashes of Goya and Bosch alongside maniacal butter-churning, a skeleton horse calmly strolls through the unholy bash. "Debout, les damnés de la terre," as the ditty goes, a brimstone hallucination and incidental defense of the demons it depicts. Fantasia has the swarm of witches on broomsticks, Russell's The Devils the nun's madness, much here for Dreyer to parse. The epilogue turns in modern times to the kleptomaniac widow (Tora Teje) as a continuation of the persecution, "isn't she still a riddle to us?" With Astrid Holm, Clara Pontoppidan, Elith Pio, and Oscar Stribolt. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |