Witchcraft beyond RepressionRealizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible. By Richard Baxtrom and Todd Meyers. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016.

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Previous articleNext article FreeBook and Film ReviewsWitchcraft beyond Repression Realizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible. By Richard Baxtrom and Todd Meyers. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016.David J. KimDavid J. KimDepartment of Anthropology, Purchase College, State University of New York, 735 Anderson Hill Road, Purchase, New York 10577, USA ([email protected]). Search for more articles by this author Corrections to this articleErratumPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreDanish director Benjamin Christensen’s film Häxan (The Witches, or Witchcraft Through the Ages) premiered in Stockholm in 1922. Already an established and innovative filmmaker in Denmark, he was given artistic control over its production and appeared to have ultimately escaped the hand of censors despite their concerns regarding its sensational and controversial subject matter (2, 134). Unfettered, he was afforded the means to “pursue the pioneering, bizarre, and lavish project” that would become his masterwork (3). Louis B. Mayer of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, after viewing Häxan, would bring Christensen to Hollywood, where he found his creative and monetary sources limited and directed mostly “forgettable films”; returning to Denmark in 1935, Christensen finished his career “unceremoniously” (3, 4). Häxan, on the other hand, remains a striking film in terms of its ambition, subject, method, and scope. Its cinematic legacy is often associated with the horror genre or is seen in relation to protodocumentary or nonfiction film, but ultimately it is a work that “resists easy categorization” (4). For Richard Baxtrom and Todd Meyers, however, Häxan is far more than a curiosity or cult film that troubles genre. It is a powerful articulation or artifact “that exceed[s] the power of its historical source material—to breathe life into its subjects” (5). It is this excess that Braxtrom and Meyers search for in every segment and frame of this remarkable film. Häxan’s excesses are likewise Christensen’s, and if the latter was trying to perform a demystification or exorcism of superstition via the optics of modernity and science through his filmic lecture, Realizing the Witch remind us that every exorcism must also begin with a conjuring, which in this case escapes the filmmaker’s intention and takes on a life of its own.Häxan is comprised of seven chapters that contain dramatic vignettes pieced together “with direct reference[s] to original writings, art, and literature on witchcraft from the Middle Ages through the Reformation and beyond—materials which he considered alongside and through his reading of the modern sciences of neurology, psychiatry, anthropology, and psychology” (2). Christensen’s years of research on the topic of the witch were expansive and mimetically pushed the boundaries of what was possible in terms of the filmic medium; the result was a spectacular production where history and drama, fiction and nonfiction, and superstition and science converge and spring forth as excesses from the interstices of the camera and director’s eye. Included in Realizing the Witch are Christensen’s cited source materials (249–252), an expansive list that includes Armand Bénet’s Bibliothèque Diabolique (1883), which Baxtrom and Meyers note is a particularly rich archival source for the filmmaker—perhaps even more so than the infamous Malleus Maleficarum—in addition to numerous secondary texts on the topics of witchcraft, sorcery, and possession, too great to mention here. The before-mentioned “beyond” finds its way to Charcot’s and Richer’s Les Démoniaques dans l’Art (1888) and Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpêtrière (1888–1918), which are then further articulated via the operative mechanisms of Freudian repression, at the very least as an interpretive mode. Christensen’s research led him to this particular terminus, which was the logical one based on the theoretical apparatus of the day—namely, that witchcraft was an internalized and “misidentified nervous disease” and, in this way, could be understood and realigned with enlightenment modernity and science (2). It is this thesis that Häxan attempts to put forth, but for Baxtrom and Meyers, what emerges instead is something far stranger, mediated, and provocative. In attempting to objectively explain (away) the witch, Christensen is in fact “caught by her” and subsequently subsumed by the invisible and nameless forces that traverse her and give power to both her magic and any apotropaic resistance (7).It is clear that Baxtrom and Meyers have meticulously combed through Christensen’s source materials, as one of their aims is “to think alongside him” (4, italics theirs), which they do in an exquisite and revealing manner. Realizing the Witch does this by mirroring the structure of Häxan, with its own seven chapters, each devoted to a particular theme and containing rich scene-by-scene analyses drawing from “cinema studies, film theory, anthropology, intellectual