[...]ng difficulty to ask questions (as a result of the constant increase in the specialization of the knowledges --> science) {propositions in discursive systems, (a “task” that) proceeds with a plane of reference --> paradigmatic (a worldview) ==>? to *confront chaos* ~= to provide chaos with reference points [<-- artists need to learn this]}****

(my work in lecture-performance: to provide chaos with reference points)

Barad, Stengers, <== stable foundations of physics had broken up and it is time for science to become philosophical

science becomes philosophical philosophy becomes artistic art becomes anthropological anthropology becomes poetic poetry becomes biological biology becomes archaeological archaeology becomes speculative speculation becomes scientific science becomes aesthetic aesthetics becomes adventurous adventure becomes rigorous rigor becomes Iranian Iran becomes German Germany becomes Arabic Arab becomes Egyptian Egypt becomes animalistic animal becomes fabulous fable becomes political politics becomes...

...................................

(Baxstrom + Meyers highlight a productive gap between intent & outcome in) Christensen making a case of witchcraft (in his pioneering, bizarre, and lavish project of Häxan):
•misidentified nervous disease
•incompatibility of superstition and religious fanaticism with modernity and science
•bringing “errors of belief” in the 15th and 16th centuries into our view

living cinematic tableau, Häxan's excess =/= socially constrained thinking, discursive mode of analysis

Christensen's thesis concerned/gripped with abnormalities, events, and causes ==provide==> diagnosis
(like Favret-Saada) he was an un-witcher at once caught & catching

witch =? epiphenomenon

(to bring the ajayeb to life “objectively” is nonsense)

[Häxan = spectacle + argument ==> *to make nature speak*] drove efforts to locate & combat witches, and it served to shape similar aporias between *sense & distance* imbricated in:
•the invention of modern hysteria in the 19th century
•the “discovery” of the “native's point of view” by anthropologists in the early 20th century

for Christensen: “witchcraft = unrecognized manifestations of clinical hysteria and psychosis”

excessiveness of Häxan's reenactment --> construct the witch's material, invisible, mobile force
(Häxan's objectivity) had no expectation that the real will simply “speak for itself”

Häxan's reception in the 1920s --> to energize a negative, conceptually dogmatic discourse that formed and hardened cinematic taxonomies [particularly the division between “documentary” (nonfiction) and “feature” (fictional) films]

experimentation + evidence making

sexual intercourse, cannibalism, cauldron --solemnize--> pact with the d[...]

[...]inine weakness” associated with the hysteric, exacerbated by low social status
-in countless accounts of possession, we find descriptions of demons speaking through the mouths of girls
[Baxstrom + Meyers =/= Federici's flat analysis of witch hunt as the tool of subjugation of the local population or of woman by men]

tableau vivant --into--> tableau clinique --into--> tableau critique

hysterical reliving of the original symptom --> reframed trauma: an attempt to suspend the two temporalities (real and reimagined) in the same image
@Hoda

one element of fascination with hysteria was its “look” --> hysteria's aesthetic link to forms of possession

possession --> aneasthesias, amnesias, subconscious acts, somnambulisms, fixed ideas

a scaffolding: conceptually arranged chasm between outer and inner states ==>
•exorcists building on the techniques of inquisitors and witch hunters --> possession acts as the bridge across this chasm
•neurologists and psychologists construct the same
--✕--> (Malinowski's) anthropologists: fieldworkers as truth-tellers returning from the dark corners of the real (the witches are no longer explicitly the target of the inquiry)

Häxan's real object: the specter of sheer nonsense

hunt (even in objective scientific mastery) --> fueled by a desire operationalized in a method of being close enough to something to sense it

...................................

