a review of 女巫

Everything I'd heard about this movie was true -- the fanciful recreations of black masses and demonic disturbances are 100% worth watching this movie to see, but I also found just a little bit more. It was kind of a surprise to discover that this movie took a more modern/humane take on witches and the phenomenon of witch hysteria than most later horror films ever did. It doesn't quite make the feminist case that the witch hunts were patriarchal religious pogroms aimed at vulnerable women, but it comes awfully close, by laying bare the corruption of the medieval church as well as the cruelly elaborate torture methods used to obtain "confessions". I was also unprepared for the meta direction of the narrative, where the film's director literally breaks into the narration at various points to directly editorialize or reveal some aspect of the production process. It makes me wonder if this was a common device of early silent cinema, or if this film was seen as something of an oddity at the time.