history, and science studies” (9). Accompanying their analyses are numerous film stills from Häxan juxtaposed with drawings, woodcuts, paintings, and photos from Christensen’s source materials, as well as Baxtrom and Meyer’s own archival research—some of which appear in the film itself and give remarkable insights into the thought processes behind Christensen’s cinematic essay. More than this, however, they also work as a visual testimony to forces that he ultimately could not fully comprehend but yet was, in fact, collecting and (re)presenting in a kind of “violent multiplicity,” so characteristic of demonology and the diabolical imaginary (85). It is ironic that Christensen, in attempting to reproduce apodictic evidence from a critical distance, should appear in his own film as Satan himself—the iconic flash-like manifestation of being everywhere yet “just out of sight” (73), in a momentary lapse of reason that gives way to a nonsensical encounter with “invisible [and] irrational forces” (18). The stills of Christensen as Satan, like so many in Realizing the Witch, can be stunning—perhaps even more so when removed from a moving series of images—and provide footing for Baxtrom and Meyers’ intense theoretical engagements and detailed critical analyses. Possessed nuns portrayed by the actresses in Häxan, adjacent to photographs of hysterics in the Salpêtrière, are likewise powerful couplings that produce ready-made associations that, at first glance, appear to fit Christensen’s thesis but unravel by virtue of the spectacular intensities produced by recording mediums that emphasize the externality and “power of invisible forces … technology was supposed to abolish” (137).For Baxtrom and Meyers, to think alongside Christensen is not the same as reproducing him. For them, the medicalization of witchcraft as a kind of apparatus of internalized repression is “too pat, too clean” (140). The filmmaker or researcher digs deeper, looks closer, in order to unearth something, but where one expects to find an answer or origin, one is instead confronted with forces “from the outside” (159)—they are touched and traversed by them. This kind of internalized or allegorized descent into depths that unwittingly produce encounters with external forces is further analyzed in the book via a comparison of Häxan with Malinowski’s Argonauts (1984 [1922]), which is as convincing as it is provocative and insightful in relation to the ethnographic encounter. But in regard to the external nature of the force that generates the witch, one should certainly consider Evans-Pritchard as much as Malinowksi, beyond just a passing mention in relation to the inadequacies of structural functionalism. I was likewise a bit puzzled by only minor allusions to James Siegel’s Naming the Witch (2005), which makes similar arguments in regard to the force of witchcraft, at the very least in terms of its externality and elusiveness. But these are small critiques.At the end of the day, the “nature” of the witch for Baxtrom and Meyers is precisely that—a kind of radical naturalism. The power of the witch is not about a return of the repressed, as it was never really repressed at all. The technology of Christensen’s day only served to intensify what was already there. It is Deleuze’s take on naturalism—a polymorphous multiplicity of forces and affects—that Baxtrom and Meyers suggest emerges from Häxan’s folds and excesses. The figure of the witch moves beyond the symptomatic, idiomatic, and allegorical and makes possible a kind of “ethical engagement” (212) in the deepest Spinozistic sense—something intimately tied to life in all its creative, cooperative, and joyous capacities. This kind of turn is quite remarkable for a figure so usually wrapped in darkness, sorcery, and maleficium—a wild ride, indeed. Realizing the Witch is a welcome and seminal contribution to the study of witchcraft in anthropology, literature, and cinema studies. Baxtrom and Meyers have revealed the force of Häxan and cast it into an entirely new light.References CitedBénet, Armand. 1883 [1591]. Procès-verbal fait pour délivrer une fille possédée par le malin esprit, à Louviers (Bibliothèque diabolique). Paris: Progès Médical.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarCharcot, J.-M., and Paul Richer. 1888. Les démoniaques dans l’art. Paris: Delahaye et Lecrosnier.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarCharcot, J.-M., Paul Richer, Georges Gilles de la Tournette, and Albert Londe, eds. 1888–1918. Nouvelle iconographie de la Salpêtrière. Paris: Lecrosnier et Babé.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarMalinowski, Bronislaw. 1984 [1922]. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Prospect Heights: Waveland.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarSiegel, James. 2005. Naming the witch. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.First citation in articleGoogle Scholar Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Current Anthropology Volume 58, Number 1February 2017 Sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/690140 Views: 699Total views on this site HistoryAccepted August 04, 2016 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.Related articlesErratum31 Mar 2017Current Anthropology