Everyone has thoughts

To the list of very great witch films in this world everyone should please add Nietzchka Keene's The Juniper Tree (1990), seen tonight at the Brattle Theatre by me and rushthatspeaks.

Lovingly restored by the Wisconsin Center for Film & Theater Research and the Film Foundation, this first of only three features by the Boston-born academic and filmmaker is a luminous, numinous, black-and-white microbudget reworking of the Grimm fairy tale, shot on location in Iceland in the summer of 1986 and set centuries earlier in a medieval landscape of turf houses, wooden crosses, and witchcraft, all plain and real as black sand beaches and meadows star-burst with angelica, basalt cliffs and white-spuming waterfalls, the hollow roar of waves and overcast thunder, the northern lights streaming in the sky like the wordless voices of women singing. Through this richly elemental, sparsely human mise-en-scène wander Margit (Björk, pre-Sugarcubes and still credited as Guðmundsdóttir) and her older sister Katla (Bryndis Petra Bragadóttir), looking for a place "where . . . no one will know us," since where they came from their mother was stoned and burnt for a witch. The floating body of an unknown woman, hands bound behind her in the dark reflections of a reed-draggled river, tells them they haven't gone far enough. Katla nonetheless swears to find a husband by magic if she has to, to secure her sister's safety and her own; the blond-bearded young widower Jóhann (Valdimar Örn Flygenring) takes her home after no more enchantment than a tumble in a field, but she rides a triple circle around him just to be sure. Watching her suspiciously from his father's arms is motherless Jónas (Geirlaug Sunna Þormar), towheaded and uncharmed; he breaks the circle, running away into the long, dim, low-beamed house where he will never eye his stepmother without resentment, increasingly accusing her of witchcraft less because he spied her murmuring over charms of burnt braided hair than because it is the easiest stone to throw at an interloper, an outsider, a woman who's "different." With his step-aunt, however, he forms an uneasy, mystical alliance borne out of their shared grief and Margit's visions, which reassure him that his mother remembers and protects him, watching from a raven's black-glass eye as he lays flower wreaths on her grave. "You look like our mother did when she saw," Katla observes wistfully, watching her sister's eyes darken with visions in the fire: a silhouette on the ridge, a wheeling bird. "She could tell everything by what she saw. But I can't see." The last figure in this small cast, as spare and concentrated as a murder ballad, is the mother herself (Guðrún Gísladóttir), glimpsed first as a seated shadow through the small blurred glass of a window, then as a saintlike apparition on the sea-stacks, finally as herself, a wry-smiling silent woman with a black void where her breastbone should be, into which Margit thrusts a hand as suddenly as a gasp. "She can't speak," she warns Jónas as they kneel before the mother he tries to but cannot see, either sitting on a stone or picking burrs from sheep's wool in a space of shared memory. "When people are dead, they can't speak anymore." They can still tell stories, though, and in this film, as in the original tale whose bones can still be seen shining and disarticulated beneath the earth-swept phantasmagoria of Keene's imagination, they do.

I had previously seen Björk as an actress only in Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark (2000), which I hated so much that I have difficulty even in hindsight evaluating her performance; she's astonishing here. With her dark shag of hair and her long seal's eyes, she convincingly plays a grave, fey adolescent despite having just given birth to her own first child and there is nothing twee or crystally in her half-absent singing as she gathers driftwood at the crunching foot of the sea-cliffs or roams the black-cragged hillsides after her brother-in-law's cows, just as her visions, while often haloed by choral rises in Larry Lipkis' alternatingly folk-angular and modern-atonal score, are as clear as candles or carded wool or racks of stockfish drying, so that we must accept them all of a piece with the natural and inhabited world. Hers is the voice we hear most often on the densely layered soundtrack, musingly telling and retelling a story of stranger marriage and children turned to birds. Elsewhere we hear rhyming charms that blend Christian invocations with pagan correspondences, Bible readings with cautionary tales of wives stolen by trolls. (After hearing the latter, Margit imagines herself curled in a glass coffin as if sleeping, hauntingly touched by another story of violent stepmothers and sorcery.) There might be another world in that white-night sky of wings and seabirds' cries. The juniper tree that springs from a buried bone is as actual as the raven that roosts in its branches. I am reluctant even to describe the character of the mother as a ghost—we were told in the very first lines of the movie that her soul was bound to a bird's heart until the heart should break and that seems to be exactly what governs the duration of her appearance in the story. Perhaps all women's work in this world is witchcraft, spells, sight, and survival. Certainly we see no women who don't practice it, even Margit knotting a charm out of a raven's feather for Jónas to wear around his neck. When they lie under a black overhang of rock, playing a checkers-like game of shells on an outspread cloth and picking at her ambiguous origins ("But you can't change where you're from."–"But what if where you're from isn't there anymore?"), it takes only a small twist in the conversation before Jónas is angrily pelting his outlander stepmother's sister with the shells, drawing blood from her face like a mimicry of stones. "She's a witch," he chants vengefully, swashing the tasseled heads off child-high grasses, "she's a witch, she's a witch, she's a witch, she's a witch!" Katla grinds herbs for a spell of fertility with the same workaday motions with which she spins wool or sews pockets; when the time comes, she cuts fingers from hands and stitches lips as closed as Loki's with the same quiet practicality. I spent the second half of this movie waiting to see if someone would journey to the underworld and I'm not completely sure that they don't, disappearing over the rocky rim of the horizon like the sun winking out. It wouldn't make a difference to the narrative if not.

The Juniper Tree was written, produced, directed, and edited by Keene, who died in 2004 and left her archives to the Wisconsin Center for Film & Theater Research and as near as damn it disappeared from the historical record. You could, if you felt like it, justly pair this movie with Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957), Sergei Parajanov's Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965), Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev (1966), Pier Paolo Pasolini's Medea (1969), Neil Jordan and Angela Carter's The Company of Wolves (1984), or Aleksandr Rogozhkin's The Cuckoo (2002). I have never encountered it in discussion of any of them. I had never heard of it at all before last month. Even when I was agreeing to watch Dancer in the Dark with a college friend who was a major Björk fan, we didn't run across it, and it's not like I never read about cinematic adaptations of folktales. I am profoundly grateful it's in the wild again, even if I can't yet encourage everyone toward a home release; it reminded me of all the films mentioned above, but its images, its language, even its rhythms are deeply its own. The cinematography by Randy Sellars could be freeze-framed for icons, the uncanny effects by Pat O'Neill are as wrong and as familiar as dreams. It ends with a story where it began with a rhyme and it even fulfills its epigraph by T.S. Eliot. "And so they stayed behind and knew what the birds know," but if you want to know what that is, you'll have to let these ghosts of thread and feather and blood and 35 mm tell you. This spell brought to you by my seeing backers at Patreon.