A monumental display of artifices

Faust opens in darkness, a world of smoke and shadows. Mephisto and an archangel make a bet: If Mephisto can destroy the divinity within the virtuous Doctor Faust, the earth will belong to him. Mephisto unleashes a deadly plague upon Faust’s town, shaking his faith in God and leading him to summon the forces of darkness to aid him in healing the sick. Once conjured by Faust, Mephisto first offers him magical powers of healing and then youth and worldly pleasure in exchange for his soul. However, after he has been transformed into a handsome young man and “tasted all of life’s pleasures,” Faust remains spiritually unsatisfied. It is then that he lights on Gretchen, a girl from his hometown. Ordering Mephisto to procure her for him, he sets in motion a series of tragic events, including the death of Gretchen’s mother, brother, and the child she bears out of wedlock. Gretchen is imprisoned on false charges of infanticide and condemned to burn at the stake. When she calls out to Faust in desperation, her cry echoes across the world until it reaches Faust’s ear. Faust commands Mephisto to take him to her, but they arrive too late. Transformed once again into an old man, Faust collapses onto her funeral pyre and dies with her. As they ascend to heaven, the archangel tells Mephisto their pact has been voided by one word: Love.

This screenplay, which Murnau co-wrote with Hans Kyser, is loosely based on Goethe’s Faust Part I. However, from a narrative and thematic perspective, it is perhaps even more deeply informed by the widely popular nineteenth-century theatrical adaptations of Goethe’s drama. For example, Goethe’s Faust was best known in nineteenth-century Europe through Charles Gounod’s opera Faust, which premiered at the Théâtre Lyrique in Paris in 1859 and became the most performed operatic work in the late nineteenth century.¹⁶ Based on the play Faust et Marguerite by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, which was in turn based on Goethe’s Faust Part I, Gounod’s opera had at its center the love story between Faust and Marguerite (also known as Gretchen) that Goethe introduced to the Faust legend. The so-called “Gretchen tragedy” was instantly canonized as one of the great love stories of all time.¹⁷ Gounod’s opera exploited the popularity of this romance by making Gretchen’s role even more central to the narrative; at times, the opera was billed under the title Margarethe. Murnau and Kyser’s adaptation reflects this narrative focus on Gretchen, and on the primacy of the love plot over Goethe’s philosophical themes. This is in keeping with other late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century cinematic adaptations of Faust, which overwhelmingly turned to Gounod’s Faust as source material.¹⁸ At the same time, Murnau and Kyser’s screenplay is not an adaptation of Gounod’s Faust; it is far more eclectic in its source materials, which include versions of the Faust story drawn from puppet shows and early modern drama.¹⁹ Along with the film’s departure from Goethe’s drama, its “inability to settle on one variant of the legend”—even if that variant was not Goethe’s—was part of what critics found so objectionable.²⁰

Rather than considering this hodgepodge of narrative elements a sign of artistic indecision, I propose that it is fundamental to the film’s exploration of cinema’s roots in popular visual culture. In taking this approach, I follow Thomas Elsaesser’s argument in Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary that Murnau and his remarkable team of film technicians were not interested in the philosophical complexity of Goethe’s Faust, or even in the Faust narrative made famous by Gounod. Rather, Murnau saw Faust as a way “of showing off the form” of cinema and as a means for “an almost scientific interest in experimentation [and] exploring visual effects and technical possibilities for their own sake.”²¹ Like Elsaesser, I consider Faust as a special effects film, a towering technological achievement, and an unapologetic “display of artifices,” one that I will argue situates film art as an extension and reimagining of the technological images created by nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century optical and magical theater. Unlike Elsaesser, however, for whom narrative is merely a launching point for the creation of technological spectacle, I argue that there is a substantial, historically meaningful, and thoughtfully rendered relationship between Faust‘s special effects and its narrative. As I will demonstrate, the Faust narrative has always been bound up in the display of technological visual forms, from early modern theatrical special effects to nineteenth-century optical conjuring to early film. Indeed, the Faust story is inextricable from the development of cinema as a mode of technological illusion and visual manipulation. This narrative material enabled Murnau to theorize the plasticity and trickiness of the cinematic image.

