The Masters of Cinema Series

The Catalogue

Faust

by Peter Spooner, 2006

UFA, the Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft, was founded in Germany in 1917 for reasons of national prestige. By 1926, the year of Faust’s production, it had taken over most of its competitors and was eager to improve its reputation and earnings in other countries. Faust was planned as a super-production to further that aim by winning both critical and popular acclaim. Most of Germany’s top directors, technicians, and actors already worked for UFA so the company was able to assemble the kind of talent such an important national project needed.

To emphasise the film’s artistic merit, UFA asked Gerhart Roehrig, their country’s foremost poet, to compose the intertitles, which you can see on disc one of this special edition (the domestic German version).

Faust is a German legend and as with most legends, even those of a supernatural nature, it has some basis in fact. The real Doctor Faust seems to have been a wandering scholar and conjuror who went through Germany at the start of the sixteenth century claiming to cure the sick and practice magic. He must have been a pretty good conjuror because there were soon rumours that he was empowered by the devil. These rumours were circulated in so-called ‘Faust books’ and somewhere along the line the artful quack was transmuted into a noble old scientist who had sold his soul to the devil only because he believed it would enable him to alleviate the suffering of the plague victims, and also enjoy some of the pleasures of youth he had neglected the first time round.

That interpretation of the story has been immortalised in various works of art, notably the tragedies of Christopher Marlowe, at the end of the sixteenth century, and Goethe, at the start of the eighteenth, and also a masterly opera by the French composer, Charles Gounod, in the nineteenth.

F.W. Murnau’s 1926 film draws on all of these but is a highly individual work. Its place as the definitive screen version of the Faust legend remains unchallenged after more than three-quarters of a century.

UFA wanted an international cast. For the title role they chose Gösta Ekman, a notable Swedish actor. He was still in his thirties and so is equally convincing in the rejuvenated state in which he spends most of the film. Ekman’s other films were rarely seen outside of his native land. One exception was Intermezzo (Gustaf Molander, 1936) in which he played Ingrid Bergman’s guilt-ridden lover, but he lost that role to Leslie Howard when the film was remade, again with Bergman, in America.

The supernatural elements circulating the legend of Faust were what inevitably attracted the cinema’s pioneers. After all, they had just laid their hands on a form of magic which enabled them to outdo the opera’s cardboard sets and hidden trapdoors.

Even before the end of the nineteenth century, when cinematography was still only a few months old, one-reel versions of the Faust story had been made by Georges Méliès and the Lumiere Brothers in France and George Albert Smith in Britain. Edwin S. Porter, the American director of The Great Train Robbery came out with two versions of Faust, first in 1900 and later in 1909. At least a dozen of these primitive versions were made by numerous directors before the first full-length feature appeared in the early 1920s.

There were also variations on the theme, for example in the first of the three versions of The Student of Prague that the Danish director Stellan Rye made in Germany in 1913. In that story, what the devil offered was not youth, which the victim already had, but wealth. What he took as security was the student’s reflection in the mirror.

Another spin-off was Don Juan and Faust (Marcel L’Herbier, 1922). This was an original tale about a meeting between two eponymous characters. L’Herbier was an author who turned to the cinema after the war and made a few avant-garde films before dwindling into a director of strictly commercial projects. In 1925, a rival German film company announced that it had commissioned Ludwig Berger, director of the Cinderella film The Lost Shoe, to film the Faust legend with Conrad Veidt, sinister occupant of Doctor Caligari’s cabinet, as Mephistopheles. It never happened.

American studios were generally reluctant to put money into pure fantasies, although the great D.W. Griffith directed an updated version of Faust under the title, Sorrows of Satan (1926). In this production (incidentally shot in the same year as Murnau’s Faust) the pantomime devils of the primitive films were replaced by a suave, immaculately dressed Adolphe Menjou.

There is no such reticence in Murnau’s interpretation. Here is German folklore in its pristine state: a visual symphony of wind, flames, and smoke, conceived with the artistry that German film-makers had developed, quite remarkably, amid the chaos and uncertainty of the years immediately following their country’s defeat in World War One. A highly stylised vision certainly, but done with sufficient conviction to make the legend seem – well – almost believable.

