The director of such stunning films as vampire tale Nosferatu (1922) and marital romance Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) died at the age of 42 in 1931, meaning that his career barely scraped into the talkie era. Still, Murnau’s tremendous run of silent pictures included some beautiful, often disturbing classics, in which he sent his camera roaming through changing vistas of shadows and light, and plumbed the depths of the human soul. Nowhere more so than in his tour-de-force Faust, released 100 years ago this month, based on Goethe’s play about a deal with the devil.
And the making of Faust is depicted in a stunning new book, which is both a document of, and in a sense an artefact from, the production of this classic film. Murnau was also one of the most mysterious of directors: secretive about his methods, with an intense devotion to his work. Early collaborator Edgar G Ulmer called him “a great purist who worked under a sort of hypnosis”.
Murnau banned producers from his sets, and executives from watching his rushes. Bar a few exceptions, he did not allow on-set photography to reveal the secrets of his camerawork and special effects. This mystique created room for speculation as to whether Murnau, or his talented crew, were responsible for the success of his films.
The Faust Bible: The Making of FW Murnau’s Masterpiece publishes unseen images from the shoot of one of his best films, and gives a rare insight into the collaborative way it was made. Faust was Murnau’s final German film before he went to Hollywood, and at the time it was the most expensive, complex film that the Ufa studio had ever produced. It is an adaptation of Goethe’s tragedy about the scholar Faust (played by Swedish actor Gösta Ekman) who sells his soul to the devil, represented by the grinning, black-clad demon Mephistopheles (German star Emil Jannings).
A commercial flop on its release, Faust is now acclaimed as one of the greats. French New Wave director Éric Rohmer, a Murnau devotee, wrote his doctoral dissertation on the film. The Faust Bible reveals how Murnau and his crew achieved some of the incredible shots and special effects in this film, but it is also an enhanced facsimile of an artefact from the film’s production, which has survived against all odds to spill its secrets.
In the film, Faust owns a hefty, leather-bound Bible, which he throws on the fire in a moment of despair. But the prop was to become something more. Art directors Robert Herlth and Walter Röhrig pulled the book from the ashes and pasted designs, stills and behind-the-scenes photographs on to its blank pages so they could present the souvenir as a gift to the director at the end of the shoot.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
