A Fairy Tale of Love
...and Evil
See below: the last ten minutes of the 1926 silent movie of Faust, by F.W. Murnau. It seems somehow right for the holiday time this year. It is about illusion, greed, want and being destroyed by want. In Murnau’s film, it is finally about the ascendancy of love at the peak of evil. It is corny and it relies on the cliche of feminine suffering made beautiful. But there is something in it that is deeper than that, and that “something” transcends the cliche.
I saw this segment on YouTube maybe 12 years ago and it affected me enormously. I hadn’t yet read Goethe’s play or seen Murnau’s film. I knew the story, almost everybody basically knows the story of the jaded scholar who, lusting for worldly delight, signs a pact with Mephistopheles. That was enough for me to understand and to feel, to believe, the reality of the segment: the flailing despair, the futile vanity, the experience of running through a live, tactile murk of demons and uncomprehending humans, moving slo-mo through their own fates, trying to undo something that can’t be undone. The unjust infliction of suffering by mechanical systems, the useless pity. And love. How love, even if it is powerless to change anything, can transform everything in a moment, even if its only for a moment. How a loved one’s face, even if it is aged and unbeautiful, can appear exquisite—even young again, if you knew them then.
I started to include an image to support that last thought, but it’s not really appropriate. What I am describing is something that can only be seen by the inner eye.
In case context makes the narrative better: one of aged Faust’s wants is to seduce young Gretchen. He doesn’t wish her harm, he has real tenderness for her—but, of course, all goes wrong. In a cascade of misfortunes, the bewitched Gretchen (unintentionally) plays a part in the deaths of her brother and mom; she’s left impoverished with a baby, wandering in the street with her infant who dies. She is tried and condemned for murder (in the book, she actually does kill her child and her mother) and Faust rides to the rescue, or tries. In the book, Gretchen refuses Faust’s rescue, and thus saves herself. The film is simpler and more sentimental in terms of plot, but it still conveys, through kinetic layers of imagery, the multi-dimensional depth of the tragi-comedy.
That’s one of the great things about Faust; although it is a tragedy, it is also cosmically funny, Mephisto and Faust sometimes bantering like Laurel and Hardy. Another fine mess you’ve gotten us into!
So: If you’d like to give yourself a Christmas present, the whole movie is free online. Or, if you just want a stocking thing, watch the video. The visuals are best in a darkened room. Have a wonderful holiday.
In regards to the beauty of a loved one's face: There's a fine quote from Dickens's Oliver Twist where Mr. Brownlow tries to recall the faces of people he's seen throughout his life: “He wandered over them again. He had called them into view, and it was not easy to replace the shroud that had so long concealed them. There were the faces of friends, and foes, and of many that had been almost strangers peering intrusively from the crowd; there were the faces of young and blooming girls that were now old women; there were faces that the grave had changed and closed upon, but which the mind, superior to its power, still dressed in their old freshness and beauty, calling back the lustre of the eyes, the brightness of the smile, the beaming of the soul through its mask of clay, and whispering of beauty beyond the tomb, changed but to be heightened, and taken from earth only to be set up as a light, to shed a soft and gentle glow upon the path to Heaven.”
Murnau was a master of light and dark in Faust as were many films of the time which explored the underbelly of ‘civilization’ such as Metrpolis, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu and even Battleship Potemkin. Filmmakers of that time were edgy not because it was in to be so but because film was in its infancy and every serious director was experimenting with technique.