The Faust story’s entanglement with magic history and special effects begins with its early publication history. Johann Georg Faust was a German magician, known as a “charlatan and bon vivant,” whose death in a violent explosion caused by an alchemy experiment around 1540 sparked rumors that he had made a pact with the devil.²² The earliest known Faust legend was published in 1587 in Frankfurt am Main by the printer Johann Spiess as a Volksbuch (“folk book”), a chapbook illustrated with woodcuts, called Historia von D. Johann Fausten. A consolidation of the legends that circulated in the decades after Doctor Faust’s death, the volume was enormously popular. Twenty-two editions, and translations in English, Dutch and French, were in circulation by the end of the century.²³ Although it was intended as a cautionary tale of hubris leading man into sin, the Spiess Historia sustained the fascination of its far-flung readers through its accounts of Faust’s magical powers derived from the devil. When Mephistopheles, on his second appearance at Faust’s beckoning, asks the doctor what he desires, Faust requests “to become a Devil, or at least a limb of him.”²⁴ In this telling, Faust most desires not only to share in the devil’s powers, but to become his equal in sorcery. Through the Spiess Historia, the Faust legend was formulated as a tale of magicians and tricksters that attracted readers through its depictions of magical mischief and spectacular illusions.

Moreover, the Faust legend was almost immediately intertwined with the modern history of visual spectacle from urban theaters to provincial fairgrounds. In addition to the chapbook, the late sixteenth century saw the emergence of popular plays, including puppet shows, that harnessed the outlandish spectacles of the Faust tale to create exuberant retellings of Faust’s supernatural experiences and magic tricks.²⁵ These shows remained popular in Germany at least into the mid-eighteenth century. An announcement for a performance of the Faust story in Bremen, probably from the 1690s, promised spectacles as varied and baroque as Pluto riding an airborne dragon, conjuration of spirits, animals that burst from a pastry and soared through the air, and a fire-breathing raven. The action was rendered in “shadow pictures,” with fireworks used to represent Hell.²⁶ A century earlier, informed by the English tradition of Faust puppet shows, Christopher Marlowe wrote The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, a play dramatizing Faust’s contract with Mephistopheles and subsequent damnation. Doctor Faustus is offered 24 years on earth with Mephistopheles as his personal servant, after which his soul will be damned for eternity. The play follows Faustus as he fritters away his allotted time, and his magical powers, with Mephistopheles seeking to distract him from the passing years “with shows, pageants and illusions.²⁷ In Marlowe’s version of the Faust tale, Mephistopheles becomes, in Michael Mangan’s words, a “showman-cum-projectionist” who conjures visions.²⁸ Like the German and English puppet shows, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus exploited the story’s potential for visual attraction and theatrical spectacle.

Faust self-consciously portrays itself as a descendent of these early modern special effects-laden representations of the Faust legend. After Mephisto and the angel make their bargain, Mephisto descends to earth and looms over a medieval German village within which we see townspeople enjoying a variety of popular entertainments at a town fair. Among men and women swinging across the screen on fairground rides and tightrope walkers balanced on wires, a man in a devil costume performs acrobatic tricks on the stage and shadow puppets are projected onto a cloth screen. These performances not only evoke the exhibitionist spectacles and special effects of early cinema, as Paul Dobryden has written, but reference the shared origins of the Faust legend and the cinema in fairground culture.²⁹ While the devil references portrayals of Mephistopheles in early modern theatrical versions of the Faust tale staged at town fairs and circuses, the shadow puppets pay tribute to the “shadow picture” shows of Faust’s adventures and damnation that were popular beginning in the late sixteenth century.

