In the Flesh: Faust (1926)

Vast black wings unfurl over a medieval German city. A sooty face grins from the shadow between them as smoke boils through the streets below. Faust himself, played with a hawkish yet vulnerable intensity by Gösta Ekman, hunches over his alchemical paraphernalia, his strong, severe countenance bathed in the glow of elements converting in a primal soup of fog and bubbling liquid. F. W. Murnau’s iconic adaptation of the classic German folk tale of Dr. Faustus, who renounces God and pledges himself to Satan in exchange for youth, power, riches, and the sorcerous aid of the demon Mephisto (Emil Jannings), is a wonderland of groundbreaking effects work and astonishing makeup and costuming. Murnau makes mesmerizing use of miniatures, achieving impressions of speed, motion, and distance which shame even modern filmmaking’s best stabs at the effect. His sets loom larger than life, stone and wood and plaster more suggesting a city than attempting to replicate one.

Ekman and Jannings have some of the most electrifying onscreen chemistry I’ve seen, emotion flowing easily and freely between them to such an extent that at times it feels like their facial expressions and body language are those of a single entity, action and reaction rippling smoothly through their separate bodies. Jannings in particular, at once impish and ogrish, sinister and lovably charming, is cartoonishly captivating, his wide, mobile mouth and sturdy frame an earthy counterpart to his archangel (Werner Fuetterer) foe’s slender, aristocratic build and serene expression. The makeup used to age Ekman is so seamless that for the film’s first hour I was unaware Faust was being played by just one actor. The Mosaic gravity of his beard, the broad sweep of his eyebrows, the leonine curl of his receding hair — he is both plainly the same man and completely distinct.

But more than anything, what makes Faust so extraordinary is Murnau’s camera itself. The clever tricks of forced perspective — foreshortened hallways, slanted walls — the before-their-time moving shots and miniature landscapes, there’s so much technical innovation on display that by the time we watch the words of an infernal contract burn themselves into a scroll it feels almost as though there are no special effects at work at all, that we’ve wandered into a world of strange and terrible wonders where demons yank cloth unburned from forge fires and wood-and-canvas elephants lumber and sway at the head of an exotic procession. The deeper one falls into Murnau’s vision, the more hypnotic it becomes until at last facts fall away and only awe remains.