(?every time we have to) show how *the word (that we are using) relates to meaning*

Christensen makes every effort to craft a witch that is real to us : ontological fluidity of a cinematic image ==> “Häxan = word + image + thing”

metoposcopy: the expression of reasoning was to be found on the face, (dating back to Girolamo Cardano and the Renaissance) the operation of reason as the weaving together of images in the mind --> a proto-cinematic theory of the relation between image and thought if ever there was one

•respectable scholar indexes himself through his sources
•authoritarian first-person tenor --> instrumentally impersonal tenor
•establishing the X as a chapter within a much longer constellation of practices, discourses, traditions, and institutions

Kieckhefer --> how the long history of practical natural magic was enfolded into the specificity of European witchcraft in the late Middle Ages

Christ in Limbo --> Christensen's parallel editing ==> moving representation of a terra-centered universe <~~ elaborate wonders found in baroque wunderkammer (meticulously assembled by the German elite)


Renaissance Hermeticism:
writings of Hermes Trimesgistus ~=> foundation for:
•Ficino's relatively mild natural magic
•Pico della Mirandola's Christian Cabalist
•Agrippa's Christian magus
•T[...]

[...]etic–Cabalist tradition -->
•scrupulously mathematical astrology of Girolamo Cardano
•the rigorously empirical studies of the natural world demanded by Bruno's attempts to operate as a magus
}==> (paved the way for) science of Newton and Copernicus --> a new metaphysics to emerge

attacks on Renaissance magic and the Hermetic–Cabalist tradition (that authorized witch) ==> anti-witch treatises

(case of Giordano Bruno's execution --> Hermetic magic and Cabalism) how in the 16th century: “superstition = crime”


(Christensen attributing) --> Hortus deliciarum, a largely cohesive image of hell to a period when the nature of hell's location and “topography” was a subject of fierce theological debate
-he strategically ignores debates and alternate conceptions of damnation that existed in the 15th and 16th centuries in Europe

[that which you choose] works to amplify affect more than further analysis (--> such as Christensen's attempt to heighten the fiery terror of the scene by billowing smoke ==> عام generic explanation)



...a palpable sexual dimension crepting into Christensen's thesis <-- images of women “sneaking away” to attend Sabbats

Häxan visually grounds itself in citable evidence from the start
•cinema: (as an instrument for “recording reality”) a vehicle for “telling the truth” about the world [in early 1920s]

when documentary was not yet documentary -- fiction wasn't fiction yet either --Chanan-->{
moving pictures = visual tidbits لقمه چرب ونرم
made no demands on literacy (==> spread easily)
whe world on the screen remained anecdotal (and predominantly iconic)
practically inarticulate (in terms of public discourse)}

(1900) visual meaning-making machines that demanded not only attention but belief (by staging as real reenactments) --> mutated the desire to see far-off contemporary events
•--> Attack on a China Mission Station (1900), Hunting Big Game in Africa (1907), and With Captain Scott, R.N., the South Pole (1912), The Battle of the Somme (1916) and With Our Heroes at the Somme (Bei unseren Helden an der Somme, 1917)

(Baxstrom + Meyers) question of mimesis
-what is the relation between a fragmentary visual artifact drawn “from life” and the truth value of any such fragments?
-what sorts of filmmaking practices can felicitously mimic life as such?

[for example in Curtis's In the Land of the War Canoes] status of reenactment ==> prevailing standards of expressing the real

--later --> crypto-structuralist origin myth that falsely represented what “documentary” meant to pre-Griersonian filmmakers ==> “realist” Lumiere =/= the “fanciful” Melies

}--> *gap between witnessing and the real* in Europe (this question of evidence occupied inquisitors [...]

[...] desire to see far-off contemporary events
•--> Attack on a China Mission Station (1900), Hunting Big Game in Africa (1907), and With Captain Scott, R.N., the South Pole (1912), The Battle of the Somme (1916) and With Our Heroes at the Somme (Bei unseren Helden an der Somme, 1917)

(Baxstrom + Meyers) question of mimesis
-what is the relation between a fragmentary visual artifact drawn “from life” and the truth value of any such fragments?
-what sorts of filmmaking practices can felicitously mimic life as such?

