The annual Colin Raugh Thomas O’Fallon Memorial Lecture in Art and American Culture will deal with issues of damnation, psychic crisis and spiritual bankruptcy.
The lecture, which is sponsored by the Oregon Humanities Center and takes place today at 8 p.m., will feature Associate Professor of Art Leon Johnson discussing his film “Faust/Faustus in Deptford.”
The 15-minute film, based on a series of performance pieces enacted by Johnson and theater arts Assistant Professor John Schmor, draws from the two central sources of the Faust myth. It depicts an encounter between 16th-century author Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust on their way to damnation.
“It’s a beautiful meditation on the Faust myth,” said Schmor. “Our performances were mostly guided by instinct and guess.”
The piece was performed across the country and eventually in England. While there, Johnson and Schmor had the performances documented on film. The result, according to Johnson, is part travelogue and part literary reinterpretation.
“We shot it in various contexts on various locations,” Johnson said. “We performed it at a number of beautiful sites in England. We would arrive at a site and reinterpret the performance based on what the site suggested.”
The sense of improvisation was fueled by the different personalities of the two characters, Johnson said. He added that while both are in essence meant to be the same person, Marlowe and Goethe took different approaches to the character. This meant that the performance had the dynamic of two different people dealing with the same experiences.
“John, who played Faust, had his performance rooted in a European style, very upper class and well read. His character has resigned himself to his fate,” Johnson said. “Faustus is more of an emotionally driven character, someone who is not willing to take his damnation sitting down.”
After the film was completed, it was screened at a number of international film festivals, including the Raindance Film Festival in London. Johnson is glad his film was chosen as the topic of discussion for the memorial lecture.
“The project is a good fit since it draws on so much literary and musical discourse,” Johnson said. “It really represents a complete humanities project in a really lovely way.”
Those in charge of the lecture feel the same way.
“We don’t typically use people from the University of Oregon for this lecture,” Oregon Humanities Center Associate Director Julia Heydon said. “But given the amount of notice the film has gotten nationally, we thought it would be good to give it some local attention.”
The lecture will take place in 177 Lawrence Hall and will include a showing of “Faust/Faustus in Deptford.” The lecture is free and open to the public.