Ghédalia Tazartès

Composition and performance of music: Ghédalia Tazartès

A self-taught musician, vocal improviser and manipulator of sounds of all kinds, Ghédalia Tazartes is impossible to define. For this cine-concert, which he first gave at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain last April, he provides the musical backing to Häxan, witchcraft through the ages, a film by the Danish director Benjamin Christensen. Released in 1922 as a documentary, this astonishing silent film shows how the Devil has been portrayed over the ages in a series of scripted scenes. Christensen drew heavily on the Malleus Malificarum (“The Hammer against the Witches”), a fifteenth-century guide to demonology.