[for example in Curtis's In the Land of the War Canoes] status of reenactment ==> prevailing standards of expressing the real

--later --> crypto-structuralist origin myth that falsely represented what “documentary” meant to pre-Griersonian filmmakers ==> “realist” Lumiere =/= the “fanciful” Melies

}--> *gap between witnessing and the real* in Europe (this question of evidence occupied inquisitors and theologians long before the invention of cinema)


preparing viewers for the “diegetic absorption”
(telling of a story by a narrator) diegesis =/= mimesis

the strategy of “reimaging” is methodological and intentional (in the opening minutes of the film Häxan) --> (in European terms, for a very long time:) “knowledge = recitations of the known”

+ creation of new images --> constituting its own evidence for what is at stake
(Christensen designating) **techniques of presentation rather than simple content**

****the “truth” gained by the reproduction of archival images**** <==through== their mobility in the context of their new use
--> (similar to Farocki) Christensen empties out such visual artifacts, expressing through their preestablished frame a meaning that was hidden and resisted



(Baxstrom + Meyers carefully treating the) methodological element of Christensen's image-making practices --in--> Häxan's depiction of the violent moral disorder of the Wild Ride of the witches to their Sabbats

(16th century) Wild Ride: a standard element of both demonological and popular literary accounts of the activities of witches, folding:
•older legends of wild hunters
•restless travels of the dead at night
•tales of the Furious Horde (a super natural band that was not originally associated with witchcraft)
•twisted chaos of the deep forest
Canon Episcopi regarding the power of demonic illusion to deceive women into imagining that they could travel great distances at night, often in the company of the goddess Diana
}--> conjoining of witch image to demonological discourse [<-- an empirically verifiable invention in the late medieval period and the Renaissance]

*the oscillating value of the non-fictive* (of its discrete artifacts)

hybrid human–animal creatures with each “natur[...]

[...]structuralist origin myth that falsely represented what “documentary” meant to pre-Griersonian filmmakers ==> “realist” Lumiere =/= the “fanciful” Melies

}--> *gap between witnessing and the real* in Europe (this question of evidence occupied inquisitors and theologians long before the invention of cinema)


preparing viewers for the “diegetic absorption”
(telling of a story by a narrator) diegesis =/= mimesis

the strategy of “reimaging” is methodological and intentional (in the opening minutes of the film Häxan) --> (in European terms, for a very long time:) “knowledge = recitations of the known”

+ creation of new images --> constituting its own evidence for what is at stake
(Christensen designating) **techniques of presentation rather than simple content**

****the “truth” gained by the reproduction of archival images**** <==through== their mobility in the context of their new use
--> (similar to Farocki) Christensen empties out such visual artifacts, expressing through their preestablished frame a meaning that was hidden and resisted



(Baxstrom + Meyers carefully treating the) methodological element of Christensen's image-making practices --in--> Häxan's depiction of the violent moral disorder of the Wild Ride of the witches to their Sabbats

(16th century) Wild Ride: a standard element of both demonological and popular literary accounts of the activities of witches, folding:
•older legends of wild hunters
•restless travels of the dead at night
•tales of the Furious Horde (a super natural band that was not originally associated with witchcraft)
•twisted chaos of the deep forest
Canon Episcopi regarding the power of demonic illusion to deceive women into imagining that they could travel great distances at night, often in the company of the goddess Diana
}--> conjoining of witch image to demonological discourse [<-- an empirically verifiable invention in the late medieval period and the Renaissance]

*the oscillating value of the non-fictive* (of its discrete artifacts)

hybrid human–animal creatures with each “natural” species being traceable within the complete appearance of the demonic creature


(coming into contemporary performance art -->) figures from antiquity:
•Saturn @Ale
•Circe @Bryana (changing men into beasts, games of chance, gambling, tricks, slight of hand, illusion, hybrid animal–human forms of the demons dancing around the “grandmother” with surprisingly young and beautiful appearance --melancholy--> general sense of sexual and societal disorder swirling around a placid, passive female protagonist) + empirical strain of the discourse of the witch
•Sabbat @Jassem
•
-->

pact of the witch
obsessed state of the hysteric
interpl[...]

