"And then came a man-Benjamin Christensen-who did not fabricate his films but created them out of love and an infinite care for detail. He was thought mad. But time has shown that it was he who made a pact with the future."-Carl Th. Dreyer, 1920Benjamin Christensen (1879-1959) directed only fifteen films, eight of them outside his native Denmark, in a career spanning thirty years. His brilliant debut features, The Mysterious X (1913) and Night of Revenge (1915), and his notorious fusion of the documentary and supernatural fiction film, Häxan (Witch, 1918-1921, rereleased here as Witchcraft through the Ages), have earned him international recognition as a visionary Scandinavian film stylist and pioneering master of light, shadow, staging, and narrative in the cinema of the 1910s and early 1920s. His influence on fellow Danish auteur Carl-Theodor Dreyer was also substantial. Yet film historians have tended to undervalue the remainder of the Christensen canon. Of the six films Christensen made in Hollywood between 1926 and 1929, three are still considered to be lost, but the archival rediscoveries of The Devil's Circus, Mockery, and Seven Footprints to Satan reveal that Christensen's stylistic creativity, idiosyncratic experimentation, and sardonic wit all remained intact during his American emigre period. After a failed attempt at financing independent productions in Hollywood in the early 1930s, Christensen returned to Denmark, directing four films for Nordisk Films Kompagni between 1939 and 1942. The first three were contemporary "social-debate" films which re-established Christensen (then in his sixties) as a serious Danish filmmaker, social provocateur, and gifted director of both veteran and younger actors. His last film, The Lady with the Light Gloves, was a misfired return to the WWI-era espionage plot intrigues and expressionist silent-film visuals of The Mysterious X thirty years before. This critical fiasco abruptly ended his career, and Christensen managed a suburban cinema (the Rio Bio) in Copenhagen for the last fifteen years of his life.-Arne LundeThis series is sponsored by the Royal Consulate General of Denmark in New York. It was organized by Jytte Jensen, Associate Curator, The Museum of Modern Art, Department of Film and Video, with the generous collaboration of The Danish Film Institute/Film Archive, Fondazione Cinemateca Italiana, and Swedish Film Institute.A series booklet with essays by notable scholars, produced by The Museum of Modern Art, will be available, free, at PFA.Arne Lunde, who contributed many of the program notes for our Calendar, is a doctoral student in the Department of Scandinavian Studies, UC Berkeley. His dissertation focuses on directors Christensen, Victor Sjöström, Mauritz Stiller, and the Scandinavian Colony in twenties Hollywood. Our series title is borrowed from an essay by Casper Tybjerg. Saturday October 16, 1999
