Standing on the threshold of yet another technological revolution, in an age when watching films together in a cinema no longer seems the only option \u2014 or even the main one \u2014 we decided to look back and mark the centenary of two outstanding films made on the eve of one of the last century\u2019s major technical turns: the coming of sound. We also wanted to present them roughly as audiences would have seen them in 1926, allowing for a certain cultural distance. From the many titles released that year we chose Friedrich Murnau\u2019s Faust<\/em><\/a> and Teinosuke Kinugasa\u2019s A Page of Madness<\/em><\/a>. A hundred years on, the screening practice of live music and live commentary, once ordinary for silent-era audiences, is a unique event for us \u2014 and a chance to think once again about the benefits and costs of technological progress. Today, when new tools are pushing people out not only of the cinema but also out of the filmmaking process itself, such an \u201cexpanded\u201d screening feels like a therapeutic return to the point of origin, to the childhood of world cinema, from which the future may look less frightening.<\/p>\n Murnau\u2019s Faust<\/em> is one of the most striking examples of German Expressionism \u2014 ahead of its time, as the saying goes, and undervalued by its contemporaries. Murnau admired and studied Rembrandt; the 17th-century painter became a source of inspiration for the 20th-century filmmaker, and it shows in almost every frame. The painterly image plays, literally and metaphorically, on the struggle of light and dark; Gretchen and Faust<\/em>\u2019s tragic fate still tears at the viewer\u2019s heart a century later. In this film, Murnau devised and used many original techniques: double exposure, light, smoke, film stock, sets, miniatures, camera movement \u2014 including a flight over a model landscape that is all but an ancestor of today\u2019s aerial shot \u2014 all in the service of a dense, convincing mysticism. We will show this remarkable film accompanied by an electronic music trio \u2014 Denis Ringo, Ksyusha Buraya, and Andrei Figa \u2014 assembled especially for Message to Man to bolster the forces of light on screen.<\/p>\n