Faust

Released in 1926, directed by F. W. Murnau.

While technology is continuously adding to the expressive possibilities of art, fashion, coming behind, wears them away. Technology expands what can be done, fashion constricts what will be excepted. All right-thinking people agree on the genius of Bach; the discovery of any of his lost works would be celebrated; but there is no demand for anyone today to compose in the style of Bach. Anything current composed in the style of Bach, composed with Bach’s ability, would create a sense of dislocation; there might be interest in it, but the primary interest would be in the dislocation, not the quality. The quality would, in a strange sense, feel ungraspable (this is a hint that quality is not easy to conceptualize).

Faust is a treatise on technologies lost to fashion. It is a proto-industrial film, done with fog and smoke and flammable ink; the set was choked with fumes, the crew wore protective overalls. It’s a made point to compare the guttiness of practical effects with the over-fluency of digital (here is Ebert doing just that in an essay on Faust), but to have such a density of practicality as here clarifies. The unrealism of the effects brings to mind the physical manipulations required to achieve them: objects set on fire, cameras stopped and started – the mind is drawn to reality; whereas with current effects the greater the degree of realism the more we are conscious of its transcendent, informatic, mathematical underpinnings – realism leads away from itself. Nor can we go back to the way things were, except at the margin. Faust’s clonic transformations, toy models, wavering double-exposures – none of this is available to a modern director who is operating, as Murnau decidedly was, in the commercial mainstream. These techniques are now only available within the realm of a self-conscious art, which will always have its own complex of issues where reality is concerned. As for the multiplex, we cannot find films there any more real than the films we already have.

When should one take a Faustian bargain? From a personal perspective, never. You are after all trading something infinite (your afterlife, which will, your soul being sold, presumably be spent in Hell), for something finite (great wisdom in your remaining, numbered years). The math doesn’t work out. What about from the perspective of society? Perhaps you can do immense good for your fellow man with the wisdom gained? Maybe, but again you are only providing them with finite succor, whereas your own eventual suffering will be limitless. In fact the only circumstances under which one should imitate Faust would be when by doing so you could save at least one soul (a wash), and preferably two (a clear profit).

But that’s a cold-blooded way of thinking things through, and the Faust of Faust is surprisingly hysterical. We first meet him (played by Gösta Ekman both in his original old age and then later in youth) in wisdom poses – a scene where he ponders a glowing orb to the edification of his students is the kind of gorgeous non-sequitur you hope for in a dream – but when plague breaks out he moves quickly to frenzy. He prays; when his attempt at a cure fails he throws his Bible in the fire. Burning, the Book opens to a non-sanctioned page, on which are laid out instructions for summoning a devil (a devil, the celestial conflicts portrayed here are all between middle management). This is Mephisto (Emil Jennings), whom we know. In the film’s opening scene Mephisto and an unnamed angel wager the fate of the world on one man’s purity; with gross misjudgment the angel nominates Faust, and thus it is Mephisto who has summoned the plague, the better to bring on a pact-making mood. The plague-calling is the film’s iconic image, Mephisto astride the town, the sun-glare over his left shoulder, storm clouds over his right, the point of a church-steeple jutting across his torso, pestilence boiling in black coils from beneath one huge cocked wing. We know what we are seeing: a man in an awkward costume, standing over a model; we are charmed by the economy with which he is made into a perfect fantasia.

The concept of Mephisto benefits from not being worked out. Once summoned he appears in peasant garb, his greeting to Faust an ominous doffing of his cap. He offers a teaser – one day of perfect wisdom, no strings. Faust accepts, one day being enough to cure the plague. But when he goes into the streets to bring his cure to the people he happens to come across a crucifix, and being satanically compromised finds he can’t stand the sight of it. The people see his trepidation, condemn him as unchristian, and lightly stone him. Rather than make another attempt Faust returns to his study in a bout of petulant despair. The sequence is a neat distillation of the Dark Ages ambience that dominates the film – religion as objects and bodies, morality as contagious psychosis, the collective as mob, the individual as petty and fallen. This might or might not be accurate history, but there is a sense that Faust is unusually proximate, for a film, to pre-Renaissance attitudes; that somewhere in its provenance it picked up faint echoes transmitted through the centuries in the form of sayings and attitudes and ways of holding a mug of beer, echoes which have in the intervening years fallen silent.

Spurned, Faust decides to end all his efforts, and to dismiss Mephisto; Mephisto changes tack and offers instead of wisdom the return of Faust’s youth. Faust, again demonstrating that he was a very poor choice to hang the fate of the world on, takes up that offer with unrecommended speed, and now the makeup and the wig and beard are discarded and we are off to the races. Mephisto also transforms, trading his rags for black silk robe and a plume and a sword (the sword juts constantly behind him at a jaunty reverse-phallic angle, a visual cue for anti-generativeness). This is done via the usual double exposure, the new version of Mephisto appearing beside the old, which fades away – but there is a beautiful touch: the new elegant Mephisto gives a disparaging look at his former self, and with a discreet gesture shoos it away. Just like that, our comprehension of the identities involved is rendered uncertain, our ability to grasp what Mephisto really is called into question. It’s worth noting that while Hans Kyser wrote the inter-titles for Faust, the extremely detailed and literary shooting script was written by Murnau himself; the complex clarity of the individual scenes, the way they pleasantly stretch our logic, lies largely with him.

Holistically however Faust has a reputation for not hanging together. After he becomes young again Faust journeys to Parma to seduce a duchess (because she’s the most beautiful woman in the world), then there are further debauches which are skipped over, then he becomes morose and wants to go home, then he does, then he meets a pure and simple girl named Gretchen and they – and so on. Eventually Gretchen ends up burned at the stake; Faust sacrifices his youth and his life and throws himself on the fire with her. This sets up a beautiful Teutonism: up in heaven, Mephisto claims his victory, only to be informed by his angelic counterpart that Faust has been redeemed, redeemed by a single word. And what is that word? Cut to a dense thicket of German (the word is liebe).

Murnau was known for being pleasant and professional to work with, but he shared with other stylistic obsessives such as Kubrick and Fincher a disinclination to empathize with actors. This tendency would seem to offer a director advantages: you can imagine the leg-up a painter would have if he were the only one not solicitous of the feelings of his paint. In Murnau’s case the story goes that he wasn’t unkind, only rapturous; he would be so carried away by the aesthetic impact of a given scene that he would forget himself and go into a kind of reverie, while the actors were left holding uncomfortable poses, or being doused in soot, or what have you. Yet on the other side of the image, as viewers, what we feel most in Murnau’s films is the sense of aesthetic activity, not stupor – that we are being worked on, that he wants to get over with us. It’s as with Hitchcock, but while Hitchcock is always linking scenes to plot the better to string us along, in Faust at least the scene is everything, and thus the effect is compressed and serial – regular ravishing raps on our eyes. Murnau would adapt easily, one feels, to the current transnational style of filmmaking, in which only the most basic concepts can be relied upon to be universally intelligible, while in the realm of spectacle we are all becoming ever more complex connoisseurs.