My feature review of/historical essay on F.W. Murnau’s Faust and Kino’s new DVD release is now up at Turner Classic Movies.

Emil Jannings as Mephisto in Faust

Murnau’s Faust, scripted by Carl Mayer and subtitled “A German Folk Saga,” reimagines the modern myth of the idealistic scientist who signs a pact with the devil as a holy battle between good and evil, with Faust as a kind of modern day Job. Mephisto (Emil Jannings, as a hulking bestial being with massive gargoyle wings) and the Archangel (Werner Fuetterer, looking like a heavenly Seigfried with feathery wings that tower over him) debate the goodness of mankind in an abstract celestial setting, where shafts of light breath through storm clouds like the dawn coming through the dark night. “I’ll wager that I can wrest Faust’s soul from God!” he bets the Archangel, who accepts (confident of mankind’s goodness and, apparently, unconcerned over the torment the victims are soon to endure). Mephisto emerges over a picaresque mountain village, a looming monster who hovers over the innocent town like a storm of evil, his cloak smothering it in darkness while spreading noxious fumes that carry the plague. The image is astounding, a vision of darkness and pestilence personified and an image of pure visual power.

Read the complete essay here. I also wrote about Faust and the new Murnau box set from Kino on Parallax View here.

Last week, there was a plethora of New Releases fighting for attention. This week, the attention belongs to just a few impressive pieces, including two trememdous box sets: one in tribute to one of the most acclaimed directors of the silent era (or any era, for that matter), one to celebrate a neglected Japanese director.

The Haunted Castle

Murnau: A Six DVD Box Set is an upgrade from Kino’s five-disc The F.W. Murnau Collection from 2003. The disc of Tartuffe is the same the rest of the set is either upgraded or brand new: the recently restored German editions of Nosferatu and The Last Laugh (previously available from Kino in two disc “Deluxe Editions”) and the DVD debuts of The Haunted Castle and The Finances of the Grand Duke and the original German version of Faust, which are also available separately (with Faust offered in a two disc “Deluxe Edition” featuring the earlier DVD release). Made before Nosferatu, The Haunted Castle (1921) is not a horror film or a ghost story but a psychological drama and murder mystery set in a magnificent country manor. Murnau shows real skill building the story in clever crosscutting while maintaining dramatic tension and an ominous mood. The Finances of the Grand Duke (1924) couldn’t be more different, a lighthearted espionage thriller scripted by Thea von Harbou that feels more like a Lubitsch lark than the dark expressionism that Murnau specializes in. And Faust, Murnau’s final German film before he left for Hollywood, is one of the most visually magnificent films of the silent era. His reimagining of the Faust myth as a holy battle between good and evil is full of magnificent visual effects (Emil Jannings’ Lucifer envelops a mountain town in his dark cloak of plague) and gorgeous images created in the play of light, shadow, and mist on his beautifully designed sets. This new reconstruction and restoration is the most beautiful it has looked since, surely, its original release, and it is now the definitive version of this essential silent masterpiece.

I go into detail on every film at Parallax View  here.

Look up Hiroshi Shimizu on the IMDb and you’ll find 42 films made between 1924 and 1957 listed under his name. According Michael Koresky in the liner notes to the box set Travels With Hiroshi Shimizu (the 15th set from Eclipse, Criterion’s budget-minded label), he made over 150 films. That’s a lot of films for a director largely forgotten to time, even in Japan, but it isn’t the number of films that’s most alarming about his neglect. It’s the deftness and stylistic joys, the humor and humanity, the unexpected rhythms and a delightful stories on display in this set of four features. The silent film Japanese Girls at the Harbor (1933) is a lovely character piece about best friends who follow very different life paths, marked by evocative, startlingly modern direction Mr. Thank You (1936) is a buoyant road movie set on a bus ride through mountain roads with a cross-section of travelers whose stories spell out the desperation of Japan’s depression. The Masseurs and a Woman (1938) and Ornamental Hairpin (1941) are both set in mountain resorts in the lazy atmosphere of summer vacation, both full of lovely rhythms and a meandering pace that favors personality and character of plot and defined by a melancholy tone of impermanence. The title Travels with Hiroshi Shimizu is perfectly evocative of the films, not simply because they are about characters in transition but because Shimizu is as much travel guide as storyteller, taking us on a tour of people and places and the stories of their lives.

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Murnau, Borzage and Fox actually came out last week, but I didn’t receive a copy in time for that column, so it’s featured this week. And yes, it is a beauty of a set, a labor of love and a gift to all lovers of silent cinema (and, for that matter, anyone who loves great cinema of any and all kinds). The box set features two silent films by F.W. Murnau and ten complete features by the much less well known Frank Borzage, one of cinema’s great romantics and forgotten giant of silent cinema.

At the inaugural Academy Awards in 1927, Frank Borzage’s Seventh Heaven, won for Director and Adapted Screenplay, F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise won for Cinematography and “Artistic Quality of Production” (a sort of high-art “Best Picture” award that disappeared the next year), and the two shared Janet Gaynor’s Best Actress award. This confluence of directors, studio and era is essentially the grounding for this year’s answer to “Ford at Fox.”

Mary Duncan and the boys: "City Girl"

Sunrise is the only film on this set to have been previously available on DVD and it’s been newly remastered for this set. City Girl (1930), the third of Murnau’s three films for Fox, makes its long awaited debut and it’s a beaut. A late silent film made in a period while the studios were rushing to sound, it’s a rural romance between a sincere young man (Charles Farrell) from a Minnesota farm, the harried dreamer of a waitress (Mary Duncan) from Chicago who falls for his sincerity and honesty and accompanies him back to the farm as his wife – much to the displeasure of the man’s father, a hard, severe man as cold as the Minnesota winters. It’s a simple story with moments of unabashed beauty and freedom, as when she runs through the wheat fields of her new home, a burst of innocence and joy from a woman who thinks she’s found her dream come true. Unlike Sunrise, Murnau did not have carte blanche with this film and it was completed in his absence, as he had grown disenchanted with Fox and the American studio system and left to make Tabu in the South Seas.

While Sunrise was a financial failure, it reaped other rewards for Fox. Murnau the studio’s artist in residence and every director came by to watch him work and soak in the expressive qualities of his style and cinematic sensibility. No one benefited more than Frank Borzage, a good director who became great as he found the imagery and approach to match his own romantic impulses. In Seventh Heaven (1927), perhaps not coincidentally featuring Sunrise stars Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, his style burst forth fully formed and irresistibly passionate. Farrell stars as a Parisian sewer worker gives a home to a destitute street girl and the two fall in love in the seventh floor garret, but before they can marry he leaves to fight in WWI. Borzage tells his story as much through visual metaphor as narrative convention, expressing in images what words cannot. Their daily ‘telepathic’ communication across hundred of miles defies logic, but Borzage makes it believable in the context of his story which takes place largely on the spiritual realm.

This collection finally brings his holy trinity of romantic classics to DVD: Seventh Heaven, Street Angel and Lucky Star. All starring Fox’s eternal young lovers, Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, they are among the most lush silent films ever made and the most entrancing celebrations of the redemptive power of love in all of cinema.

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