Faust (1926)

Sort-of-but-not-really because it's Halloween I finally sat down and watched the 1926 silent film Faust, which I had never heard of but just read about over at the A.V. Club. (That web-site has some good things, but its advertising is consistently obnoxious.) If you haven't seen it and fancy yourself a film-lover, you should see it. The modern moviegoer is perhaps reluctant to take silent films seriously — so conditioned are we by the special effects and other conventions of movies these days — but once one discards certain expectations and assumptions it becomes clear how original and effective the best silent movies are. To employ an inadequate metaphor, it's like drawing a circle: sure, it's quite easy to open MS Paint and make a perfect circle, but it takes real practice and dedication to actually draw a circle, with a pencil, on paper. Faust passes the test of all real art: it's still worth experiencing today.

It occurred to me that Faust can be understood as symbolic of 20th-century German history: Faust renounces God to reshape the world according to his own ideas, with disastrous consequences. It then occurred to me that Thomas Mann already noted the Faustian resonances in the Third Reich. It then occurred to me that I really ought to begin reading Mann's Doktor Faustus: presently all my knowledge about it is secondhand, by way of The Rest Is Noise, which you really should read.