Witches' Hammer review

Senses of Cinema WITCHES' HAMMER review

[Originally published online for Senses of Cinema’s Senses Of Cinema's Cinemateque Annotations (August 2008) Melbourne, Australia]

Witches’ Hammer/Kladivo na čarodějnice (1970 Czechoslovakia)

Prod Co: Filmové Studio Barrandov Dir: Otakar Vávra Scr: Otakar Vávra, Ester Krumbachová, based on the novel by Václav Kaplický Phot: Josef Illík Ed: Antonín Zelenka Prod Des: Ester Krumbachová, Karel Škvor Mus: Jiří Srnka

Cast: Elo Romančík, Vladimír Šmeral, Soňa Valentová, Josef Kemr, Lola Skrbková, Jiřina Štěpničková

"Whoever believes that any creature can be changed for the better or the worse, or transformed into another kind or likeness, except by the Creator of all things, is worse than a pagan and a heretic."

- Malleus Maleficarum of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger/“The Witches’ Hammer”, c. 1496, Part 1, Question 1

Coming from a country rich in experimental, absurdist, surrealist-tinged and fantastical cinema, the Czech film Witches’ Hammer is a surprisingly formalist and unambiguous comment on life under a totalitarian regime. Based on actual transcripts of Moravia’s witch-trials during the period 1667-1695, and using the same allegorical language as Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudon, the message is as subtle as a two-foot bodkin to the inner thigh: positioning religion as a state-bound brand of delirium and control. To director Otakar Vávra’s credit, the hysterical and wildly expressionist flourishes Ken Russell brought to his version of The Devils in the following year are toned down to produce a deliberately measured pace and a mounting sense of doom as the veil of fear descends inexorably over a 17th Century town held in the grip of religious paranoia and delusion. Absent too is Russell’s garish palette; Witches’ Hammer’s stunning black-and-white photography compounds its stark opposites with images of an ever-mounting number of smouldering stakes, one for each doomed townsperson suspected of witchcraft, and silhouetted like burnt matches against the grey sky.

At the film’s core are two bleakly contrasted figures. Representing authority and control is the autocrat Bobling, a famed inquisitor coaxed from retirement to smoke out the town’s pagan elements. A vainglorious hypocrite, he proclaims worldliness a sin in one breath whilst wallowing in the most grotesque of indulgences in the next. His target is the local Deacon Lautner, who is at once a deeply moral man and a self-confessed sinner whom we suspect has carried out a sexual relationship with his young charge, Zuzana. Boblig relentlessly pursues Lautner, usurping his position and privileges along with his material possessions whilst Lautner’s fellow clergy fearfully abandon him in droves. He also sends sends countless innocents through his Inquisitor’s threshing machine. As the litany of forced confessions grows, including that of the doomed Zuzana, Lautner’s various shades of grey are brought back into sharp contrast, and he becomes an almost Christ-like figure made noble through his suffering.

Witches’ Hammer presents a cruel, unforgiving universe painted in blacks and whites: women are perceived as either hags or harlots, men as sinners or saints, while the most profound example of this schizophrenic split is to be found in the film’s title. Characters constantly refer to “the Book” – not The Bible, which is hardly ever mentioned, but the Malleus Maleficarum, the Inquisition’s handbook on the torture and execution of suspected witches, and a manifestation of the Church’s temporal supremacy that is constantly flipped through like the I Ching for inspirational epithets. Ultimately, one has to wonder where God exists within this depressingly human equation. “I’m not a theologian”, one of Boblig’s underlings confesses to Lautner, his blackening teeth barely making a crooked smile, “I’m a jurist”. God, it seems, has left the building.

“Power and truth are two different things”, a defeated Lautner tells his accusers, underscoring the struggle between those consolidating their power within the circle and those honest enough to remain on the outside (whom history consigns to being crushed under the dialectical wheels). The film’s binary opposites are found everywhere – truth and lies, dogma and heresy, the spiritual versus the carnal, and in the sometimes arbitrary and paradoxical split between Good and Evil. The underlying dualistic notion that the world and all that is worldly is sinful inevitably has at its core a deep loathing of sexuality and a mistrust of the fallible flesh. This inevitably unhealthy pathology is neatly set up in the film’s opening. Cutting between a wide-eyed monk describing the torments of the damned (“A woman’s womb is the gateway to hell!”) and shots of voluptuous young girls bathing, the naked innocence of the latter is at once tainted by the monk’s foaming-at-the-mouth vitriol.

