Brief Thoughts on F.W. Murnau’s Faust
(Published July 6th, 2024)
No film is perfect. Faust is remarkably uneven (why does Mephisto get involved in a slapstick romantic subplot that goes nowhere and distracts from the central relationship at its most foundational stage?) but such things can be overcome. Despite its flaws, Murnau’s 1926 adaptation of the classic tale is staggering. The German Expressionist movement, along with its contemporary Soviet Montage movement, has thoroughly perforated cinematic language, yet its original works remain awe-inspiring in their distilled formal audacity and commitment. Every image in this, beyond some lethargic scenes from its center act, composes light and dark with a force that reminds you just how primal and all-defining they are to the moving image, every aspect of its mise-en-scène transcends artifice and places the viewer in this fantasy. To state it is among the best-looking films ever shot is no exaggeration.
It is cathartic how films like Faust and Häxan deconstruct Christian horror to display how institutions of Christianity are themselves part of the horror; don’t get me wrong, The Devil is unambiguously the villain here and young Faust is sleazy and flawed, but Mephisto destroys lives with endemic Christian sexual conservatism more so than the actual prompting of sexual transgression in his victims — just as stigmas around mental illnesses in Häxan’s, perpetuated by the church, cause as much or more damage as the illnesses themselves, which they believe Satan to be responsible for. Faust — a man who literally sold his soul — did not toss a mother and infant into the dead of winter, Mephisto did. The church’s culture did. All Mephisto had to do was tell them what was happening. Both films implicitly further damn Christian anti-pagan dogma, in that when people incorporate aspects of other traditions — be it folk medicine or Faust’s demonic compromise to alleviate the black death, which leaves him incompatible with Christian imagery — are persecuted for harmless, even altruistic, acts. Such persecution is antithetical to Yeshua’s actual philosophies, but it’s what much of Christianity became when Rome took it as its imperial faith. Faust is not an anti-Christian film, it still operates under the assumption of a God and Devil in popular terms, but it reckons with faith in human terms. Faith is a human concept, a human form of communication with each other and the divine, and is capable of as much cruelty as it is beauty. If God, or gods, or the universe, or divine nature means dogma, imperialism, and oppression, I decry it. If it is a manifestation of our capacity of love, redemption, and joy, I am a nervous hopeful. I see myself in Faust as he casts his head back to both laugh and cry at a statement of a merciful God, and a merciful and good world and humanity he reigns over. How can that be when we’re ravaged by plague and violence? Yet I think we both want to believe anyway. There is too much beauty to ignore.
“The word that rings joyfully throughout creation, the word that alleviates every pain and sorrow, the word that absolves all the guilt of humanity, the eternal word… Love.”
