A nervous illness and intense stage fright put an end to Christensen’s success as an opera singer and a theatre actor. He dropped out of medical school to get trained as an opera singer.
Witchcraft through the ages movie#
Christensen did two years research for the movie from 1919), the film can be unanimously heralded as an incendiary expose of religious persecution and a quasi-feminist exploration of the patriarchal tendencies, from the medieval to the modern times.ĭirector Benjamin Christensen (1879-1959) was born in a well-to-do family in Denmark.
Yet even without getting consumed by the debates over Haxan’s genre or whether it’s a precursor to a particular genre (Mr. Both horror and documentary didn’t exist as a genre during the year of its making.īut it’s important to note that Murnau’s Nosferatu and Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North released in the same year, which became the forerunners of the modern horror and documentary respectively (moreover, let’s not forget the 1920 eerie expressionist marvel, The Cabinet of Dr. Some other critics hail Haxan as the proto-horror movie, citing its shockingly effective imagery delineating witchcraft and demonology. It’s considered as the proto-essay film, a type of documentary later developed by the likes of Dziga Vertov, Chris Marker, and Jonas Mekas. Visionary Danish film stylist and one of the pioneering masters of the silent-era cinema, Benjamin Christensen’s Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922) is an ambitious and spellbinding feature-length documentary that included some artfully constructed dramatized scenes.
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