Witches’ Hammer is by necessity a contradictory beast, both a genre film and a political fable sanctioned by a totalitarian regime. Its generic qualities recall the perfectly-executed excesses of The Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, 1968) with Boblig a mirror image of Vincent Price’s monstrous Matthew Hopkins, and no more so than in its most disturbing scene of Boblig’s Inquisition poking and prodding a girl’s naked, broken body under the sign of the cross. As for its Iron Curtain origins, it’s too easy to label the film’s premeditated targets as either organised religion (presumably the reason the film was permitted to be made in the first place) or Czechoslovakia’s Communist overlords, a critique which most Czech New Wave films appear, at first glance, to be sneaking under the radar. As a philosophical meditation it runs much deeper, presenting the Church as a disorganised and inherently corrupt bureaucracy ossified by constricting dogma. This view is as timeless as it is unambiguous, a metaphor for any worldly apparatus designed to steamroller over the human spirit. A humanist horror film and an indisputable work of art, Witches’ Hammer drives its point home with a cold, methodical rhythm that has weathered the test of time more successfully than many of its modish, pop-centric contemporaries.

Czech Gothic Retrospective 2004

Grim Fairy Tales for Adults: BIFF's Czech Gothic Retrospective

[Originally published in Rave magazine, Brisbane 28/07/04]

For lovers of the dark, the grotesque and the imaginative, this year’s most exciting retrospective at BIFF is Czech Gothic: Classic Horror and Fantasy Films, curated and hosted by visiting American author and film academic Steven Jay Schneider.

The name most familiar to Brisbane audiences is arch-surrealist Jan Svankmajer, creator of the wonderfully twisted animated takes on Alice In Wonderland (Alice, 1988) and Faust (1994). Schneider presents Svankmajer’s most obscure works, a series of short Gothic adaptations made after Czech authorities banned him from telling his own (admittedly hyper-critical) stories. Castle of Otrano (1977) and the Poe adaptations The Fall Of The House Of Usher (1980) and The Pit, The Pendulum and Hope (1983) show how, even in the most controlled of environments, a master storyteller’s subversive playfulness seeps through the cracks.

Along with fellow countrymen Svankmajer and Jiri Trnka, Jiri Bata is one of the leading visionaries of animation, and The Pied Piper (1985), with its eye-popping blend of 2D animation and stop-motion wood carvings, is a perfect introduction to the very adult world of Czech fantasy, of folk superstitions and dark horror tales filtered through half a century of totalitarian regimes.

The Czech New Wave of the 60s was a liberating force for young filmmakers, and yet the spectre of Nazi occupation still loomed large. ...And The Fifth Horseman Is Fear (1964) is a Kafka-esque tale of a Jewish doctor wandering through the nighmarish landscape of German-occupied Prague in search of “morphium”. At turns bleak and wildly absurd, the oppressive lighting and beautifully contorted black and white photography owes much to Orson Welles and The Third Man, Carol Reed’s own love letter to war-scarred Europe. Gallows humour also hangs low over The Cremator (1968) and its protagonist, a ruthlessly ambitious crematorium operator searching for the most efficient means of large-scale “waste management”.

A complete change of pace is the Pop Art explosion of Who Killed Jessie? (1966), a freewheeling take-no-prisoners romp through the comic strip Euro-excesses of Diabolik and Modesty Blaise. An unimaginative academic schlubb is transported into the world of superheroes, who then follow him into the “real” world. A then-revolutionary clash of live action and comic panels, Jessie has certainly aged but is still insanely addictive fun.

The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 saw a dramatic end to the freedom of ideas in the Czech artistic community, and signalled the twenty year policy of “Normalization” under which art was to solely function as a tool to glorify the Socialist revolution. Nevertheless, filmmakers like Svankmajer were able to slip quite radical political and universal themes into their work under the Soviet radar, as “fantasy” was regarded by the State Censors to be the sole domain of children.

Which still doesn’t quite explain Jaromil Jires’ Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders (1970). The famous Czech surrealist tale of a young girl’s sexual awakening is layered with mystic symbols and its bizarre dreamlike scenario is maintained by a strong artistic grip, yet comes across as Alice In Wonderland rejigged by nudie horror specialist Jean Rollin. Another curio is from Cremator director Juraj Herz, the Poe-goes-psychedelic Morgiana (1971), based on a famous Russian gothic story of an evil sister who slowly poisons her beautiful sister and plots to steal her handsome soldier fiancee. The evil sister’s expressionless china doll face soon becomes cracked by guilt and madness, while her poisoned sister’s distorted view is filled with soundtrack shrieks and saturated colours, both observed by the creeping fish-eye lens of Morgiana the cat. Incredible.

Czech Gothic is nicely rounded by two films from after the fall of the Russian Empire, The Damned House Of Hajn (1988), described in the program as “experimental Gothic horror-noir”, and In The Flames Of Royal Love (1990), a more agressively stylistic blend of experimental techniques and grotesque imagery.

A rich and strange film culture, Czech Gothic runs from 29th July to 6th August.