With this opening scene, Faust signals its engagement with the history of the Faust legend as visual and technological spectacle and positions itself within the tradition of illusionistic visual media. The film also inaugurates a motif of Mephisto as technological engineer of marvels, magic, and illusions. The scene cross-cuts between the revelry of the fair and trick shots of Mephisto, draped in black with massive black wings extending from each arm, superimposed in the sky over the town. As an audience of villagers watches the shadow puppet show, Mephisto slowly raises his wing to block out the sun. When the sky darkens, the puppeteer’s shadowgraphs begin to fade and then disappear entirely as both audience and puppeteer gaze ominously up to the sky (fig. 1). Mephisto’s control over light and shadow, the components not only of shadow puppetry but of cinema, and his ability to manipulate and transform the elements of the cinematic image through diegetic magic portrayed through special effects, locate him as the film’s representation of the filmmaker. At the same time, through montage, Murnau portrays filmmaking as the technological evolution of earlier forms of spectacular display and a medium of visual magic.

Figure 1.

Mephisto, master of light and shadow.

Mephisto is not Murnau’s only meta-cinematic villain. Nosferatu (1920), in Stacey Abbott’s words, “imbues its vampire with the filmic and photographic qualities of the cinema as a means of exploring the inherent vampirism of this new technology,” while in Sunrise (1927), the Woman from the City seduces the Man and persuades him to murder his wife through a cinematic spectacle projected against the sky.³⁰ However, unlike these other representations, Murnau’s choice to style Mephistopheles as magician, filmmaker, and master of visual technology participates in a late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century practice of associating the devil with technological showmanship and apparatuses for visual illusion. In the opera Faust, Gounod and his librettists interpreted Goethe’s Mephistopheles as, in Helmut Schanze’s words, “the man of the magical machinery.”³¹ He orchestrates the opera’s visual illusions through his mastery “over the very technology—the stage, settings, lighting, and even the orchestra—that realizes the opera in performance.”³² During the same period, the Faust legend became a popular source for theatrical magic shows and displays of optical conjuring. Magicians often playfully marketed themselves as modern Fausts or Mephistos whose illusions sprung from their practice of the dark arts. The moustache and goatee, “Mephistophelean [in] appearance,” became the personification of the nineteenth-century magician’s face.³³ Advertising played up this connection: a poster for a 1913 magic show by the American magician Fredrik the Great (Alexander Fredrik) shows the magician seated on a chair with a copy of a book titled The Magic of Doctor Faustus open on his lap, the devil gesturing towards the page as though tutoring him in the dark arts.³⁴ While Gounod’s opera portrayed Mephistopheles as a showman, theatrical magic imagined Mephistopheles as a source of magic and illusions in order to authorize and promote the skill of conjurers.

At the turn of the century, the filmmaker Georges Méliès solidified the convention of portraying Mephistopheles as a magician and the stage magician as Mephistopheles.³⁵ In his early twentieth-century Faust films, including Faust aux enfers (1903), Damnation du Faust (1904), and Les Quat’ cents farces du diable (1906), Méliès cast himself as Mephistopheles. Aside from Les Quat’ cent farces, which begins in the laboratory of the engineer “William Crackford,” Méliès does not portray Faust as himself a magician but rather as a dupe manipulated by or in thrall to the devil’s superior magic trickery. These tricks primarily constitute mischievous and mysterious appearances and disappearances executed through Méliès’s characteristic substitution splices and double exposures. As a former theatrical magician himself, one who sought to, in André Gaudreault’s terms, “appl[y] cinema to magic,” Méliès uses the figure of Mephistopheles to establish the trope of cinematic special effects as a form of magic trick.³⁶

