Yup, another foreign film right after the last, this one involving an allegedly more genuine brand of magic. Last Halloweeny pic I'll watch for some time, I warrant; Netflix just had a long wait on it.
It's only the second silent so-called "documentary" I've seen, after the reportedly dishonest Nanook of the North. (You can watch the William S. Burroughs-dubbed version from 1968 on the same disc if you hate reading intertitles or want to save time, but I prefer the powerful classical score to the quirky jazz. I don't think the later one uses helpful tinting either.) In truth, while this Swedish-Danish collaboration does start out looking like a presentation along the lines of An Inconvenient Truth, complete with rare first-person narration by the researcher, it soon goes on to reenactment with license a la "America's Most Wanted" and feels more like historical fiction. Which makes it no less enjoyable.
At 104 minutes, it's a little on the long side for the time and thus divided into chapters. This being "through the ages," of course, we don't get to see any particular characters for long, except maybe Satan. You may razz the old-fashioned costumes and effects for demons (tho the broom riding looks pretty good for the time), but the film does sometimes try to be funny, not just scary or dramatic.
One reason to watch: the thrill of partaking in what was once banned in the U.S. It wasn't the witchcraft that bothered early censors; it was the nearly unprecedented amount of exposed skin. Most nudity gets obscured in shadows and whatnot, apart from the medieval artwork, but the sexual insinuation remains. And while it could hardly be deemed gory, we see enough details of torture of alleged witches to set our minds ablaze.
Informative? Decently so. The narrator presents scientific theories that could explain what people mistook for witchcraft and why they could be quick to accuse one another. In the last chapter, he finds contemporary relevance in the parallels with treatments at insane asylums. Hopefully, such parallels are much more tenuous nowadays.
To call H:WTtA a classic is a stretch. To call it worthwhile, not at all. It is, in its own way, bewitching.
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