In 1926, there were no computers to create startling effects of the kind now routinely seen in Hollywood blockbusters and on our television screens. Nevertheless the effects conjured up by Murnau and his collaborators are still impressive, even if they were achieved in ways that now seem extremely crude, and that often made life decidedly uncomfortable for the actors.

While filming the advent of the terrible plague that shakes Faust’s faith in both himself and God, Emil Jannings had to stand for several hours on a metal grid above a model of the town while his cloak was blown aloft by powerful electric fans and clouds of soot were pumped out from beneath his feet. Jannings, it was reported, was not amused and nor were the technicians. Only Murnau, who eventually got the shot he wanted, seemed unperturbed by the dirt and discomfort. He simply discarded his blackened overall and mildly rebuked the grumblers by saying, “If it’s too much for you, don’t bother to come.�

To establish the diabolical speed with which Mephistopheles’ plague engulfs this medieval town, many directors would have filmed hordes of frenzied extras swarming through a massive set. They might even have tried to copy the breathtaking montage of shots recently used by the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein to record panic on the steps of Odessa in his 1925 film, The Battleship Potemkin. Murnau does neither. He gives us a series of carefully composed shots more symbolic of disaster than explicit.

The town centre was never built as a complete set: individual sections of it were put up and pulled down again as soon as the required shots had been taken. This piecemeal method was used in other parts of the production. Murnau and his collaborators favoured it because it helped them to get the exact camera angles and lighting effects they were after. There is, however, remarkable cohesion in the discrete sets and we are left in no doubt that this is a real town whose inhabitants are dying in large numbers.

Some of the sets were built on a slant, forcing the extras to move in certain ways and even creating a little genuine panic among them once the action got under way.

The absence of camera movement is noticeable. Murnau and his cameraman seem to have avoided it for fear that it would disturb the careful composition and lighting of each scene.

The extras making up the crowds are well-chosen and play their roles with much greater conviction than is usually seen in British and American films of the same period.

In Carl Hoffmann Murnau had an unusually talented cameraman. Hoffmann was a technician as well as an artist, having started his career as the director of a photographic laboratory. The ‘dance of death’ sequence is a showcase for Hoffmann’s skill in producing macabre images from sets that bear the stamp of Murnau’s ‘artistic elimination’ – his firm belief that art consisted of elimination. Never, surely, has the moral collapse of a population been brought to life so effectively, yet so economically. In Faust, more than in any of his other films, elimination is applied to the environments in which action takes place, rather than to the action itself. Murnau believed that because a medieval legend presented so many opportunities to produce stunning images, there was some danger that those images would overwhelm the thoughts and emotions of the characters. In fact, on this occasion the visual planning actually began with Robert Herlth’s costume designs. Murnau was sure that these would have considerable influence on the way characters were portrayed, as well as on set design.

Murnau, according to those who worked with him, was quite fanatical in his determination to achieve the results he had visualised at the planning stage. This meant that during filming, working conditions in the studio were often uncomfortable and sometimes downright dangerous. In Faust, many of the sets are suffused with an almost invisible mist. To generate this, Murnau got some of the studio workers to burn strips of unwanted nitrate film and waft the fumes towards the action that was being photographed.

Things almost got out of hand when they were filming the sequence in which Faust burns his beloved books of learning because they have given him no support in his attempts to help the dying townspeople. It took large quantities of scrap film to produce the flames he was after. Miraculously, no-one was injured. But what the company’s insurers would have made of it is another matter. It probably explains Murnau’s insistence that during the filming the studio was to be closed to everyone – including his boss, Erich Pommer – not directly involved in the production.

