Watch Faust: Appearance of Mephistopheles For Free

Best movie ever!

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

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'.