[Editor’s note: While preparing for my frequent course “Deals With the Devil,” which centers on the Faust theme, I discovered that one of my favorite filmmakers, Éric Rohmer, wrote a doctoral dissertation on F.W. Murnau’s silent film Faust. To force myself to read it, I put it on my syllabus, hoping that it would set up an exercise where my students could build connections between the Faust theme and a major work not obviously based upon it, in this case, My Night at Maud’s. As you will see, it turned out that much of the material in the book was not directly relevant to the course, but Rohmer does have some good stray observations about Murnau’s reworking of the Faust theme and his relationship to Goethe in particular. I share the text of the handout I will be distributing to my class in case anyone might find it interesting or useful. My translated excerpts below are drawn from Éric Rohmer, L’organisation de l’espace dans le Faust de Murnau (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1977). Page numbers refer to this edition.]

Éric Rohmer (1920-2010) was a French filmmaker associated with the New Wave movement pioneered by directors like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. Like Godard and Truffaut, Rohmer actually started out as a film critic and scholar, and he did his doctoral dissertation on Murnau’s silent film adaptation of Faust (1926). As a film critic and aspiring filmmaker himself, Rohmer is much less interested in the plot of the film than in Murnau’s cinematic technique. In fact, he believes that the familiarity of the plot was what allowed Murnau to be so innovative in the way he presented it—all his attention was focused on technique rather than narrative. Nevertheless, Rohmer does make some very insightful remarks about how the film functions as an adaptation of Goethe’s Faust. Here I will provide an overview of Rohmer’s work and a translation of those passages. My hope is that this will help us to make connections between the Faust theme and Rohmer’s film My Night at Maud’s (1969).

Rohmer opens the book with the claim that “Of all filmmakers, F.W. Murnau is perhaps the one who knew how to organize the space of his films in the most rigorous and inventive way” (9). He defines three different kinds of space that a film can create. The first is the pictorial space, which talks about the way that individual shots or frames are composed. The second is architectural space, which refers to the way a film creates the illusion of a “real world” that the characters are moving through. The third is filmic space, which refers to the way that the film creates a sensation of movement.

The main chapters of the book go through these versions of space one by one. In the first chapter, on pictorial space, Rohmer claims that most filmmakers of Murnau’s time were inspired by photography, but Murnau preferred to use painting as a model. Rohmer goes through many individual painters he believes inspired Murnau’s broad style, including Rembrandt, Caravaggio, and Vermeer. He also mentions several specific paintings that he sees as models for particular scenes and refers, in broader terms, to the way that illustrations of Goethe’s Faust may have influenced him as well. This chapter basically does not discuss the plot at all and hence does not include any substantial passages relevant to our class discussion.

In the second chapter, on architectural space, Rohmer does a detailed study of the layout and décor of the various spaces that appear in the film. This chapter includes some analysis that is so detailed that it may border on the insane—for instance, at one point he provides a chart listing and categorizing every single object that appears on screen (80-82). He also includes sketches where he tries to reconstruct the layout of Faust’s study (67), Gretchen’s house (71), and Martha’s house (72). More relevant to our discussion is his inventory of the scenes from Goethe that Murnau excluded or modified, which leads to an analysis of Mephistopheles as a character:

Now let us precisely determine, while examining each scene in detail, the places that are in Goethe and those that have been modified. Auerbach’s tavern disappears, but it is in a tavern that we see Mephistopheles provoke Valentine and engage in a feat of sorcery, here more terrifying than burlesque: the flame shooting out of the wine. If the character of Mephistopheles retains all the comic force of his literary model (without going beyond it, except perhaps in Martha’s house), Murnau wanted, however, to preserve the seriousness of the wonders he shows us, whereas Goethe tinged the legacy of the Volksbuch [a term for the original Faust legend] with derision. The demon is not presented to us, as in the play, in the form of a poodle; it is Faust himself who evokes him, just as in the legend; and the sinister monk who emerges, though sarcastic, cannot provoke in us the slightest chuckle. Murnau will equally avoid showing us the gallery of animals that is the witch’s kitchen (Hexenküche); it is in his study that Faust’s rejuvination is carried out. Walpurgis Night, which inspired painters and musicians, has also disappeared, but I do not see how a cinematographic translation of that satiric-philosophical interlude could be given, except in a spirit of Goya-esque masquerade, which is quite far from Murnau. (60-61)