[...] 19th century for an epistemological reliable inquiry in the nature of things) <-- fascination for the freak and the occult <-- on the way to technology


(Baxstrom + Meyers > Philippe Alain-Michaud on Warburg) “in Mnemosyne, photographic reproduction is not merely illustrative but a general plastic medium to which all figures are reduced before being arranged in the space of a panel. In this way, the viewer participates in two successive transformations of the original material: different types of objects (paintings, reliefs, drawings, architecture, living beings) *are unified through photography* before being arranged on the panel stretched with black cloth. The panel is in turn *rephotographed in order to create a unique image*, which will be inserted into a series intended to take the form of a book. The atlas, then, does not limit itself to describing the migrations of images through the history of representation: it reproduces them. In this sense, it is based on a cinematic mode of thought, one that, by using figures, aims at not articulating meaning but at producing effects.”


transgressive approach to the archive:
•Gerhard Richter's Atlas, 2006
•Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinema, 1988
•Christensen's Häxan
•Warburg’ Mnemosyne (presentation of a series of visual cliches and stereotypes, fragments which were most likely already familiar to the viewer ~ figurative givens ==> empirical evidence + media to conjure with)
•Bataille's journal ‘Documents’ 1929–30 --> seizes cliched objects and then systematically empties them out in the course of its own expressions. Bataille and his contributors sought to defamiliarize the cliches, disturbing the placidly deceptive surface of the mundane in their fragmentary, juxtaposing methods of critique and presentation =/= Warburg + Christensen collecting mythological, figurative givens seemingly quite distant from the “really” real
}--> unsettling distances between myth and the everyday
-weave together episodic fragments in order to draw parallels (across domains of sense that cut across time) and correspondences across situations and characters
-Häxan deploys the techniques associated with Warburg's Mnemosyne and Bataille's Documents for purposes of affectively emphasizing the dark, chaotic forces that lurk under the smooth surface of the everyday
(Häxan's episodic structure ==>)
•characters seemingly out of a dead past to live again
•draw the phenomenology of the hysteric
•draw the work's own contemporary time to the surface


promiscuous: neither wholly artistic nor scientific =/=? hybrid artistic and scientific

traverse steep slope between past and future in the form of an event =/= plot


inability to automatically categorize Häxan (or any work of art) <== ***formal strategy rooted in an epistemic virtue***[...]

[...]of representation: it reproduces them. In this sense, it is based on a cinematic mode of thought, one that, by using figures, aims at not articulating meaning but at producing effects.”


transgressive approach to the archive:
•Gerhard Richter's Atlas, 2006
•Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinema, 1988
•Christensen's Häxan
•Warburg’ Mnemosyne (presentation of a series of visual cliches and stereotypes, fragments which were most likely already familiar to the viewer ~ figurative givens ==> empirical evidence + media to conjure with)
•Bataille's journal ‘Documents’ 1929–30 --> seizes cliched objects and then systematically empties them out in the course of its own expressions. Bataille and his contributors sought to defamiliarize the cliches, disturbing the placidly deceptive surface of the mundane in their fragmentary, juxtaposing methods of critique and presentation =/= Warburg + Christensen collecting mythological, figurative givens seemingly quite distant from the “really” real
}--> unsettling distances between myth and the everyday
-weave together episodic fragments in order to draw parallels (across domains of sense that cut across time) and correspondences across situations and characters
-Häxan deploys the techniques associated with Warburg's Mnemosyne and Bataille's Documents for purposes of affectively emphasizing the dark, chaotic forces that lurk under the smooth surface of the everyday
(Häxan's episodic structure ==>)
•characters seemingly out of a dead past to live again
•draw the phenomenology of the hysteric
•draw the work's own contemporary time to the surface


promiscuous: neither wholly artistic nor scientific =/=? hybrid artistic and scientific

traverse steep slope between past and future in the form of an event =/= plot


inability to automatically categorize Häxan (or any work of art) <== ***formal strategy rooted in an epistemic virtue***


***(in later Middle Ages) practices such as persecuting witchcraft to meditating on Christ = techniques (of sorting operation) to draw distinctions among visual phenomena, differentiating, say, physical objects from fantasies, dreams, and diabolical or artful deceptions
<--artist-- image-makers specialized in manipulating one thing (their materials) in order that a viewer should see something else ~ *to make something invisible visible* [<-- this is always ideological, and is very common in art]
(#testing) the objective knowledge possessed by the uncanny (in witch's pathological language of diabolic proofs) ==> witch must be experienced in her own milieu, a satanic biome, her state in nature

...................................

typical in 17th century: tacit mutuality of word & image
-artists habitually gave their paintings titles, mottoes, tags and quotations, and their works[...]

