Häxan with live soundtrack by Lori Goldston and Greg Kelley
Häxan with live soundtrack by Lori Goldston (cello) and Greg Kelley (trumpet)
Tuesday, October 25, 2022 at 8pm
SMFA at Tufts
Performance Studio (2nd floor)
230 The Fenway
Boston, MA
Tickets: $10 general / $5 non-SMFA students & members / Free for SMFA students & faculty
A rarely-seen silent horror film that still shocks, Häxan (1922, Benjamin Christiansen, director) turns 100 years old on Halloween! Originally banned in the U.S., this legendary Swedish masterpiece offers a mesmerizing investigation into the fear of the unknown.
About the artists
Classically trained and rigorously de-trained, possessor of a restless, semi-feral spirit, Lori Goldston is a cellist, composer, improvisor, producer, writer and teacher from Seattle. Her voice as a cellist, amplified or acoustic, is full, textured, committed and original. A relentless inquirer, her work drifts freely across borders that separate genre, discipline, time and geography. Lori Goldston's collaborators include Earth, Nirvana, Mirah, David Byrne, Terry Riley, Cat Power, and many more. Her work has been commissioned by and/or performed at the Kennedy Center, Sydney Festival, Cineteca Nacional de México, Tectonics Festival, Frye Art Museum, Time Based Art Festival (TBA), WNYC, The New Foundation, Paris Fashion Week, Northwest Film Forum, On the Boards, Seattle International Film Festival, Seattle Jewish Film Festival, Bumbershoot, Crossing Border Festival, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Joe’s Pub, the Stone, University of Chicago, and venues large and small throughout North America, Mexico, Australia, and Europe. Lori's new album High and Low will be released in October.
Greg Kelley constantly seeks to push the boundaries of the trumpet and of "music." He has performed throughout North America, Europe, Japan, Argentina & Mexico at numerous festivals, in clubs, outdoors, in living rooms, in a bank, and at least once on a vibrating floor. He has collaborated with a number of musicians across the globe performing experimental music, free jazz and noise, appearing on over 100 recordings including as a member of Nmperign (with Bhob Rainey), Heathen Shame (with Wayne Rogers & Kate Village of Major Stars), Cold Bleak Heat (with Paul Flaherty, Chris Corsano & Matt Heyner) and Hound Dog Taylor's Hand (with Jeffery Taylor, John Seman & Mark Ostrowski) and has collaborated with Jandek, Keiji Haino, Donald Miller (Borbetomagus), Anthony Braxton, Kevin Drumm, Christian Wolff, Pauline Oliveros, Joe McPhee and Lionel Marchetti, among others. In addition to playing the trumpet, Kelley records music using electronics and musique concrete elements.
About Häxan
Referred to in English as The Witches or Witchcraft Through the Ages, Häxan is a Swedish-Danish film, a curious and groundbreaking mix of documentary and horror, written and directed by Benjamin Christensen. Whereas most films of the period were literary adaptations, Christensen's take was unique. He based his film upon non-fiction works, mainly the Malleus Maleficarum, a 15th-century treatise on witchcraft he found in a Berlin bookshop, as well as a number of other manuals, illustrations and treatises on witches and witch-hunting (a lengthy bibliography was included in the original playbill at the film's premiere). Häxan was envisaged as a "presentation from a cultural and historical point of view in seven chapters of moving pictures". While the bulk of the film's format, with its dramatic scenes portrayed by actors (including Christensen himself in the role of the devil), would have been familiar enough to cinema-goers at the time (although shocking in content), the first chapter, lasting 13 minutes, is a different story. With its documentary style and scholarly tone — featuring a number of photographs of statuary, paintings, and woodcuts — it would have been entirely novel — a style of screened illustrated lecture which wouldn't become popular till many years later. Indeed, the film perhaps could make a decent claim to being the first ever documentary (an accolade normally reserved for Robert J. Flaherty's ethnographic study from 1922 titled Nanook of the North). Reportedly the most expensive film of the Swedish silent film era, Häxan was originally well-received in Denmark and Sweden but was banned in countries like the United States for what was considered graphic imagery. In France, Catholic organizations mobilized against the film because of its negative depictions of the Church.
