Faust (1926)

How would you rate "Faust"?

It is a rare occasion to be able to go back in time. Even with all the new technologies available today, we can only imagine how it was in the pass; how they lived; how they laughed; how they cried. But, from the moment that Faust started I was transported and I felt like I was watching it for the first time ever; maybe even 91 years ago. I felt like my usual longing for the past was satiated and I was absorbed by the movie and for two hours the screen was my world, a world that I rarely get to visit. 

For me, a guy from a small town in Venezuela, watching a silent movie from 1926 with live music in a movie theater is already a rare occasion. So, that was an opportunity that I was not going to let pass.  I sat on the theater ready to make the trip. A trip that does not need any time machines or science. A trip that I've tried to take several times in the past. A trip that included just me, a screen and a piano player. Yet, I was no prepared to be impacted in such a strong way by the experience.

When I hear the expression “the power of cinema” I always related it to the power that film could have, both in the world and in the individual. In the back of my mind it has always had another dimension that like a heavenly creature only comes out in rare occasions: the power of the theater, the power of the screen room, the power of the auditorium, the power of cinema . Today, this heavenly creature has showed itself to me again. I believe the “power of cinema” can be felt even if you are alone in your sofa; but there are exceptions to everything. Faust deserve to be an exception.

Faust was first screen in 1926 and it was directed by the great F.W. Murnau, German director consider by some as one of the greater Expressionist and kammer-film maker. Faust is the vivid portrait of Expressionist cinema at its best. Today it is still a remarkable work. Its sensitivity, emotions and style, and exoticism are still very palpable and are proof that art, when well make, can survive the passing of time. 

I sat and enjoyed it more than my words allow me to express. The great locations and sets; the costumes and make up, the very Expressionist performances, the special effects and, the outstanding use of light stopped being the ingredients for a movie and became part of my reality. I saw them as a whole. I felt like I was watching it for the first time, like I did not know what was coming. And it was then when I allowed myself to fantasied. Did they feel the same as I am feeling now? Did they laugh like the man to my right is or are they scare like I am? Did they, like me, pity Faust as he was signing his doomed fate, and were they as amazed as I am? For a moment I felt like I knew the answer to all these questions.

But my trip was not only to the past. I also went to the future. Faust made me wonder about the future of cinema, about how are the future societies going to appreciate the movies of my times, about the beauty that someone maybe in a hundred years will experience what I am now, about the great idea that in a good or  bad way, we will be infinite. 

                               

It is no often that I say that the theater can change or interfered in your experience of a movie. (I think last time this happened was with Gravity a few years ago.) The trip I made tonight makes me include Faust in my short list.  They say a classic never gets old and boy, were they right.

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