How ‘Witches’ Director Elizabeth Sankey Summons Cinema to Cast a Spell

From Agatha to Elphaba, it’s been a season of witches on film and television. But whatever charms witches conjure in the narratives that entertain us, the MUBI documentary “Witches” shows how ideas about too powerful, too magical women have variously defined and reinforced the contradictions of femininity; and yet also helped women make sense of themselves. 

Director Elizabeth Sankey does this using the medium of film itself, telling her own story of a post-partum depression severe enough to require psychiatric treatment through speaking directly to camera, through talking-head interviews with friends and experts alike, and through an archive’s worth of relevant film clips. The more montages Sankey weaves together of girls, mothers, psychiatric patients, and, of course, witches, the easier it is for us to see how our media archetypes cast a spell that can settle deep into our bones.   

The process of pulling footage and organizing the edit of “Witches” was an intense one, but also one that helped Sankey see film a little bit differently as a medium. “You sort of realize there’s this continuity between stories about the same things that is visual as well as narrative and I just really love that,” Sankey told IndieWire on an episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “Humans have used the same ways of expressing themselves, from 1928 with ‘The Passion of Joan of Arc,’ all the way through to yesterday.” 

By lining up clips from “The Witch” to “Gothika” next to each other, it becomes easy to spot storytelling conventions that otherwise go around in an invisibility cloak. Certain actors — Fairuza Balk, Joan Fontaine, Winona Ryder — have also answered the call to play witchy or otherwise troubled women again and again. When looking for that slightly buried throughline of film worlds pushing back against women who don’t quite fit, scenes in otherwise overlooked movies can take on new power. 

“There’s a scene in one of the films, quite a schlocky black-and-white, British film from the ‘60s, about this woman who starts practicing witchcraft, and her husband’s freaking out about it. And if I were to play that film for you now, you’d be like, ‘Why is she wearing shorts?’ But there’s a scene in it where she walks into the sea fully clothed that was so beautiful and so brilliant,” Sankey said. 

Part of the joy of “Witches” is Sankey’s ability to draw out surprisingly beautiful, brilliant imagery and make it resonate and feel all the truer inside the framing of her own story. The video essay format of the documentary feels like the best kind of proof that films and shows about witches really do hold sway over how Western culture understands things like motherhood, pregnancy, and madness. Sankey was struck by how films do tend to represent psychiatric wards very honestly — so much so that she found a clip from the 1948 film “The Snake Pit” that had, unintentionally, perfectly illustrated her own experience of being on a mother and baby ward. 

“There’s a scene in ‘The Snake Pit’ where she walks into her room. I use it in the film [as] I describe my room, but I found the clip after we’d shot that monologue. I say, ‘And I walked into my room and it was really nice. I could see trees through the window.’ [In the clip, Olivia de Havilland] walks into her room and she can see some trees through her window,” Sankey said. “We were like, ‘Oh my God.’ That synchronicity is magical and it is kind of witchy,” Sankey said. 

‘The Snake Pit’20th Century Fox Licensing/Merchandising / Everett Collection

Sankey uses her story as a springboard to explore the deeply under-discussed and undertreated problems of post-partum care and its associated stigmas, but also how we always turn to stories to try and get people to understand what’s going on inside of us. “Witches” not only uses film to look at a modern experience but to cast its gaze backward to the witch trials of the early modern period. 

“I was using these films to show what it was like inside my brain. And something that keeps coming back to me from my reading about the witch trials is that quite often these women were using the framework of witchcraft and demonology and stuff to talk about things that they didn’t have language for,” Sankey said. “There’s examples of women clearly talking about sexual assault, that they’ve been sexually assaulted, but they don’t have the language for it,” Sankey said. 

Fortunately, Sankey had a wealth of films and television series at her disposal and such a strong script that it was easy to make the fair use case for how and why all these clips needed to be summoned. “It’s an art form that should be elevated; I see people doing it in such cool, interesting ways,” Sankey said. “Maybe people don’t have a budget to shoot anything, but there are [ways] you can use films. You have to be critiquing the film or referencing the film when you’re discussing it, you can’t just use the film as b-roll, but it’s quite flexible.” 

‘The Witch’Everett Collection / Everett Collection

Not so flexible that filmmakers should forgo getting a lawyer to clear clips, of course, but “Witches” only had to pay for two shots, both of which feature in its more abstract, elemental opening cards. The rest, Sankey and her team were able to make or find themselves. “In this situation that we’re currently in where you basically need to be bankrolled into making a film and only people like me who are privileged are able to do it, a really great way of telling a story,” Sankey said.  

In Sankey’s hands, the format is also a really great way of pulling off cinema’s most powerful magic. “I just felt like it was such an amazing opportunity for me as a filmmaker to be like, ‘This is something that happened to me and I can show you what it felt like. I can show you what it was like inside my brain,’” Sankey said.  

“Witches” is available on MUBI.