“Häxan” live soundtrack

Περιγραφή στα Αγγλικά

A woodcut of a witch in flight fills the screen, and the cello enters underneath it — one sustained note that holds the room still. Haxan, Benjamin Christensen's 1922 silent film on witchcraft through the ages, screens at Kentro Elegchou Tileoraseon in Kypseli on March 3, with a live soundtrack performed by Semeli-Sofia Kostourou and Max Reubel.

Christensen spent two years and what was then the largest budget in Scandinavian cinema history building this film. Part documentary, part dramatized nightmare, Haxan draws on the Malleus Maleficarum — the fifteenth-century manual that taught inquisitors how to identify and punish witches — to argue that medieval accusations of sorcery were misreadings of mental illness. The film's devil costumes and sabbath scenes were explicit enough to get it banned in multiple countries on release and infamous enough to earn a 1968 re-edit narrated by William S. Burroughs.

Kostourou, a cellist who completed her postgraduate studies at the University of Music in Nuremberg, works alongside Reubel to build what they describe as a multidimensional, dynamically changing soundscape. The instrumentation layers electric guitar, electronic surfaces, vocals, and cello — scoring the film in real time rather than pressing play on a fixed composition. The approach means the performance responds to the images as they appear: quieter in the documentary passages, harsher when the dramatizations take over.

Kentro Elegchou Tileoraseon — the TV Control Center — occupies a former television repair workshop in Kypseli that served the neighborhood's black-and-white sets through the seventies and eighties. Founded in 2012, the space has operated as an independent venue for experimental music, performance, documentary screenings, and theater. The room is intimate by necessity: this is not a hall with rows of cinema seats but a workshop converted into a cultural space where the screen and the performers share the same close air as the audience.

The crowd at KET skews toward people who seek out programming they will not find on any mainstream listings page. Experimental music regulars, documentary devotees, film enthusiasts who own the Criterion edition of Haxan and want to hear what a live score adds to a film they already know frame by frame.

If you want a comfortable cinema experience with reclining seats and surround sound, KET operates on entirely different terms. But if you want to watch a hundred-year-old film about witchcraft while two musicians build its soundtrack live in the same room as you, this is one of the few places in Athens where that happens.

Victoria metro is the nearest station, roughly a fifteen-minute walk or a short bus ride — trolleybus lines 2 and 4 stop near Kypseli Square, and bus 054 stops at Kallifrona. Doors at 21:00. Tickets are twelve euros through more.com.

A film banned in 1922 and narrated by Burroughs in 1968 gets its third sonic life in a television repair shop in Kypseli.