Once again, Murnau was fortunate in having the services of two of the German film industry’s finest designers. Walter Röhrig, one-time painter of theatrical scenery, came to films in 1918 and achieved instant fame by helping to produce bizarre cubist sets for Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920), spearhead of the expressionist movement. During the next sixteen years he worked alongside Herlth on numerous productions, including Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and, more significantly, Murnau’s Der letzte Mann and Tartuffe. Herlth was more modest about his achievements, but it was he who did the sketches for both the costumes and sets for Faust. Both men stayed in Germany when the exodus to Hollywood began, and rather sadly went on to design sets for run-of-the-mill talkies that dominated the studios’ output once the Nazis had taken over.

Modern cinemagoers may be surprised that the materialisation of a discreetly veiled lady is thought to be sufficient to awaken Faust’s dormant libido, but this is 1926, and even in continental cinemas it is rare to see any kind of nudity on the screen. When Faust was released in America a small censorship cut seems to have prevented the apparition from approaching the camera too closely.

_Faust_’s script presented Hoffmann and the designers with many challenges. Faust’s command “Take me to her!� for example. How were they to transport Faust and Mephistopheles to the Duchess of Parma’s palace? Silent film-makers usually relied on intertitles to move characters around in time or place. Murnau wanted something that would bridge the gap between grim scenes and sexual adventure. A magic flight, no less.

To get them airborne, Faust and Mephistopheles were filmed against a black background while the camera was hauled away from them on an uneven surface. This shot was then superimposed on a static shot of the broken window.

It is soon followed by an in-flight shot produced by the travelling-matte process – an optical printing technique not often used in the twenties. An area of the cloud background corresponding to a separate shot of the two characters was blanked off, then the shot of the characters was printed into it rather like fitting a jigsaw piece into place.

The real challenge was that Murnau was determined that the flight should be seen through the eyes of Faust and Mephistopheles. Hoffmann at first experimented with a little cart on which he mounted a camera and pulled it past a model landscape over what was described at the time as a plaster switchback. But the resulting shots were shaky and blurred, worse in every way than those filmed by George Méliès some twenty years previously for his little fantasy films.

Hoffmann was so discouraged by this that he wanted to hand in his notice, according to Lotte Eisner, whose researches have thrown much light onto Murnau’s production methods.

A solution was found by chance. Out in the street one day, Hoffmann saw a car being unloaded from a very low-slung truck. He promptly built a camera dolly using the same engineering principle as the truck. This was then used to film a much bigger panoramic landscape. The model, incorporating mountains, rivers, waterfalls, forests and stately buildings, was based on a painting by one of Germany’s foremost artists. It was housed in a specially built shed some thirty metres long and twenty metres wide, thus enabling the experimental work to be done without holding up the studio filming.

Although the journey from one end of the landscape to the other was photographed to a single take, Murnau cuts in live action shots of Faust and Mephistopheles on the latter’s cloak, and also shots of strange birds, using animated models.

Lotte Eisner reports that when Murnau was allowed to see the final result he was so delighted that he promptly regaled his collaborators with champagne and even partook of it himself, although a health problem had forced him to be a teetotaller.

Today Faust and Mephistopheles would have been transported through a non-existent landscape conjured up by a graphics-imaging technique. But one wonders whether the journey would still be as exhilarating as the one created long ago in a shed at the UFA studios.

The Duchess of Parma is played by Hannah Ralph, most likely to be remembered by silent-movie enthusiasts as the fiery Queen Brunhilde in Fritz Lang’s epic production of Siegfried. Her role was clearly planned to be much bigger, since UFA’s records show that she had been booked for a full week’s shooting in September 1925. Murnau apparently had second thoughts about this part of the story, presumably fearing that it might produce an imbalance in the film if he were to give away to the temptations that such colourful material presented.

It has to be admitted here that the script is the least successful element of Faust. For that, the scenarist Hans Kyser, a minor poet who later turned to film direction, cannot be held wholly responsible, even though he lacked the experience and vision of Carl Mayer, Murnau’s most notable writer. The truth is that several people had a hand in it.

Ludwig Berger is known to have produced a script for the Faust he never made. Kyser probably had access to this and is likely to have drawn quite heavily from it. Finally, there is no doubt that Kyser’s draft was substantially reworked by Murnau, who eliminated some scenes, including a devil’s party on Walpurgisnacht, and expanded others.

