Faust (The American's Guide to Czech Movies) (Patreon)

Faust, Jan Švankmajer’s second feature film, comes six years after Alice, in a changed Prague. The Cold War was over, at least in appearances, if less so in clandestine geopolitics. Czechoslovakia was dead: the Czech Republic and Slovakia rose in its wake. Like the rest of the former Eastern Bloc, Česko had become another neoliberal democracy in the miasma of capitalist realism.

With the removal of an alternative to capitalism, Czech culture needed some other way to undermine reality. Communism had failed, and so Jan Švankmajer had to suffice. Fortunately for him, he not only sufficed, but he delivered his best work to date.

Before Faust goes gorgeously off the rails, it follows a similar direction to Alice. A solitary eccentric loner out of a classic myth falls out of the world and gets consumed by the nightmarish haze of Czech culture colliding with foreign mythologies, guided by little except dream logic. The Faust myth here becomes a story of rebellion against banality — a man in Old Town Prague struggles in poverty, and chases sin as an intellectual pursuit that animates his otherwise empty life.

This is of course an engine for all of Švankmajer’s usual nightmares. There’s a claymation baby that Faust creates and immediately destroys in a fit of reasonable horror, demon marionettes that seduce Faust, and a man that carries a human leg around Prague. The main character is hardly Faust — he simply adopts the mantle in an act of sacrilegious theater. You should watch this damn thing. If the leg doesn’t sell you, then maybe the demonic puppet seduction will.