<PERSON>
My thoughts primarily align with my original review, so I'll direct you there rather than scrape after a novel rephrasing, as it's one I find worth a smidge've pride. There is, however, one point of mine I wanna relitigate here, the statement running, "We're off to the races, and won't make contact with more sensible reality for a good hour," with regards to <PERSON> devil popping from behind a parish in the second movement.
While it's true the opening chapter's play at pure filmed lecture stylings with the direct source citations and the pointer tapping over medieval woodcarvings remains by the wayside in favor of vignettes depicting all-consuming witch hunts, midnight rides with the horned one, and hysterical outbreaks in secluded convents, I don't think my claim fair in view of the trials and persecutions which span chapters three through five. These are the meat of proof <PERSON> does not shift from academia to spookhouse tactics as simple means of shocking the audience or indulging a belief in witchcraft as undoubtedly real. Anything fantastical presented before the inquisitors is explicitly coerced under torture of physical and psychological natures alike, or else the spiteful curses of a long-wronged woman dragging those who denigrated her with false accusations down to this level. 417
The shots of witches smearing mixtures of piss and mud upon a victim's door, or dancing naked as they smooch Satan's ass in the pale moonlight, they're filmed with as much grungy veracity as their counterparts in chapter two, but the context of edited storytelling matters a great deal, and <PERSON> clearly means these delves into fantastical as tragic moments when the victimized break beneath the lash and rack, giving their tormentors precisely the proof they need to exercise injustices they meant to perpetrate no matter what. A full-throated confession from out the thumbscrews will prove the existence of witchcraft in this body just so well as demanding tears on command and declaring dry eyes a smoking gun, after all.
'Tis a sobering demonstration of his thesis, that idea of superstition as the readiest expression and excuse for prejudice. Flying so far off the handle in visual depiction of the ghastliest practices, only to cast these shadows as concrete-solid for the power and justification they inspire in the minds of those entrenched and enabled by status to cast their own subtler, crueler spells. We've our feet firmly upon the ground during these wildest of fancies, for one cannot escape the roots nor reasons behind such beliefs in devilry and the inherent purity of the accuser's heart. Those weirdest and wooliest of conjurations exist near-always in service of minds which wish pain and suffering for the most mundane reasons; to fail at recognizing the relation is to fail at steeling ourselves against whatever weaknesses in our own belief systems might make us susceptible to such insidious, prosaic bewitching. 285