Realizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible

Richard Baxstrom; Todd Meyers

Open Access Published by Fordham University Press 2015

Realizing the Witch

Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible

Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers

In the series Forms of Living

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823268276

Overview
Contents

About this book

Realizing the Witch follows the unfolding of Benjamin Christensen’s visual narrative in his 1922 film, Häxan (The Witch). Through a close reading of Häxan, Baxstrom and Meyers examine the study of witchcraft from historical and anthropological perspectives, as well as the intersection of popular culture, artistic expression and scientific ideas.

Author / Editor information

Baxstrom Richard :

Richard Baxstrom is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Houses in Motion: The Experience of Place and the Problem of Belief in Urban Malaysia.Meyers Todd :

Todd Meyers is Associate Professor of Anthropology at New York University-Shanghai. He is the author of The Clinic and Elsewhere: Addiction, Adolescents, and the Afterlife of Therapy.

Reviews

Philippe-Alain Michaud:

Baxstrom and Meyers’ book is more than a meticulous analysis of Benjamin Christensen's masterpiece Häxan, more than a model monograph. It finds and charts undiscovered tracks in the field of film studies, tracks that the authors invest with methods of analysis inspired by Warburgian iconology. In
the light of their work, the film becomes a privileged way of accessing the history of discourses and representations.

—Walter Stephens:
“Benjamin Christensen's 1922 film Häxan is well known for some of the wrong reasons. Realizing the Witch rescues Häxan from the sensationalist prurience of the entertainment market, and subjects it to careful historical scrutiny and a lively close reading that exploits the resources of film history and theory. The authors explore Christensen's use of his contemporaries' research into witchcraft, psychology, and anthropology and refract their analysis through up-to-date scholarship on these topics. They conclude that Christensen hoped to 'materialize' the figure of the Witch, setting a trap that would 'possess' the audience. The implications of this interdisciplinary study will be of interest to researchers and teachers in all these fields, not least the history of witchcraft studies.”

—Alison Griffiths:
“Baxstrom and Meyers have a keen eye for the wondrous otherness of Christensen’s work, never missing an opportunity to theorize the film’s struggles with the ontological slipperiness of the witch, cinema as absent presence, and questions of recording, witnessing, and irrationality in twenty-first century science and culture.”

—Stuart McLean:
This is a powerful and highly original work that makes significant contributions to a number of areas of contemporary scholarship, including visual anthropology, the anthropology of witchcraft, cinema studies and science studies. At the same time it succeeds impressively in communicating the authors’ own admiration and enthusiasm for an often negelcted masterpiece of silent cinema. The professed aim of Christensen’s Häxen was to show that witchcraft was a misidentified nervous disease and thus to illustrate the incompatibility of superstition and religious fanaticism with modernity and science. In fact, as the authors point out, the film exceeds such a scientific enframing of its subject-matter, its effect being rather to “give the witch life.” Their analysis shows how both Christensen and they themselves as spectators are, in Jeanne Favret-Saada’s phrase, “caught” by the phenomenon of witchcraft in such a way that it can no longer be held at a safe analytic distance as an instance of the (misguided) beliefs of others. Instead, they suggest, Christensen’s film complicates its own status as a ‘truthful’ representation. In doing so it opens up intellectual and imaginative possibilities beyond any straightforward opposition between ‘documentary’ and ‘fiction’ and raises important and unsettling questions not only about witchcraft, modernity and cinematic representation but also about the past, present and future of anthropology.

—Henning Schmidgen:

“Realizing the Witch is a highly original, exciting, and important book. With this
work, Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers establish themselves as pioneering scholars in the emerging field between media studies and the history of science.”

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction. What Is Häxan? Open Access Download PDF	1
Part One. The Realization of the Witch
The Witch in the Human Sciences and the Mastery of Nonsense Open Access Download PDF	17
One. Evidence, First Movement: Words and Things Open Access Download PDF	32
Two. Evidence, Second Movement: Tableaux and Faces Open Access Download PDF	62
Three. The Viral Character of the Witch Open Access Download PDF	87
Four. Demonology Open Access Download PDF	103
Part Two. A Mobile Force in the Modern Age
1922 Open Access Download PDF	133
Five. Sex, Touch, and Materiality Open Access Download PDF	145
Six. Possession and Ecstasy Open Access Download PDF	168
Seven. Hysterias Open Access Download PDF	187
Postscript. It Is Very Hard to Believe . . . Open Access Download PDF	205
Acknowledgments Open Access Download PDF	213
Notes Open Access Download PDF	215
Benjamin Christensen’s Cited Source Material Open Access Download PDF	249
Filmography Open Access Download PDF	253
Bibliography Open Access Download PDF	257
Index Open Access Download PDF	275

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Pages
- Main content: 296
Keywords: Anthropology; Cinema; Documentary; Early Modern Europe; Evidence; film; Haxan; History of Science; medieval; Witchcraft

eBook

Published: November 2, 2015
ISBN: 9780823268276