[...]ting one thing (their materials) in order that a viewer should see something else ~ *to make something invisible visible* [<-- this is always ideological, and is very common in art]
(#testing) the objective knowledge possessed by the uncanny (in witch's pathological language of diabolic proofs) ==> witch must be experienced in her own milieu, a satanic biome, her state in nature

...................................

typical in 17th century: tacit mutuality of word & image
-artists habitually gave their paintings titles, mottoes, tags and quotations, and their works abound in literary allusions
-explicit interleaving of the verbal and visual


cat feces and dove hearts boiled in the moonlight

stereotype of a debased and corrupted priest
object of the customer's affections


Protestant discourse against the Catholic Church in the 16th century --> artists of the period extended the instrumentalization of slander through the production of proto-pornographic images of bishops, priests, and the pope engaged in myriad obscene acts --depicting--> the emotional states and desires of the clergy

magical salves (considered particularly powerful and troubling by demonologists)

Häxan self-positioning as a scientific investigation + constantly pull back from the dramatic outcomes of what Häxan depicts

Häxan's demonstration of the power of the witch =/= paranoid delusions of witch- crazed villagers


widely held set of beliefs regarding the “nature” or “essence” of women
Christina Larner's assertion that witch trials were gender-related (but not by definition gender-specific)
--Baxstrom--> *women often came under suspicion of being witches because they were understood to be particularly susceptible to lust, avarice, and jealousy by their very nature [~ 16th century: **women “naturally” susceptible to witchcraft*** + women were presumed to possess elements of the nature more than men] =/= Federici's understanding of witch-hunt as straight-forward instance of misogyny*
--Roper--> *one cannot approach witchcraft or possession from a vantage point in the present without granting some legitimate status to the ways in which the Devil and witches were not only asserted to be real but were experienced as such*


(debates over) politics and evil
satan's malefic presence (in Dreyer's Leaves)
*a density of parallelisms*
Dreyer figures Satan as a problem of the present
“Bolsheviks violently engaged in revolutionary struggle = manifestation of a transcendental demonic power”

question of theodicy --> God's seeming absence from the world

sleep-walking --> enticing a nude female somnambulist out of her home into the forest, where she eventually kneels before a demon who embraces her

proving sexual relations with the [...]

[...]atus to the ways in which the Devil and witches were not only asserted to be real but were experienced as such*


(debates over) politics and evil
satan's malefic presence (in Dreyer's Leaves)
*a density of parallelisms*
Dreyer figures Satan as a problem of the present
“Bolsheviks violently engaged in revolutionary struggle = manifestation of a transcendental demonic power”

question of theodicy --> God's seeming absence from the world

sleep-walking --> enticing a nude female somnambulist out of her home into the forest, where she eventually kneels before a demon who embraces her

proving sexual relations with the devil ==> empirical evidence for satan's existence

(Benjamin > Christensen's art sets out) to conquer meaning


...so it is no stretch to suggest that...

subject and subtext



dreamtime of the 16h century
/> dreamtime of the witch


•Durer, Baldung, Cranach, artists at the dawn of the Reformation sought to represent the void as a figure
•strategies by which Expressionist painting sought to externalize states of mind

(Baxstrom + Meyers emphasizing) how Häxan *corresponds with a variety of traditions* without seeking to assimilate the film fully within one over another



stillness and fixity of tableau-like shot composition (Dreyer, Murnau, Christensen) ==> (the affect of) suffocating organization

Deleuze summary of Expressionism: play of light and darkness, with the mixture of the two producing an effect that suggests either falling into the black hole or ascending towards the light <-- *face* makes this affective power mobile

