Simply Perfect

People are voting emotionally.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Faust: apparition de Méphistophélès (1897) The Faust story was a very popular one to be told throughout the silent era. I'm going to guess that the story itself was well-known to people so it would easily translate to the screen. In this fifty-five second movie, Faust appears to be praying for some sort of help when all of the sudden the Devil appears. This here is when the film cuts off so obviously there's nothing here that is ground-breaking or cinema changing but at the same time it's pretty fascinating getting to see this early take on the subject. Georges Melies was experimenting with magic tricks and he too did a couple versions of the story and it appears this here is trying to be a dramatic take on the subject.

Georges Melies had been doing his trick films for a year before the Lumieres noticed and reacted with this combination of stage trickery --the opening and closing cabinet -- and the stopped-camera trick of making the devil appear.It's all done in a straightforward manner, with none of the flair that Melies imparted to his films. He had come from stage magic while the Lumieres came from photography. His strength was performance and presence while theirs was composition. Mephistopheles' sudden and off-handed appearance might have been a performance choice, but it is a boring one when contrasted with Melies'.