Faust - Live Cinema
10 Kent Terrace, Mt Victoria, Wellington
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F W Murnau, Germany 1926, 106 mins PG
Live Cinema Presentation
This Wellington Film Society screening will be accompanied by a new score arranged and played by Te-Whanganui-a-Tara musicians: Erika Grant, Isaac Smith, Rosie Langabeer and Neil Feather. Our screening is supported by the Goethe Institut and the Wellington City Council.
This will be WFS’s first film with a live score since 2017’s The Last Command and will expand the boundaries of the conventional cinema experience, bringing live music and sound effects to the giant Embassy screen.
Between them, the three musicians have provided live scores for several WFS films in the past, at their previous home of the Paramount Theatre. Erika Grant is a multi-instrumentalist, playing in local bands including Orchestra of Spheres and Cookie Brooklyn and the Crumbs. Double bassist, improvisor and sonic artist Isaac Smith is artist in residence at The Pyramid Club. Rosie Langabeer plays various instruments and works across a range of mediums, currently producing a monthly big band night at Meow Bar. Neil Feather is an inventor and performer of experimental musical instruments and a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow.
Faust, with its supernatural vistas of heaven and hell, is particularly distinctive in the way it uses the whole canvas. Consider the startling early shot of Mephisto, his dark wings obscuring the sky as he hovers above a little village that huddles in the lower right corner. Murnau treated the screen as if it offered a larger space than his contemporaries imagined; long before deep focus, he was creating double-exposures like shots in Faust where a crowd of villagers in the foreground is echoed by faraway crowds in the upper corners...Like all silent-film directors, Murnau was comfortable with special effects that were obviously artificial. The town beneath the wings of the dark angel is clearly a model, and when characters climb a steep street, there is no attempt to make the sharply angled buildings and rooflines behind them seem real... The world of Faust is never intended to define a physical universe, but is a landscape of nightmares.
- Roger Ebert, 8 May 2005.
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