In context of this history, the Faust tale would have presented itself to Murnau and his team as a story about cinema’s emergence from the modern history of the technological image—a history that spans early modern shadow puppetry and nineteenth-century forms such as magic lantern shows, stage magic, and optical conjuring. If, as Elsaesser argues, Murnau was more interested in putting UFA’s technological resources and special effects ingenuity on display than he was in Goethe’s drama, narrative and theme remained important to this project. As a story about the desire for occult magic, with a well-known popular history of being rendered as non-occult magic, the Faust legend offered Murnau a means of conceptualizing cinematic special effects as an evolution of earlier modes of magical visual culture. Indeed, as film historians Frances Guerin and Katharina Loew point out, Weimar filmmakers and film technicians conceptualized what we now call special effects as a form of visual magic, valorizing the cinematic trick as technical craft and sleight-of-hand.³⁷ The camera operator Günther Rittau declared in 1927 that “the cameraman is the modern magician. There is no such thing as impossible for him.”³⁸ The critic Henri Langlois described the film architect—usually a central player in the creation of special effects—as “the alchemist of a world that the magic of his skills lets him conjure up.”³⁹

The language of magic, conjuring, and trickery indicates Weimar filmmakers and technicians’ reflexive understanding of special effects as an extension of modern magical modes such as prestidigitation and optical conjuring. The coordination of special effects craftsmanship with magic was not intended to evoke a relationship to the supernatural, but rather to the playfulness of the magic show, designed “to fool the eye” and “make one see things that one cannot believe” through sleight-of-hand and misdirection as well as technological optics.⁴⁰ Several studies of pre-cinematic visual culture have shown how magic spectatorship created the conditions for cinema spectatorship.⁴¹ In the case of German cinema in the 1920s, the magic legacy was built into the theory and praxis of special effects on the set. In what follows, I will turn to a discussion of Faust‘s use of technological images—composited images created through manipulation of the film material. Faust‘s special effects were designed and integrated with the narrative in order to thematize cinema’s place in pre-cinematic traditions of optical media and visual magic.

Mephisto’s magic show

With a few notable exceptions, including the stunning sequence early in the film when Faust conjures Mephisto, Faust‘s special effects are employed as demonstrations of Mephisto’s magic powers. The famous aerial ride, the conjuring of beautiful women who can be made to appear and disappear, and the metamorphic, sometimes-translucent, body of Mephisto himself, are diegetically produced by Mephisto’s magic and technologically the result of highly complex composited images. My argument is that Faust portrays Mephisto as an optical showman and theatrical magician and, in the process, codes him as a filmmaker whose powers stem from the manipulation of visual forms. This coordination of magic and trick filmmaking is most forcefully expressed in the scene of Faust’s physical transformation from old scholar to young playboy—a transformation that is the result of Mephisto’s success in persuading Faust to accept his bargain. Among the trickiest sequences in the film, including spectral apparitions in liquid and metamorphic bodies, this scene is rendered as a theatrical magic act. It is structured as a series of optical magic tricks that coerce Faust into accepting Mephisto’s offer of youth and worldly pleasure, culminating in Faust’s own metamorphosis from weary old man to sexually appealing youth.

This structure mimics typical stage magic acts which tended to lead up to what were called “set pieces”—complex, apparatus-based illusions, often on the theme of “mysterious disappearances,” that ended the show.⁴² Mephisto’s culminating trick would have been recognizable to audiences in the 1920s as a reformulation of the “mysterious disappearance”-themed set piece known as “the vanishing lady.” In this trick, a woman seated in a chair is covered by a veil or cloak; at the count of three, the magician pulls back the covering to show that the woman has disappeared. Méliès famously reinvented the trick in his 1896 film L’Escamotage d’une dame chez Robert Houdin by using substitution splice, instead of a trap door in the floor, to effect the disappearance, and adding a further illusion in which the lady is replaced by a skeleton. In Murnau’s variation, a cloak is placed over the old Faust and pulled away to reveal the young Faust in his place. Murnau here extends the early trick film tradition pioneered by Méliès in which special effects substitute for “forms of machinery, visual illusion, and sleight-of-hand used in the theatre.”⁴³

