FAUST Movie Review

Faust-Eine deutsche Volkssage

This visually brilliant expressionist fantasy by Germany's F.W. Murnau is based on Goethe's version of the story of a man who exchanges his soul for worldly pleasures. It is also, as is widely acknowledged, flawed by the meandering and melodramatic love scenes that take up a good portion of the film's center section. That said, don't miss it for anything. The opening sequence alone—in which Mephisto (Emil Jannings) makes his deal with Faust (Gösta Ekman) and then sweeps him away on his satanic coattails—are enough to provide nightmares for a month. Murnau was one of the greatest visual stylists in the history of cinema, and his masterpieces—Nosferatu, The Last Laugh, Sunrise—were all characterized by a perfectly worked-out visual scheme that was continually at the service of the material. The inconsistent visual audacity of Faust, which has phenomenal power in its opening sequences and its final third, but an unremarkable center, is what prevents it from achieving greatness. Nevertheless, if all flawed films were this amazing, then flawed films would be all I'd care to see. Note: there are lots of “public domain” prints and tapes of Faust in circulation, which generally indicates poor visual quality. Since the images are the whole reason for Faust's classic status, do everything you can to find the best quality copy—laser or video—or better yet, wait for a museum retrospective.

NEXT STOP … Nosferatu (1922), The Last Laugh, Mephisto (1981)

1926 117m/B GE Emil Jannings, Warner Fuetterer, Gosta Ekman, Camilla Horn; D: F.W. Murnau; W: Hans Kyser, Christopher Marlowe, Carl Hoffmann; M: Timothy Brock, Werner R.Heymann.VHS GPV, MRV, NOS