•(in Murnau) tableau --> frees the viewer for introspection regarding nature in a kind of emotional, spiritual release =/= close-up (disruptive pathos)
•(in H (in Häxan) tableau --> grounds the uncontrollable forces at work on the faces of those confronted by the power of the witch (constituting a shot that is intensive =/= introspective)


Häxan film --> progressive unfolding of the material world through the style of a lecture
-exploration of the wonders and “errors” of the past (with near-messianic belief in the perfectibility of man)
magnified form of realist cinema + rooted in a naturalist impulse --> Christensen's witch is not only here now, it has always been here: “witch = a figure of nature”
-Häxan begins with woodcuts, drawings, and paintings that originate from *an act of touch* ==> haptic vision ==> to present figurative cliched givens ==> establish the ground
-seizes (the audience) and is seized (by the witch)
-seeing and touching *virtual beings* (such as devils)
--> rigorously logical structure + expressing the tangible singularity of the power of the witch
[...]

[...]the devil ==> empirical evidence for satan's existence

(Benjamin > Christensen's art sets out) to conquer meaning


...so it is no stretch to suggest that...

subject and subtext



dreamtime of the 16h century
dreamtime of the witch


•Durer, Baldung, Cranach, artists at the dawn of the Reformation sought to represent the void as a figure
•strategies by which Expressionist painting sought to externalize states of mind

(Baxstrom + Meyers emphasizing) how Häxan *corresponds with a variety of traditions* without seeking to assimilate the film fully within one over another



stillness and fixity of tableau-like shot composition (Dreyer, Murnau, Christensen) ==> (the affect of) suffocating organization

Deleuze summary of Expressionism: play of light and darkness, with the mixture of the two producing an effect that suggests either falling into the black hole or ascending towards the light <-- *face* makes this affective power mobile

•(in Murnau) tableau --> frees the viewer for introspection regarding nature in a kind of emotional, spiritual release =/= close-up (disruptive pathos)
•(in Häxan) tableau --> grounds the uncontrollable forces at work on the faces of those confronted by the power of the witch (constituting a shot that is intensive =/= introspective)


Häxan film --> progressive unfolding of the material world through the style of a lecture
-exploration of the wonders and “errors” of the past (with near-messianic belief in the perfectibility of man)
magnified form of realist cinema + rooted in a naturalist impulse --> Christensen's witch is not only here now, it has always been here: “witch = a figure of nature”
-Häxan begins with woodcuts, drawings, and paintings that originate from *an act of touch* ==> haptic vision ==> to present figurative cliched givens ==> establish the ground
-seizes (the audience) and is seized (by the witch)
-seeing and touching *virtual beings* (such as devils)
--> rigorously logical structure + expressing the tangible singularity of the power of the witch

*(from) tales --to--> theology --to--> diagnosis*


“advancement” of natural knowledge <--> demonology


witch: a viral character


witch hunters's trial by water *is not a “trial” but rather an experiment* (to identify evidence of evil's presence---in the absence of direct unmotivated proof) --operating--> though a form of non-knowledge <-- mastery of nonsense
= ***a deep appreciation of (that might seem misguided to us):
•cause-and-effect relations
•forces at work in the natural world
(=/= indifference to the truth, retreat into superstition)
~
[these] cases suggestive of and empiric[...]

[...]Certeau observed that) every exercise of trained judgment is authorized through the [*]dark: ratifying force of theology
**dark forces --ratify--> all forms of natural expertise**

mastery of nonsense --driving--> confirming the suspicion of witchcraft = a form of non-knowledge ==opens==> a gap in knowing (specifically, ‘who’)


line of accusation that was quite common in the early modern period --> “the desperate search for the cause of what was other wise an unexplained illness or misfortune was frequently the catalyst for specific witchcraft accusations between friends, acquaintances, and often between family members themselves”
16th century --> this violence now bore the sanction of both secular and religious institutions (<== peasant complaints of maleficium زيان <== human beings have been suffering misfortune, illness, and death long before the power of the witch was felt during this time)

