A silent witchcraft documentary-fiction, a touchstone for the occult-ritual end of the tradition. The 1968 re-cut carries a direct tradition link: re-edited by Antony Balch with Brion Gysin, narrated by William Burroughs over a jazz score.
Why the Bureau files it. The 1922 film is itself a touchstone for the occult and ritual imagination the tradition draws on: grave-robbing, the witches' sabbath, possession and torture staged as dramatic vignette. But the load-bearing connection is the 1968 re-cut, Witchcraft Through the Ages, re-edited by Antony Balch with Brion Gysin and narrated by William Burroughs over a jazz score by Daniel Humair with Jean-Luc Ponty on violin. Balch, Gysin and Burroughs are the cut-up circle whose work lies at the root of the cut-up tradition the Bureau files; their re-handling of Häxan is a genuine tradition document, not an adjacency.
Benjamin Christensen built the original over a long, costly production, the most expensive Scandinavian silent film of its period, using a study of the Malleus Maleficarum as source. Its mix-and-match of documentary, horror and dark comedy anticipates the essay film. The 1968 version shortens it to roughly seventy-seven minutes and lays the Burroughs narration and Humair's frenetic jazz over the medieval imagery, a deliberate collision of modes that belongs to the same cut-up logic Burroughs applied to tape and text.
The Cold Spring reissue brings the re-cut formally into the tradition's own distribution. The Bureau files Häxan with the 1922 film as the occult-ritual touchstone and the 1968 re-cut as the direct cut-up-circle link, the rare case where the influenced field touches the tradition's actual personnel.
This film is filed in the influenced field: cinema that shares the industrial, noise and avant-garde tradition's sensibility without being made by tradition figures. It is adjacent to the tradition, not of it. The canonical Film entries (Decoder, Halber Mensch, Pig) are tradition-internal works made by or with tradition artists; the influenced field collects the cinema that runs alongside the tradition and feeds the same imaginative reservoir.