| The Witch and the Hysteric: The Monstrous Medieval in Benjamin Christensen's Häxan Contributor(s): Ingham, Patricia Clare (Author), Doty, Alexander (Author) |
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ISBN: 0692230157 ISBN-13: 9780692230152 Publisher: Punctum Books OUR PRICE: $17.10 Product Type: Paperback Published: August 2014 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | Horror & Supernatural |
| Physical Information: 0.17" H x 5" W x 8" (0.20 lbs) 84 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Benjamin Christensen's 1922 Swedish/Danish film H xan (known under its English title as Witchcraft Through the Ages) has entranced, entertained, shocked, and puzzled audiences for nearly a century. The film mixes documentary with fantasy, history with theatrics, religion and science, the medieval past and modern culture. This uncanny content is compounded by the film's formal strangeness, a mixture of quasi-documentary with fictional episodes, illustrated lectures alongside docudrama recreations and dreamscapes. Is this a documentary, a horror flick, or both? In this chapbook, authors Doty and Ingham argue that the puzzle of Christensen's H xan might be unraveled by attending to the film's provocative and paradoxical medievalism, its fantasmatic rendering of the witch as a medieval monster. Such monstrous medievalism, moreover, sheds considerable light on the politics of gender and culture once the witch is rendered a female figure in a time-out-of-joint. |