Faust

In Prague an ordinary man follows a map pushed into his hand on the street and finds himself backstage at a theatre inside a ruined building. He puts on the costume, picks up the text and starts becoming Faust. Where the play stops and life begins goes blurry, and even out on the street he stays inside the play. The film does not rest on one Faust. Goethe, Marlowe and Czech folk puppet plays run together. The subject is not the bargain but a man who thinks he chose his part while being worked from above. Jan Svankmajer directed. Actors, life-size puppets, clay faces and stop motion share the same shot; Mephistopheles is sometimes a puppet, sometimes a copy of the man's own face. Svankmajer's technique here is not decoration but the argument itself: a puppet hangs on strings, and so does a person. Prague's streets are used as real locations, and that everyday ground makes the puppet scenes harder to sit with. Who it is for: anyone curious about Svankmajer, stop-motion animation and the Central European puppet tradition. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a straight story. The film is deliberately disorienting, some sections run long, and it never says who the main character is.