Silent Movie "Faust" on Friday

From Roger Ebert's 2005 reappraisal of Faust, which will be screened Friday 4/13 at 7:30PM in Page Hall:

"The greatest master of horror in the silent era was a cheerful man, much loved by his collaborators, even though they might lose consciousness from time to time [from asphyxiation] while enveloped in clouds of steam or surrounded by tongues of flame. F. W. Murnau (1888-1931) made two of the greatest films of the supernatural, Nosferatu (1922) and Faust (1926), both voted among the best horror films of all time on the Internet Movie Database: Faust surprisingly in fourth place, just ahead of The Shining, Jaws and Alien.

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"The Best Film Ever Made About Filmmaking"

Roger Ebert proclaims Federico Fellini's 8 1/2, which will be screened tonight at 7:30PM at Page Hall (free and open to the public) the best film ever made about filmmaking.

Read the full Chicago Sun-Times reappraisal from May 28, 2000, here.

"8 1/2 is the best film ever made about filmmaking..... The critic Alan Stone, writing in the Boston Review, deplores Fellini’s 'stylistic tendency to emphasize images over ideas.' I celebrate it. A filmmaker who prefers ideas to images will never advance above the second rank because he is fighting the nature of his art. The printed word is ideal for ideas; film is made for images, and images are best when they are free to evoke many associations and are not linked to narrowly defined purposes. Here is Stone on the complexity of 8 1/2: 'Almost no one knew for sure what they had seen after one viewing.' True enough, but true of all great films— while you know for sure what you’ve seen after one viewing of a shallow one.." More.

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