50 George Square
Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9JU
UK
Edinburgh Film Seminar
5 November 2015 5:30pm
50 George Square – Lecture Theatre G.03
Dr. Richard Baxstrom, University of Edinburgh
Realizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible
‘In Realizing the Witch, Baxstrom and Meyers show how Häxan opens a window onto wider debates in the 1920s regarding the relationship of film to scientific evidence, the evolving study of religion from historical and anthropological perspectives, and the complex relations between popular culture, artistic expression, and concepts in medicine and psychology. Häxan is a film that travels along the winding path of art and science rather than between the narrow division of “documentary” and “fiction.” Baxstrom and Meyers reveal how Christensen’s attempt to tame the irrationality of “the witch” risked validating the very “nonsense” that such an effort sought to master and dispel. Häxan is a notorious, genre-bending, excessive cinematic account of the witch in early modern Europe. Realizing the Witch not only illustrates the underrated importance of the film within the canons of classic cinema, it lays bare the relation of the invisible to that which we cannot prove but nevertheless “know” to be there.’
Richard Baxstrom is Lecturer in Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh, and co-editor of the journal Visual Culture in Britain.