While Faust’s transformation is achieved through a simple edit, Mephisto’s magic show puts on display cinema’s capacity for optical transformations and articulates cinema as a genre of optical magic. For example, several of Mephisto’s tricks are expressed through virtuosic double exposures that simultaneously allude to and thematize the production of composited images. To prevent Faust from drinking poison to end his life, Mephisto conjures an image onto the rippling surface of the liquid in the bowl. Astonished, Faust lowers the bowl from his lips to see himself as a handsome youth. The young man in the liquid apparition flutters his eyelids open and raises his head slightly, seeming to gaze out of the bowl back into Faust’s eyes. When Faust glances into the bowl a second time, the youth has been replaced by the frightening apparition of a human skull (fig. 2). These conjured visions signify the choices that are available to Faust—eternal youth and pleasure through a deal with the devil, or decrepitude and death without one. The images in the poison are echoed later in the scene. Before he transforms Faust into the young man whose image he conjured in the bowl, Mephisto consults the face of the young man in a round, handheld mirror that he keeps in his cloak. After Faust is made young again, the mirror shows the face of the old man (fig. 3). The magic mirror operates as a visual signifier of the concept of “selling one’s soul.”⁴⁴ By providing Faust with youth, Mephisto has come to possess Faust’s image.

Figure 2.

Apparitions in a bowl of poison.

Figure 3.

Apparitions in the mirror.

This trick effect is created through a series of double exposures that are meticulously crafted to express the virtual qualities of the film image. The superimposition of the images of the young Faust and the skull onto liquid evokes the essence of the film image as projected light that requires a material surface, such as a screen, for its articulation. The apparitions have the appearance of projections because they seem to take on the substance and movement of the liquid that trembles and ripples in the bowl. For the magic mirror, the same double exposure technique is employed, but it is executed to achieve subtle visual differences. Rather than creating the effect of film images projected onto a surface, the mirror images evoke reflections captured inside glass. The young Faust’s face first flickers like projected film and then shrinks inwards, vanishing as though into the depths of the mirror’s virtual space. The face of the old Faust, meanwhile, enlarges ever so slightly as if bumping up against the surface of the glass while trying to escape. In this second instance of the double exposure, the mirror evokes a motion picture camera that has the power to sever images from their referents, offering these images a ghostly reanimated life on the screen. These technologically similar but visually distinct uses of double exposure reveal the filmmaker and crew’s fine-grained attention to detail in the design of special effects, not only in the service of narrative expression—for example, visually implying that Faust’s soul is trapped inside the mirror—but also for thematic and conceptual resonance. The trope of the uncanny reflection, in both instances, uses the process of double exposure to explore the visual and virtual qualities of the film image, emphasizing its material status as flickering projected light, ontological status as a severed referent, and perceptual power over the cinematic spectator.

These uncanny reflections are, diegetically speaking, the product of Mephisto’s magic. To make the apparitions of the young man and the skull appear in the bowl of poison, Mephisto stands to the right of Faust with his left hand suspended over his head to portray the act of conjuring (fig. 4). His magic power—the power to make images appear—seems to flow from his hands as well as his glowing eyes. If this staging recalls Dr. Caligari and Cesare, it also theatrically reimagines the technological process of creating the apparitions, which similarly relied on the coordination of the hands and eyes of the trick technicians. To create a shot like the face materializing in the bowl, the cameraman would first shoot the bowl, cranking the camera while counting the turns out loud so his assistants could record the numbers where the second exposure was scheduled to begin and end. After the take, the camera was rewound to the starting point of the shot and re-exposed to the “apparition”—in this case, the face of Gösta Ekman, the actor playing Faust—against a non-actinic backdrop. To create the apparitional effect, the cameraman would slowly open the shutter, then gradually close it at the designated count.⁴⁵ Mephisto’s theatrical pose, with its emphasis on hand and eyes, alludes to the manual agility and visual acuity required to create the spectral image that Faust sees in the bowl. In turn, it re-imagines the technical labor of producing composites as a form of conjuring or prestidigitation.

Figure 4.

Mephisto conjures apparitions.

