Dissolving & Reconstituting Narrative Cinema

9	Witchcraft Through the Ages	1921 – Benjamin Christensen (Sweden)
	Documentary Narrative	Documentary form; fact & fiction

A: Background

Christensen was a former opera singer/writer/actor. Some of his other films (made in America after he immigrated there) include HAXAN (26), THE HAUNTED HOUSE (28) & SEVEN FOOTPRINTS TO SATAN (29).

B: Documentary form

Despite its unusual flow, WITCHCRAFT still evidences the essential characteristics of most documentary/nonfiction films
(a) a presentation of researched information & data
(b) a construction of the historical perspective which determines that information & data
(c) a proposed correlation between that data (pertaining to the past) and a view as to how - such information has developed into a current situation (pertaining to the present).

C: the Documentary document

Made in 1921, WITCHCRAFT works (now) as a document which tells us more (for now) about
(a) how it interpreted its researched data
(b) how it viewed its 'current situation'
(c) how it constituted historical relationships between its past and its present it.

D: fact & fiction

The presences of fact are indistinguishable from the presences of fiction
(a) in the initial scenes which depict how the devil was depicted throughout history, the film factually films fictious representations.
(b) in the torture scene of the old seamstress, her lies are factually presented by the film in the fictitious form of a flashback : the, fiction is doubled here - (i) if the old seamstress is lying she could not have seen/memorized those images, therefore the film lies in its presentation of a flashback ; and (ii) those same scenes include repeats and variations of footage which was presented to us before as 'documentary recreation' of the Sabbath ceremonies.
(c) as a reverse of (b), there is a factual summary of the dramatization of the torture scene where a title-card proclaims "INSTRUMENTS OF TORTURE" and then excepts footage from the actual dramatized torture scene.
WITCHCRAFT is a good example of how the documentary narrative functions: as a mix of the factualization of fiction and the fictionalization of fact - often with no clear indications of difference in these two separate narrative modes.