Dominican order --> aggressively promoting the cult of the virgin, to the status of the “perfect” woman {elevating the status of sexual neurosis to a virtue} =/= lustful credulous nature of common women (who were often associated with the temptations of Eve)


*conflicted status of women*
•in Häxan --through--> sternly patrilineal visual motifs (condescension + bemusement --> frail + hysterical)
•in ajayeb bestiary -->


(Häxan's) witch hunters act in accordance with their own procedures for investigating truth and falsehood and not simply out of malice, fear, or stupidity

the inquisitor priest/friar (within the realm of their own assumptions about the world) were dedicated to investigating and verifying the claims [of the accused witch) =/= (mainstream depiction of inquisitors as) gullible, fanatical, overtly misogynistic

(during the witch craze) **desire to believe =/= simple belief**
despite the unbelievable scope of demonic power, the inquisitors must believe that what the young maiden is reporting is possible


****important changes in the legal systems in europe well into the 14th century: proffering a formal indictment against another individual required the plaintiff to submit to an accusatory form of criminal procedure. (derived from Roman law) this procedure presumed such offenses as *matters between the accused and accuser* ==> the idea that “crime” was a matter between society and the accused did not exist (--> the presentday distinction between criminal and civil complaints meaningless)
raising a formal complaint required:
•the accuser to furnish proof of the allegation
•to submit to severe penalties agreed in advance if the judge was unconvinced of the complaint's merit
*it was complex, expensive, and very risky to enter into this formal framework in order to address disputes or everyday injustices* ==> most ordinary people did not do [...]

[...]user to furnish proof of the allegation
•to submit to severe penalties agreed in advance if the judge was unconvinced of the complaint's merit
*it was complex, expensive, and very risky to enter into this formal framework in order to address disputes or everyday injustices* ==> most ordinary people did not do so, choosing instead to pursue local and less formal modes of redress

15th and 16th century --> this procedure changed dramatically (with the emergence of the witch in europe)
•witch was understood as an agent of satan
•responsibility of civil and religious authorities to protect pious christians (from a power that would overwhelm the faithful regardless of their individual acts, intentions, or beliefs)

inchoate suspicion (of the fearful, the resentful, the spiteful) --> reporting --> inquisitors (positioned as experts) --> take this suspicion forward administratively --> *impersonal sociological sense* (<-- an example of Weberian rationalization)

to suspect someone of maleficium was not new --✕--> (in witch accusations) authorities were now eager to act on suspicions in dependently


unresolved sexual desires + such passion would be redirected in pathological, perverse manner ==Häxan==> witch accusations

the film emphasizes the crucial role sex played in discerning what constituted witchcraft and its status as a knowable category of (malefic) human practice


a great deal of demonological thinking was devoted to justifying the fact that civil and Church officials, despite their fears, by and large were not bewitched


following satan's idiom...

Häxan's tortured relation to “the truth”
the question of empirical certainty and reenactment haunts the status of the film as evidence

*acting the ideal type breathes life into the emptied, cliched figure* :
•Christensenrelying on the fact that the truth of the witch will take its most visible form by acting her out mimetically (~= Christensen chooses to “play” satan using his idiom to breathe life into his witch)
•Flaherty knew that the visceral force of Nanook of the North depended on the felicity of his Inuit interlocutors reenacting themselves




Christensen seems to be offering a cure for the *secularized christian blindness* at the heart of *positivist human science* --> his audience is pulled in “through a lens of science =/= as misguided inquisitors”


working with *figurative givens of witches and demons* --formulate--> visual thesis (about uncanny, mobile power)

etchings into a material
carving outlines into the image of figures that have been hiding in plain sight


beautifully composed tableau of the torture chamber
static plane of the tableau =/= sense depth signify an open or free s[...]

