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Murnau's "Faust" is part puppet show, part ballet, part Medieval Mystery play, part half-hearted melodrama -- and
also one of the most miraculous parades of stunning images ever created in the whole history of movies. There is almost no
drama to it at all, in the modern sense -- drama in which we identify intimately with the characters and recapitulate their
emotions vicariously. But Goethe's tale, or at least the Medieval legend on which it's based, is primal and profound, and
Murnau has found images to convey it. The film delivers an impact that is both aesthetic and moral -- cathartic like a gut-wrenching
dream.
Lotte Eisner sees Murnau's visual strategy in the film as one which opposes darkness against light, but this is not quite
right, for "Faust" is not a film of stark contrasts, but of chiaroscuro, of subtle gradations and complications.
Light itself is in some ways the protagonist of the film, its mysterious workings and shadings offering a mystical perspective,
making the characters and settings emblematic but also providing consolation and inspiration -- the sense of a world animated
by Spirit.
Murnau's camera does not move much here -- except in the swooping shots over the miniature townscapes and landscapes.
The plastic investigation of these beautiful but patently artificial constructions renders them magical. But in the live action
scenes the camera mostly stays put, and watches the way light creates spaces, and the way the movement of the human characters
changes those spaces and invests them with meaning.
The pantomime of Emil Jannings is sublime. He -- or Murnau -- manages to balance it precisely between caricature and dance,
between the grotesque and the familiar, giving its exaggeration an air of timeless truth . . . of a painted figure from a
Brueghel painting literally coming to life. The authority of this style makes Mephisto's evil glee actually chilling, his
obscene leer almost nauseating -- in short, we take it seriously. Faust and Gretchen are less brilliant, but Murnau's lighting
situates them in the same world as Jannings and the countless fine cameos by actors with perfectly chosen faces, so they seem
made of the same eternal stuff.
It is amazing to see Melies's old tricks, his cinematic equivalents to the practice of stage magic, dusted off and reborn
in this kind of beauty -- the puppets, the miniatures, the camera tricks all seem brand new. They are so because Murnau executes
them with a plastic inventiveness that claims them for cinema alone, negating their theatrical provenance. This apotheosis
of studio filmmaking, in which every element is arranged and controlled on a shooting stage, never feels confined -- the ghost
of the proscenium arch has been banished -- and the world that Murnau creates opens up and seems vast, because of the fertility
of his plastic imagination, the sense of the limitless possibilities he sees in light and intimate spaces.
It was interesting to watch the DVD of "Faust" and the DVD of Lubitsch's "Eternal Love" back to back.
"Eternal Love" is an abject act of homage to the Murnau of "Sunrise" -- and plastically closer to the
style of that film than to the style of "Faust". The style of Lubitsch is hardly in evidence -- but his genius is
very much on display. It is fascinating to watch one master inhabiting the mode of another, and I'd love to know how it happened.
Was Lubitsch trying to deliver to Paramount a prestige product instantly recognizable as occupying the same lofty niche as
"Sunrise"? Did Lubitsch fall under the spell of Murnau's genius and want to emulate him in Murnau's own terms? It
is in any case a strange artistic impersonation.
Using Camilla Horn, the star of "Faust", was only the beginning of Lubitsch's borrowing from Murnau -- though
if I were borrowing from Murnau, Camilla Horn is not where I'd start, despite her delicate beauty in stasis. She simply doesn't
move like a cinematic being. (If Gish had played Gretchen in "Faust", as originally planned, the film might have
turned into something else entirely. Just the idea of Gish and Jannings in the same frame, in that film, fires the imagination.
The battle for Faust's soul might have played out as a contest in the domination of cinematic space.)
Lubitsch, in addition, borrowed Murnau's pictorial gravity for "Eternal Love". The camera moves constantly and
portentously -- the film could serve as a textbook on the use of the tracking shot to create and amplify emotion. This is
odd, to say the least, since Lubitch's touch, cinematically speaking, is usually so light -- we feel the whimsy or the lyrical
lift almost before we realize how Lubitsch is achieving it. But in "Eternal Love" the camera swoops down on the
characters, on the powerful moments, like a predator -- much as it does in "Sunrise". It's not parody, either --
the use of the moving camera is beautifully, elegantly and effectively carried out, but it is frankly expressionistic, it
draws attention to itself.
There is still much that reminds us of Lubitsch's usual method. The leitmotif of doors and windows as portals of drama,
the way Lubitsch leaves things unshown visually, have a delicate quality -- echo his typical approach to storytelling. When
Barrymore enters his bedroom and sees the naked mountain wench in his bed, waiting to seduce him, we push in on his face,
then pan to a hook on the wall where the woman's clothing, and her festival mask, are hanging. It's a very erotic moment,
because of what we don't see, what is deliberately withheld from our gaze.
Horn plays a woman who is momentarily scandalized by Barrymore's drunken lust -- and there is something cold and reserved
in the actress which reinforces this aspect of her role. Horn never quite reveals any other side, however, and we must take
her second thoughts, her abiding attraction to Barrymore after she's lost him, on faith -- aided by the gorgeous way Lubitsch
lights her, and the sensual way he moves her about or follows her through space. But Horn's reserve -- towards the audience
itself, it seems -- limits the emotion of the story as drama, and makes the ending less powerful than it might have been.
Gaynor, in "Sunrise", has some of this same sensual reserve -- yet another borrowing from Murnau, perhaps --
but also a childlike energy at times which rounds her out a bit. (Horn is almost unrelievedly brittle.) The films are similar
in many other ways. "Sunrise" is set in a generic world of village and city. "Eternal Love" is set in
the same sort of generic mountain locale -- called Switzerland, perhaps, but a storybook place all the same. Both tales concern
good and simple but sensual men who are tempted by scarlet women and thereby jeopardize the true loves of their lives. Both
stories unfold as far from the sophisticated, over-civilized world of "The Marriage Circle" as it's possible to
get -- and just as far from the complications and ambiguities of character that fascinated Lubitsch in that film.
I don't know if Lubitsch made other films in this mode -- or why he made this one. But it's a fine piece of work, as fine
an analysis of Murnau's special genius (and as fine a tribute to it) as one can imagine.
Classic Murnau
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