Faust (1926 film)

Faust: Eine deutsche Volkssage (Faust: A German Folk Legend) is a 1926 German silent fantasy film directed by F. W. Murnau and produced by Universum-Film AG (Ufa), telling the story of the aged alchemist Faust, who sells his soul to the demon Mephisto in exchange for youth and the power to heal a plague-stricken town.¹ It was Ufa's most expensive production to that date, made concurrently with Fritz Lang's Metropolis, and it was Murnau's final German film before he left for Hollywood.^{2 • 3}

Production

Ufa conceived Faust as an international prestige picture, part of a strategy of grand, exportable productions that also drove Fritz Lang's Die Nibelungen (1924) and Metropolis, which was in production at the same time.⁷ The film was put into production in September 1925 by Ufa with the theater director Max Reinhardt as an uncredited producing force.³ Producer Erich Pommer allowed the costs of Faust and Metropolis to escalate; by 1926, with the German economy temporarily stabilized, this was fiscally hazardous, nearly bankrupted the company, and ended Pommer's reign as studio head.⁵

Casting. Murnau courted established American actresses for Gretchen, including Mary Philbin, Greta Garbo, and Lillian Gish. Gish was originally cast but wanted her own cinematographer, Charles Rosher, while the German crew wanted Carl Hoffmann; she was replaced by the novice Camilla Horn, discovered during the making of Tartüff (1925).^{5 • 3} The title role went to the Swedish theater actor Gösta Ekman, after John Barrymore had been considered, while Emil Jannings was the intended Mephisto from the start.³

Intertitles. Ufa hired Gerhart Hauptmann, then Germany's most famous living writer, who composed intertitles in verse; his version was screened once, on 26 August 1926, before the release version used screenwriter Hans Kyser's prose intertitles instead.⁶ A press screening with Kyser's titles had taken place on 25 August 1926.⁶

Visual style and effects

Murnau made the film entirely in the studio, unlike his earlier pictures, using strongly contrasting light and shadow in the manner of Rembrandt's paintings, flowing mist, subtle transitions, and double exposures to render the supernatural.⁸ In an early scene Mephisto towers over the town and spreads his black wings to blot out the sun while smoke representing the plague pours over miniature houses.² The camera was freed from fixed positions: the flight across towns and villages on Mephisto's magic coat was captured with a camera built into a specially constructed roller-coaster rig.⁸ Murnau's experience as a combat pilot in World War I informed the images of devil-controlled flight over the globe and a holy battle in the clouds.³

A visual diary of around 400 photographs and illustrations assembled after the shoot by crew members Robert Herlth, Carl Hoffmann, and Walter Röhrig documents this craft work, showing stepladders, model mountains, fake clouds, and papier-mâché props behind the finished images. The album was presented to Murnau as a souvenir before he left for Hollywood, vanished for decades, was thought destroyed in the Second World War, resurfaced, and was purchased by la Cinémathèque française in Paris in 2017. Restored, it was published for the first time in 2026 by MUBI Editions as The Faust Bible: The Making of FW Murnau's Masterpiece, priced $100 / £75.⁹

Reception

German critics grumbled about the liberties taken with Goethe, and the production lost money, though it performed well at the box office in Germany, the United States, and elsewhere.^{7 • 5} German audiences and critics received it poorly at the time, many judging that it did not measure up to its literary predecessors and that Ekman gave a bland performance beside Jannings and Horn.² In 1927 German censorship again classified it as unsuitable for minors.⁶ The film did receive official German awards in 1926, the predicates Volksbildend (educationally valuable) and Künstlerisch besonders wertvoll (artistically especially valuable).⁴

Since then its standing has risen sharply. It is now grouped with the great monuments of late silent cinema and German Expressionism, though it belongs to that movement's more pictorial wing, closer to the romantic stylization of Lang's Der müde Tod than to the angular distortions of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.⁷ The French director Eric Rohmer's book L'organisation de l'espace dans le 'Faust' de Murnau (1980) is considered essential reading on the film's composition.⁸

Versions and restoration

Faust survives in materially different versions. Following standard practice for export films, several negatives were assembled, but Murnau often staged and shot scenes differently for different negatives, so the German domestic version and the export versions diverge in performance, framing, and editing; there is no single authoritative cut.⁷ The German version is generally considered superior to the more widely seen English export version, and it has been the primary version in circulation since 2006.³ Several different cuts exist, of which five are in circulation today.²

Restoration work includes the 1995 "Project Lumière" restoration by Luciano Berriatúa of the Filmoteca Española, in cooperation with the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung, the Deutsches Filminstitut, and the Det Danske Filmmuseum,⁶ and Berriatúa's 1999 restoration of a German version preferred by Murnau that had not been seen until recently.² The Munich Filmmuseum has reconstructed Hauptmann's original verse intertitles, which significantly alter the film's rhythm and place greater emphasis on the images.¹⁰ The Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation holds the rights and released a digital version in 2013 with funding from Germany's Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.¹¹

Legacy

Faust was Murnau's last German production. He had already been courted by Fox and moved to Hollywood, where he made the Oscar-winning Sunrise (1927) before his death in a traffic accident in 1931.³ The film's imagery has remained influential: later works such as Nosferatu (2024) model their painterly chiaroscuro and plague-bringer effects on it, and it continues to be screened with live musical accompaniment at venues including the Filmmuseum München and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles.^{7 • 9}

References

1. Faust, Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung film record
2. F. W. Murnau's Faust (1926), The Public Domain Review
3. Faust (1926), Nathaniel Thompson, Turner Classic Movies
4. Faust, filmportal.de
5. Faust, Michael Koller, Senses of Cinema, October 2003
6. Faust, Eine deutsche Volkssage, Case Western Reserve University silent film database
7. Faust (1926), dir. F. W. Murnau, Sightlines
8. Faust, Goethe-Institut film catalogue
9. Once presumed lost forever, these eerie photos show us all what horror movies were like 100 years ago, Digital Camera World
10. Faust. 1926. Directed by F. W. Murnau, MoMA
11. Faust, availability, filmportal.de

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026

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