ABSTRACT

The author embarks straight away on the tragic story of Faust's imprudence, describing how his pride leads him to enter into his presumptuous pact. Weidmann that the story of Faust concluded for the first time with his conversion and attainment of salvation. The English Romantics borrowed only small elements from the traditional legend or from Goethe's reworking of it, notably the fantastic theme of Faust's involvement with the Devil and the boundless ambition of the doomed titan. The story of Faust was one of the most popular themes in the early cinema, before the First World War: in sixteen years there were no fewer than sixteen films on the subject, most of them inspired by Gounod's opera. The success of this ambiguous stereotype is due to the fact that in 1918 it conjured up the idealized image of a mythical hero standing erect amidst catastrophe.