mmmuconn

Benjamin Christensen's `Haxan' is a smorgasbord of narrative styles. Sometimes he lectures using still drawings to show the medieval world's fear of sorcery; elsewhere he employs state-of-the-art special effects and campy performances to depict a fun-filled fantasy world. He gravely dramatizes the plight of poor women during medieval times, and then gleefully demonstrates witch hunters' torture practices. He continues to bounce from point of view to point of view even at the end of the film, when he alternates between smug jokes and serious attempts to draw connections between medieval inquisitors and modern psychiatry. Where does Christensen stand? It is no accident that he stars as the devil. For him, both the subject of witchcraft and the process of filmmaking are a playground over which he asserts complete dominion. He enjoys himself too much to worry more than momentarily about morals.

Rating: 7

Contemporary audiences must have been awed by the spectacle of the three exotic adventure episodes within `Der Mude Tod', but the imagery Fritz Lang employs in the bookends is the most fascinating aspect of the film today. Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton had already occasionally used clever camera tricks, but Fritz Lang's film revels in special effects. Through editing and double exposure, he makes it look even now as though ghosts are disappearing through a garden wall, or that two lovers' souls are exiting their bodies. The most exciting thing about Lang's magic, of course, is that his images act as a foundation for beautiful, poetic ideas. His unusually sympathetic portrayal of Death is just one example of why the outer story resonates so much more than the obvious melodrama in its middle. Lang seems to argue that, while love cannot overcome death, it retains a power which even death would respect and envy.

Rating: 8