Faust (F.W. Murnau, 1926)

[This is my second entry in my Blind Spots series]

F.W. Muranu's final German film, Faust, is a glorious send-off for the Hollywood-bound filmmaker. Less poetic than his prior The Last Laugh (and his subsequent Sunrise and City Girl, for that matter), Faust makes up for its relative lack of camera movement for a grandeur that could rival even Lang. It's fitting that Murnau should select for his final work in his homeland the subject of a classic German legend, more so that the film should incorporate various interpretations of that legend to fully explore the folktale.

Modeled chiefly on the first part of Goethe's interpretation of the story, Faust is a film of grandiose darkness. It begins with superimposed images of the four horsemen riding in the clouds, their skeletal figures frozen in grim war poses. Smoke appears in these first shots, as it does in most of the subsequent ones; at times it seems as if hellfire is about to set light to the projector itself. But nothing compares to the sight of Mephisto himself (Emil Jannings), a giant demon revealed in the light of an evil-banishing Archangel. Looking like a mountain with a face, Mephisto is imposing and terrifying even from the torso-up.

The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930)

What was it about the Germans that made their initial forays into talkies the high-water marks of the new format? If anything, the German film style to that point was the one best suited to silence, all Expressionistic imagery crafting endless depth out of jagged set design, shadowplay and graceful camera work. Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel contains many visual cues that tie it to the national cinema of the past—angular backdrops of villages, impossibly cramped apartments filled with minute detail—but his greatest coup is his incorporation of sound into the image in such a way as to enhance the atmosphere, adding another dimension to artistic control.

The director's exacting perfectionism turns the story of Immanuel Rath (Emil Jannings), an uptight teacher at a preparatory high school who gets lured by the seductions of Weimar Germany, into a stylistic smorgasbord of crisp, static imagery (this was early sound cinema after all) that from the first moment suggest a slight separation from reality that grows into a gulf as the film progresses. Jannings, portly and mannered, nevertheless betrays flashes of expressive acting early on that show a restlessness and a madness within him long before the head-spinning perfection of Marlene Dietrich's legs tilts him off his axis.