[...]by acting her out mimetically (~= Christensen chooses to “play” satan using his idiom to breathe life into his witch)
•Flaherty knew that the visceral force of Nanook of the North depended on the felicity of his Inuit interlocutors reenacting themselves




Christensen seems to be offering a cure for the *secularized christian blindness* at the heart of *positivist human science* --> his audience is pulled in “through a lens of science =/= as misguided inquisitors”


working with *figurative givens of witches and demons* --formulate--> visual thesis (about uncanny, mobile power)

etchings into a material
carving outlines into the image of figures that have been hiding in plain sight


beautifully composed tableau of the torture chamber
static plane of the tableau =/= sense depth signify an open or free space

totality of (depicted) violence <--> composed alterity of the scene's stylistic correspondence between accused and inquisitor

(Christensen's method of) oscillating rhythm between tableau and face
-suppressing perspective and depth of field in favor of a continuous affective movement as expressed in the face
--Baxstrom--> Häxan is not grounded in a setting here; it is grounded in the forms of life present in the shot

sense of corporeal alienation from herself --> inhabit a script not her own --> critical to the “success” of witchcraft confessions

witch stereotype:
•Wild Ride
•pact with the Devil solemnized through sexual intercourse-
•cannibalism
•دیگ cauldron as the locus of the rite
•*massed, coordinated, female nature of witchcraft*


judicial machinery of a witch trial required evidence of criminal acts that (by definition) could not be witnessed


in Häxan
-the power of cinema to witness exceeds that of the witch hunter
-what it does is “worse” than rigging the truth --> it aligns itself (not with a concept of truth or the real but) with the power of the witch


(Häxan and many criminal story films) works through instruments of knowing rooted in the *dynamics of the confession*
#ajayeb storytelling

...clumsily rendered, the wriggling demons reflect an interesting set of variations to the witch stereotype, both ontologically and visually
(Maria giving birth to demon children)


Thomas Aquinas's theorization of the *virtual bodies* (of angels)
-angels do not need bodies for their sake but for ours --> unnatural couplings could produce children, but that the bodily essence of devils would rule out the possibility that these children would themselves be demons


16th century author primarily concern with Satan's ability to manipulate and pervert language (including er[...]

[...] /> etchings into a material
carving outlines into the image of figures that have been hiding in plain sight


beautifully composed tableau of the torture chamber
static plane of the tableau =/= sense depth signify an open or free space

totality of (depicted) violence <--> composed alterity of the scene's stylistic correspondence between accused and inquisitor

(Christensen's method of) oscillating rhythm between tableau and face
-suppressing perspective and depth of field in favor of a continuous affective movement as expressed in the face
--Baxstrom--> Häxan is not grounded in a setting here; it is grounded in the forms of life present in the shot

sense of corporeal alienation from herself --> inhabit a script not her own --> critical to the “success” of witchcraft confessions

witch stereotype:
•Wild Ride
•pact with the Devil solemnized through sexual intercourse-
•cannibalism
•دیگ cauldron as the locus of the rite
•*massed, coordinated, female nature of witchcraft*


judicial machinery of a witch trial required evidence of criminal acts that (by definition) could not be witnessed


in Häxan
-the power of cinema to witness exceeds that of the witch hunter
-what it does is “worse” than rigging the truth --> it aligns itself (not with a concept of truth or the real but) with the power of the witch


(Häxan and many criminal story films) works through instruments of knowing rooted in the *dynamics of the confession*
#ajayeb storytelling

...clumsily rendered, the wriggling demons reflect an interesting set of variations to the witch stereotype, both ontologically and visually
(Maria giving birth to demon children)


Thomas Aquinas's theorization of the *virtual bodies* (of angels)
-angels do not need bodies for their sake but for ours --> unnatural couplings could produce children, but that the bodily essence of devils would rule out the possibility that these children would themselves be demons


16th century author primarily concern with Satan's ability to manipulate and pervert language (including erotic language)


wild flowing hair of the women --> a common visual metaphor for sexual promiscuity and disorder


images of cannibalistic night witches were explicitly a demonological variation on long-standing popular conceptions

...................................

xxxxxx



persistence of witchcraft
how witchcraft might still exist as more than just one of many choices available on a personal empowerment “menu”
-how rituals pertaining to magic came to be understood as a problem of knowledge

*magic binds forces that would otherwise overflow l[...]