Rohmer then takes a step back to think about Murnau’s relationship to Goethe more broadly:

If Murnau and Kyser [the writer of the screenplay] ultimately remain so faithful to Goethe, despite their apparent desire to distance themselves from him and return to the sources of the myth (“an old German legend,” as the credits say), it is perhaps also the case that the play carried the seed of its cinematographic transcription. It is true that the settings of the scenes, in this philosophical drama that was made above all to be read, even if they do not play a truly active role, assert their presence more forcefully than in many works better conceived for staging: that of Shakespeare, for example, or the Greek tragedies. The “tragedy” of Faust is indeed more cinematographic than theatrical, in its first and second parts. We never find in it a banal waiting room, an anonymous place, but always a well-defined place, which makes up an integral part of the old myth and of what Goethe himself forged, in the same way as the names of characters or the epoch when the story unfolds—which no one would dare change. (61)

Later in the chapter, after his reconstruction of the various sets and his listing of all the objects, Rohmer reflects further on the idea that everything in the film has a very defined purpose:

In Murnau, the same thing holds for clothing as for objects: it is never a means, a tool, a weapon for getting what one wants or seducing someone. We are in a world made of relationships of force, not of persuasion. Not of a lover’s courtship: the woman does not play the flirt, the man does not play the rake. In this universe of pure desire, there is room only for predator and prey: whether he uses the fascination of his looks or pure violence, it is all the same. Each being is for the other a vampire or a victim. Each knows what he is after from his counterpart, or what he fears. Deception is impossible. There is no need to strut about: one passes immediately to action, which is to say to assault or its simulation. The love scenes are conceived as battles where now the man, now the woman is attacking or attacked, pursuing or pursued. Thus, for example, the scene in Martha’s garden… (86).

This concreteness holds especially for costumes:

To a change in clothing there almost always corresponds a profound transformation of one’s being, and Faust, with its theme of rejuvenation, puts out in the open a theme that is elsewhere latent [in Murnau’s other films]. Moreover, the transition is not forcefully abrupt. It would be more fair to speak sometimes of blossoming or blooming. In the famous scene with the jewelry, reduced by the filmmaker to a simple necklace, or in the one where Valentin offers a shawl to his sister, the two faces of Gretchen are revealed, today a reserved young girl, tomorrow a woman and a lover. The fact of wearing such and such clothes is not for Murnau a social act, but a natural phenomenon of evolution, of growth or decline. (87-88)

In the third and final chapter, Murnau analyzes the idea of filmic space or the creation of motion. Here he emphasizes Murnau’s use of sudden appearances, which leads to another massive table listing and categorizing every example (96ff.). This chapter also includes a long section where he provides multiple abstract sketches of different scenes to trace the direction of the main movements (125ff.). He discusses the overall pattern of motion in the film as a kind of strategy, which is sometimes apparently violated by the actors. In this context, he talks about individual performances, particularly those of Emil Jannings (Mephistopheles), Yvette Guilbert (Martha), and Camilla Horn (Gretchen):

Certainly one can say that Emil Jannings and Yvette Guilbert “go too far.” It is certain that the gestures of these two actors, especially in the scene where they meet, appear indifferent to the general dynamic of the film’s strategy. They are gestures that bear a significance without reference to the global conception of the mise en scène. Their direction owes nothing to their inscription in the space of the film… But one must not confuse the direction of the film and what is proper to each filmed element…. This mode of expression is the responsibility of the characters…. It is not Yvette Guilbert, nor Jannings who “goes too far,” but Martha and Mephistopheles…. This comic verve, though due in part to the personal rapport of the actors and though apparently foreign to the general spirit of the mise en scène, is ultimately integrated successfully into the film’s modelling and its motor scheme….