The double exposures in the transformation scene conceptualize cinematic “tricks” or special effects as a genre of theatrical magic and pre-cinematic illusion and articulate the instability and malleability of the film image as a form under the magical control of the conjurer-filmmaker. Indeed, the uncanny reflections not only resemble film images, but reference the visual techniques and effects of nineteenth-century pre-cinematic optical media. The skull that manifests in the bowl of poison, seeming to materialize on the surface of the liquid, points to cinema’s evolution from earlier traditions of projected light such as magic lantern shows and optical conjuring, while the images in Mephisto’s mirror are designed to resemble the early photographic medium of the daguerreotype.⁴⁶ Named after their inventor Louis Daguerre, daguerreotypes were created through a direct-positive process that allowed unique images to be preserved on a silvered copper plate. The combination of the highly polished plate and the glass under which it was sealed cause daguerreotypes to look like small mirrors with reflections trapped just beneath the surface. Moreover, for its effects of verisimilitude, the daguerreotype was popularly known as “the mirror with a memory.” The shrinking and enlarging of the faces inside Mephisto’s mirror remediates the daguerreotype’s uncanny effect of having trapped images inside glass, while the mirror’s magic power to capture one’s corporeal form literalizes the notion of the mirror with a memory.

Goethe did not invent the magic mirror trope or make the connection between Mephisto’s magic and optical technological illusions. Instead, the magic mirror trope enters the Faust canon in 1913 with Stellan Rye’s Der Student von Prag, which combines the Faust story with Edgar Allen Poe’s “William Wilson” (1839) and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) to tell the story of a student who sells his reflection to a wizard. This plot device helps to establish the convention of selling one’s soul as losing one’s reflection that Murnau would take up in Faust. In both Der student von Prag and Faust, the stolen reflection trope reflects on the technological and ontological genealogy of cinema by synthesizing the mirror’s pre-cinematic legacies as a tool of mimesis and illusion. In nineteenth-century culture, the mirror was a master trope for representational arts from the realist novel as a “mirror held up to nature” to photography as a mirror with a memory. At the same time, the mirror was commonly a used apparatus for magic, with a long history extending back to the catoptric theaters imagined by early modern natural magicians like Giambattista della Porta and Athanasius Kircher.⁴⁷ In the late-nineteenth-century, optical conjurers developed methods of using reflections in mirrors and glass to make spectral forms appear, disappear, and transform on stage. In magic, the mirror is no longer a reflection of reality but a device through which reality can be manipulated and people can be made to see things that are not there. Mephisto’s mirror embodies cinema’s dialectical relationship with the mirror’s representational legacies of mimesis and illusion. As a metaphorical camera, it portrays cinema as a mode of compositing and technologizing the film image in order to overcome its merely indexical registers. For Murnau, the film image is not merely a record of the real, but the optical transformation and re-making of reality.

This essay has sought to demonstrate that Faust codes its special effects as magic tricks to position the film image as a technological and artistic evolution of earlier forms of magic showmanship and optical illusion. By reading Faust as a self-conscious contribution to a long history of mass cultural and spectacular media, rather than an adaptation of an elite high literary drama—as a “display of artifices” rather than a “cultural monument”—I have argued that the film reflexively cites and places itself in conversation with the Faust story’s long history as visual spectacle and its associations, both textual and para-textual, with visual magic. In this way, Faust‘s special effects are not designed to reflect and explore cinema’s place alongside literature in the canon of high art, but cinema’s place among modern technologies of visual illusion. The uncanny reflections rendered through double exposure advance a theory of the ontology of the cinema based in its capacity to create technological images—film images that are technologically manipulated, layered, and composited. Special effects reveal cinema’s Faustian desire, in the words of the Spiess Historia, “to become a Devil.” Cinema aspires not to duplicate reality, but, like the devil, to transform the nature of reality itself.

Author Biography

Amanda Mingail Shubert is Teaching Faculty in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she specializes in nineteenth-century British literature, visual culture, and media. Her first book, Seeing Things: Virtual Aesthetics in Victorian Culture, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press.