Griefwalker conjures a haunting live soundtrack for FW Murnau’s devilish classic Faust
In this classic of German expressionism screening at the Shadbolt, “Every frame is like an album cover,” says the postrock band’s Simon Dobbs
FW Murnau’s 98-year-old Faust is notable for its wild effects work and gothic imagination.
Griefwalker plays a live score for Faust at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts on October 25 at 7:30 pm
SILENT CINEMA STILL retains its grip on modern audiences. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is perpetually in revival, ditto Robert Wiene’s Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, usually accompanied by an orchestra or fetchingly modern new score. In the case of Nosferatu, FW Murnau’s classic is currently on tour with a cut sync’d to Radiohead’s Kid A and Amnesiac. Even in then case of a lesser seen title like Murnau’s Faust, the appeal is deep.
“Every frame is like an album cover,” says Simon Dobbs, whose postrock collective Griefwalker will provide a live original score to the 98-year-old feature at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts on October 25.
The band has previously presented The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari at the same venue, and was pondering a few other titles including Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc for its newest presentation. Faust won out for fairly obvious reasons. So what should we expect?
Drawn loosely from Goethe’s play, Faust is considered a classic of German expressionism although its relentless effects work and gothic imagination—giving rise to unforgettable images like that of the winged Devil looming like a gigantic sentinel over a small German village (later nicked by Disney for Fantasia)—puts Murnau’s film in a category of its own. Dobbs notes that while Faust lacks the cultural currency of other titles like Nosferatu, it’s only through the vicissitudes of history.
“I hope that people trust this series enough to watch something that they’re not as familiar with,” he tells Stir. “The technological leap to from Caligari in 1920 to Faust only six years later is incredible. That’s part of the fun of it, too—being a lover of cinema and seeing the language of cinema develop in just a decade.”
Added to this is the 4K restoration Griefwalker chose to work with. Says Dobbs with a chuckle: “I know people can be put off by a 100-year-old movie about the Devil making deals with peasants but, you know—it literally looks so good that it could be modern.” Indeed, almost a century later, Faust is shockingly crisp and weirdly present, lending a tangibility to details like the visible greasepaint on Emil Janning’s face. The legendary actor delivers a big performance as Mephisto, which Dobbs points to as one of the “beauties” of silent cinema.
“All the emotions are up onscreen,” he says. “They’re having to act in a way that you can read it like a book. Musically, once you start playing to that emotion, you know the beats you should be hitting and what you’re trying to convey.” In this and other ways, Griefwalker has adapted to meet the film on its own terms. The band shares DNA with outfits like Godspeed You! Black Emperor but for this project Dobbs says he and his partners looked to No Wave avant-gardist Glenn Branca and another intense legacy outfit from New York—Swans.
“It’s a bit more stripped down than our usual sound,” he says. “The Swans element gives it a more direct, driving nature. In post-rock there’s a lot of room to hide in the crescendo and the bombast, but with this it’s a lot more direct and specific than we usually are.”
The band has further opened itself to more delicate instrumentation. “We started from the ground up. And we switch around. You’ll see members going between a dulcimer, a drum kit, Moog, some electronics. Being influenced by cinema, when we’re playing the dulcimer it feels like something out of Suspiria. We’re sort of bordering on Giallo with this project.”
Notwithstanding the audiences will behold Murnau’s phantasmagoric masterpiece at precisely the right time—over Halloween—this is also a great opportunity to catch one of Vancouver’s most cloistered and mysterious musical outfits. Dobbs reckons that Griefwalker has done a mere seven shows since forming in 2017 while it maintains a revolving membership of up to nine people drawn from locals including art-rockers Taxa and hardcore outfit Teeth to Your Throat, along with Dobbs’s ambient project Beautiful Violence. “It’s slow-moving,” he says. “A behemoth.”
For Faust, Griefwalker is stripped down to five members including guitarist Hieg Khatcherian, who took on the early composition work. On the eve of the performance, Dobbs counts over a dozen screenings of the film. Slow-moving is apparently key to the band’s nature, not to mention painstaking. “We just go through it and through it,” he says, “working on chunks, working on connecting material, piecing it together, and now we’re just playing it through again and again and again… That’s the process. It’s 100 percent playing to the film and that’s why Faust is the right film for this lineup of the band.” 
Related Articles