By opposite means, Murnau obtains with an unknown, Camilla Horn, in the role of Gretchen, the same result…. Did he lead his actress to find some of these poses and gestures herself, or did he suggest them right from the start? It is of little importance whether he uses one or the other method. The fact is that he succeeded there as well in perfectly marrying what came from him and what he owed to the actress, giving us the impression of cutting her to the quick, of forging a new being who would be, from birth, “Murnauian”… This second nature which she is granted renders her always absolutely “natural.” (108-110)

In the footnotes to this chapter, Rohmer also returns to the notion that the Faust legend is more intrinsically cinematic than theatrical. Here he quotes Goethe’s version of the wager, where Faust defies Mephistopheles to give him happiness so great that he will declare, “Beautiful moment, please do not pass away”:

It is an idea more cinematographic than theatrical, because tragic theater, whether Greek or Shakespearean, puts the accent on the impossibility of innocence, not of happiness, having in view action rather than contemplation. The feeling of the incompleteness of the moment, associated with that of is fullness, we find in a vague way in almost all films, in the guise, most often, of a “sentimental” optimism, in search of one of those “suspensions”… that the screen is well suited to achieve by its magic and that of the soundtrack. In this sense, the “happy ending” of Murnau’s Faust appears to be more in line with the typical mythology of the cinema than with the ambiguous conclusions of the first and second parts of Goethe’s Faust. (123)

I have been spending a lot more time thinking about logic and math than I ever would have anticipated even as recently as five years ago. I’ve read books that were essentially about the square root of two, or how many points are on a line, and my current train reading is a primer on non-Euclidean geometry. Meanwhile, formal logic has become a staple of my teaching, both in the philosophy department and in the Shimer Great Books program. And who do I have to thank for all of this? Hegel.

During the pandemic, I was part of an intense reading group on Hegel’s Science of Logic. I have seldom read a book so hard — reading the section for the next meeting (often as little as ten pages) multiple times over, poring over every page during our long discussions, even poking at the German text. It is well-known to be among the most challenging texts in the Western philosophical canon, and I found it to be among the most rewarding as well. I haven’t spent much time with the text since then, but it often feels like everything I do — or at least everything new in my teaching and reading — is somehow related to it. I initially volunteered to teach logic in the philosophy department both to prepare for the Shimer course on logic and math and to get a handle on the syllogism, which is so central for Hegel. I have increasingly been teaching history of science courses, and I am drawn to non-reductionist accounts of the emergence of life out of physics and chemistry that echo the final passages of the Science of Logic. I don’t know when or even whether I will ever have a level of expertise needed to write credibly on these subjects, but my encounter with Hegel has profoundly shaped the way I look at the world.

It has also shaped the way I teach logic. As I have grown more confident and fluent in my syllogisms, I have tried to give my students a sense of how and why they work — something that neither the Copi/Cohen or Hurley textbook is much concerned with. They just list the valid forms and provide a dense proof (which they all but invite the reader to skip) as to how all of them fulfill the syllogistic rules, which are in turn simply presented as brute facts to be memorized. By contrast, I try to show how all the forms are generated out of the famous Barbara (AAA-1) form, and why the figures other than the first are more limited in their range of possible valid conclusions. (An initial effort at such an explanation can be found in this post.) I don’t want them to simply recognize that the EIO form is valid in all figures, I want them to know why.

At the end of the day, though, this knowledge inevitably collapses into a merely mechanical memorized list. Once I created a kind of algorithm for how to generate the 15 unconditionally valid (or Boolean) forms, the list became a permanent possession for me. To get there, I spent many a walk to the train pondering the mysteries of three overlapping categories — once I “had it,” I lost all patience for further reflection. It became boring, inert.

