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he conversation between Todd Meyers and Tarek Elhaik follows a screening of the original version of Benjamin Chistensen’s film Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922). The dialogue builds on the innovative argument developed in Meyers’ book Realizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible (co-authored with Richard Baxtrom, Fordham, 2015) where the authors invite us to think of Haxan as an “anthropological and cinematic object” afforded by the scientific and artistic “milieu” of 1922. (1922 is indeed the signal year marked by a series of key cultural productions: the publication of Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific, the making of Robert Flaherty’s proto-ethnographic film Nanook of the North, and Murnau’s Nosferatu.) The conversation also meditates on Haxan’s image environment and iconography, examining in particular the wild trans-historical correspondences the controversial Danish director establishes between a series of paired figures: Inquisitor/ Witch, Psychiatrist/Hysteric, and by extension, Meyers and Baxtrom provocatively suggest, Fieldworker/Native. Not as farfetched as one might think. After all, didn’t Walter Benjamin compare the figure of the Filmmaker to that of the Surgeon?
Häxan a film by Benjamin Christensen
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odd Meyers is Associate Professor of Anthropology at NYU Shanghai. Prior to joining NYU Shanghai, he was Associate Professor of Medical Anthropology at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Professor Meyers holds a joint PhD in Anthropology and Public Health and a MA in Anthropology, both from The Johns Hopkins University, and a BFA in Studio from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Professor Meyers’s research is primarily focused on the social study of medicine. His publications include Realizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible (with Richard Baxstrom, Fordham University Press, 2016), Experimente im individuum: Kurt Goldstein und die Frage des Organismus (with Stefanos Geroulanos, Walther König/ August Verlag, 2014) and The Clinic and Elsewhere: Addiction, Adolescents, and the Afterlife of Therapy (University of Washington Press, 2013). In addition, he is co-editor of the Forms of Living book series from Fordham University Press and Associate Editor of the on-line forum Somatosphere.
Professor Meyers has received numerous awards and fellowships, including an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship (with Stefanos Geroulanos, NYU), a Residency Research Fellowship at the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Research/University of Michigan, and the Ruth L. Kirschstein Individual Fellowship/NIH/National Institute of Drug Abuse.
CONVERSATION PODCAST