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

Benjamin Christensen's H xan (The Witch, 1922) stands as a singular film within the history of cinema. Deftly weaving contemporary scientific analysis and powerfully staged historical scenes of satanic initiation, confession under torture, possession, and persecution, H xan creatively blends spectacle and argument to provoke a humanist re-evaluation of witchcraft in European history as well as the contemporary treatment of female "hysterics" and the mentally ill.

In Realizing the Witch, Baxstrom and Meyers show how H xan 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. H xan 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. H xan 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 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.

Todd Meyers is Associate Professor of Medical Anthropology at Wayne State University. He is the author of The Clinic and Elsewhere: Addiction, Adolescents, and the Afterlife of Therapy and the coeditor of Fordham’s Forms of Living series.