That tendency is what Hegel is constantly fighting against in the Science of Logic. He wants to show us how logic emerges into life, and he injects genuine drama into the whole affair. Yet as we progressed through the massive tome, the past sections inevitably became subject to rote memorization: first Being, then Nothing, then Becoming, then Existence….. Remember, Quality comes before Quantity! Many people, including no less an authority than Jameson, will tell you that all you “really need” is the Encyclopedia Logic, but in that text, I feel that Hegel has already succumbed to the tendency toward mechanism. Each step becomes something to be rattled off, without bothering so much with the connective tissue. Symptomatic here is the conversion of the “Remarks” — so energetic and tightly argued in the Science of Logic, beginning with scornful and even sarcastic attack on anyone who would deny that Being and Nothingness are the same — into the more disconnected “riffs” (my translation of the German Zusätze) in the Encyclopedia Logic‘s lecture notes.

I keep trying to forestall that moment by giving myself fresh challenges — for instance, trying to teach basic logic directly “out of” Aristotle’s original texts, which is… super hard. I also continue to delve more and more into the project of modern logic and its interpentration with mathematics. In part this is to help my teaching in the Shimer course, which requires me to find a way to help the students through the difficult territory of non-Euclidean geometry or Gödel’s Proof. But in part it’s also to confirm my intuition that the entire project is, in a very real sense, insane. And not only that, but the most fervently held desire — namely, to develop a completely rigorous, self-contained, and autonomous axiomatic system with no necessary grounding in intuition or any external reality — has been rigorously proven to be impossible on its own terms.

Hegel’s approach to logic is often regarded as self-evidently misguided in modern terms, and a whole literature has arisen trying to “save” Hegel through a reductionist reading. The reason is that, from the outset, Hegel is clearly breaking some of the most basic rules of contemporary logic. Above all, he repeatedly violates the existential fallacy (indeed, that is one of his very first moves). Hegel died shortly before the Boolean revolution got underway, but I think it’s obvious that he would have rejected its terms completely. The purpose of logic isn’t to create a purely self-sufficient abstract system, but to found our understanding of the world, which we cannot finally understand without presuming that it is in some sense proto-logical “in itself.”

This is not to say that nature is governed by abstract “laws” or that it has an inherently “mathematical” structure. The concepts we use to grasp nature always have to be won through the struggle of our own understanding — they do not come ready-made. Indeed, I think Hegel would agree with Lee Smolin that the remarkable effectiveness of mathematical tools in grasping the natural world is grounded in the humble fact that at every level we know of, nature presents itself as an ensemble of discreet entities that we can count.

Hegel lived a bit too early to put it this way, but I would say that our logical categories cannot be divorced from our empirical intuitions because our minds evolved out of our natural environment in order to grasp it. Pretending otherwise — no matter how complex and rigorous the results — collapses into contradiction and, worse, triviality.

Even so, I do mostly stick to the Boolean system of syllogisms for the sake of my teaching, because there’s only so much world and time. And in case you’re curious, here is my method for generating the fifteen unconditionally valid forms. First, I presume that you have the forms in the first figure memorized, which is easy enough because they’re all pretty intuitive (see the above-linked post for more of an explanation):

AAA-1
EAE-1
AII-1
EIO-1

Then, starting again from AAA-1, you list out the same forms horizontally, incrementing the figure on each one:

In the second and third column, you then write a form with the premises reversed, and you add those “new” forms to the fourth column, incrementing the figure to 4 for each.

Returning to the second and third columns, continue both down by replacing the non-A lines with Os.

Complete the list by adding EIO to any column that doesn’t already have it:

And there you have it! Once you have this technique down, you will have the 15 valid forms in the bag and never need to think about it again!