Murnau's FAUST

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Because our corporate-media Petri dish has no memory, no sense of perspective, no desire to learn from the past and no courage to be compared with it, the rest of us need to search actively for greatness. When we find it, the impact can often hit us with unexpected force.

One such knock-out came with Murnau's 1926 adaptation of FAUST. Having now seen the restored print from the "Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung," I wish I could have seen it years ago, but good things arrive on their own terms and in their own time.

So much has been said about this film that I have little to add, beyond urging you to see it. As a work of high-budget expressionist Gothic cinematic magic, it compels from start to finish, even if the central portion of the film is more comic than nightmarish (but still well-directed). No need for qualms: the nightmare surges back. The screaming face of Gretchen that hurtles over trees and mountains is merely one of the images that will stay with you long after the film has ended.

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For a film almost one century old, FAUST makes many of the current films I've been unhappy enough to see look pale and dull. Enough time has passed to turn its traditional silent-film methods into startling innovations, which allows FAUST to shock in ways that post-modern films cannot. Every technical aspect, from lighting and set design to miniatures and optical effects, stimulates the head and heart while serving the story without fat. As a combination of pure spectacle with pure story, FAUST cannot be anticipated; it can only be seen.

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TEOREMA, 1968, written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini

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PIETRO:

Nobody must realize that the artist is worthless, that he's an abnormal, inferior being, who squirms and twists like a worm to survive. Nobody must ever catch him out as naive. Everything must be presented as perfect, based on unknown, unquestionable rules.

Like a madman, that's it. Pane after pane, because I can't correct anything, and nobody must notice. A sign painted on a pane corrects, without soiling it, a sign painted earlier on another pane. But everyone must believe that it isn't the trick of an untalented artist, impotent artist. Not at all. It must look like a sure decision, fearless, lofty and almost arrogant. Nobody must know that a sign succeeds by chance, is fragile, that as soon as a sign appears well made, by a miracle, it must be protected, looked after, as in a shrine. But nobody must realize that the artist is a poor, trembling idiot, second-rate, living by chance and risk, in disgrace like a child, his life reduced to absurd melancholy, degraded by the feeling of something lost forever.

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When These Woke Awaken

For me, the most shocking aspect of sudden social crazes would be how quickly they arise and how quickly they die. We, the survivors, look back and say, "How could people have acted like this? How could they have allowed this to happen?"

The past offers many examples of "here today, gone later today" mass delusions. The New England witch craze tore life apart, until, one day, the craze vanished. McCarthyism took a wrecking ball to American society, until one day, it ran out of gas. It simply stopped.

One example from my own lifetime would be the great Satanic Panic media craze. No one mentions it now, but many people were sucked into mass hysteria. Where are these people today? What prompted them to stop shouting, "We must believe the children," and to stop spreading false memories as gospel truth? Do these people look back and wonder, "What the hell was wrong with me?" Do they ever look back at all?

What if they never look back? What would this reveal about human beings and the force of human denial? And what would this imply for tomorrow?

I suspect that, ten years from now, students of history will stare back at our times and wonder how on Earth we could have seen the castration of boys and the genital mutilation of girls as therapeutic; how the hell we could have believed that people are defined not by character or class or learning or achievement or compassion or thought, but by the colour of their skins; how in the name of all that we hold true we could have cancelled people not for their actions, but merely because they disagreed with us on topics where people have always, and always will, disagree?

At the same time, I have to wonder if people in these corporations, governments, and institutions caught up in the current madness will shake themselves, wake up, and wonder, "How could I have believed this?"

Or will, they, instead, move on and never look back... until they fall prey to the next mass delusion?

LES DIABOLIQUES and the Curse of Previous Greatness

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Henri-Georges Clouzot's LES DIABOLIQUES has never worked for me.

You can understand my confusion. This film has been revered as highly as anything from Hitchcock. Its director has all the indications of cinematic genius. Two of his previous films, LE CORBEAU and LE SALAIRE DE LA PEUR, I would call unsettling, compelling, and extremely effective in the art of torturing nerves. Indeed, many people have been tortured by LES DIABOLIQUES. Why, then, does it bore me?

Without spoiling any details of the plot for the five or six people on this planet who have not seen the film, I would guess that it fails for me in being too long and too tidy.

The trouble, here, is escalation beyond the actual murder. Up until this point, the film sets up its characters, their problem, and their scheme to solve that problem, with a certain efficiency. Beyond this point, complications arise -- too many, I think, and with diminishing returns. We have the pool, and then the suit, and then the hotel room, but then we also have the newspaper article, and then the intrusive old man, and then the punished schoolboy, and then the school photograph, and then the typewriter: these are too much, they take up too much time, and they reduce the tension through sheer weight of delay.

A similar escalation was used in LE SALAIRE DE LA PEUR, but with a difference: the protagonists of that film faced a risk of death at every second, and the more complications that arose, the more likely these people were to die at any moment. This gave the film a tension that made my clenched hands ache, a mood of dread that few films can match. In contrast, escalation makes LES DIABOLIQUES drag onwards into tedium. It should have been turning thumbscrews, but instead, it kept me glancing at the clock: "Are we there yet?"

This bulging pile of escalation comes with a starkness of plot that seems too contrived, too neat, with every i dotted, with every t crossed. In its messiness and panic, LE CORBEAU seems like a nightmare; with its rising tension, LE SALAIRE DE LA PEUR seems like a truck out of control on a mountainside. These films are dangerous; they disturb me; they trouble me long after their endings. When LES DIABOLIQUES finally ends, whatever effect it might have had vanishes in the daylight. (Yes, we have that coda, but instead of disturbing me, it makes me embarrased for the script writers.)

My opinion, of course, is nothing more than one opinion. The film has long been famous, and is often cited as the masterpiece of a great director. In my view, however, the merits of his previous films leave this one pale and weak.

Remove One Letter From a Film's Title; Summarize the Story

Buster Keaton. Click for a better jpeg.

LA RÈGLE DU JE.
An illiterate man has one code of conduct, which limits everything he does and thinks.

STAGCOACH.
A catering company must cross the desert to bring a cake to a party, but the stripper inside the cake is not at all happy with travelling conditions.

PSYCH.
A man with a split personality cheats on a university exam by peeking at notes written by his dead mother.

THE LON IN WINTER.
On christmas day, 1183, a man with a thousand faces fights with himself for the English crown.

THE GENERA.
During the American civil war, a humble curator must take back the natural history museum collection of mutated flies that was stolen by enemy agents.