At this distance from the production period it is impossible to say what was actually cut from the Duchess of Parma episode. What remains are two virtually self-contained sequences, both extremely effective in terms of set-design, acting, and photography. Murnau makes no great effort to link them or to show how they came about. Why, for instance, is Faust transformed into an Eastern potentate with a herd of elephants? Why does Mephistopheles go to such lengths in order to abduct the Duchess when one shot suggests that only a spot of hypnotism was needed to secure her compliance?

When UFA came to cast the role of Gretchen it initially aimed very high indeed. Its first choice was one of Hollywood’s great ladies, Lillian Gish, who had parted from her mentor D. W. Griffith and was now under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Gish combined a waif-like appearance with formidable acting ability. She also had a strong international reputation, which would obviously support the company’s marketing plan for Faust.

It very nearly came off. Gish actually travelled to Berlin but never went before the cameras. What scuppered the negotiations at the very last moment was her insistence on being photographed by the top American cameraman, Charles Rosher. Murnau refused to give up Hoffmann. Forced to act quickly, UFA went to the other extreme and gave the role to a girl who had never acted in a film before. Her name was Camilla Horn.

Horn was recruited almost by accident. While Murnau was directing Tartuffe the previous year she had been briefly employed to provide a close-up of attactive female legs that the star of the film, Lil Dagover, either wouldn’t or couldn’t. Though Horn’s legs were unlikely to get much exposure in Faust, Murnau recalled her air of almost childlike innocence, and decided that as long as his Gretchen looked the part he would be able to instill in her the necessary acting ability.

Since Horn had no film experience and very little stage experience it was a brave, even rash, decision. Would Lillian Gish, a famous star with an international following, have made a better Gretchen than the inexperienced Camilla Horn? Probably not.

A curious feature of the abortive attempt to engage her is that she had been offered the role of Gretchen two years earlier and had turned it down. That offer had come from D. W. Griffith, who was then planning to make his own film of Faust. This was soon after the relative failure of his experimental sound film Dream Street, and Gish had severe misgivings. She did some research and found that no rendering of the Faust legend had ever been a financial success in America. When she expressed her fears to Griffith he abandoned the project and went on to cast her in Orphans of the Storm, generally reckoned to be his last great film.

It is not at all clear why Murnau’s Faust tempted her and Griffith’s didn’t. Was it because Gish wanted to strengthen her image as a serious actress and thought that a German Faust would carry more prestige than an American one? Did she see Murnau as a progressive director, especially after the critical response to Der letzte Mann, whereas even in 1921 Griffith seemed unable to move beyond the techniques he had pioneered during the previous decade? Again, we shall never know, but it is probably significant that in her autobiography The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, Gish makes no mention of the UFA episode.

It has to be conceded that Faust did not receive unqualified praise, either on its release in October 1926, or subsequently. “The metaphysical conflict between good and evil is thoroughly vulgarised,� declared America’s National Board of Review magazine – perhaps reflecting the critic’s disappointment that a German production had not fully redressed the vulgarisation of so many literary classics by his country’s studios.

Ernest Lindgren, one-time curator of Britain’s National Film Archive, subsequently put it more harshly: “The metaphysical conflict between good and evil was reduced to a sentimental love story,� he sniffed.

Siegfried Kracauer says much the same thing in From Caligari to Hitler, his authoritative study of the German cinema’s reflection of social and political developments in that country: “Neither the rollercoaster nor Gerhard Hauptman’s titles could compensate for the futility of a film which misrepresented, even ignored, all significant motifs in its subject-matter.�

If everyone held those views we wouldn’t be watching this fully restored version of the film today. Perhaps the great strengths of Murnau’s Faust, in particular its compelling images, are more readily appreciated today when television screens and cut-down cinema screens are crammed with so much attraction.

Although Murnau was still in his thirties when he made Faust he was already ranked as one of his country’s foremost directors, the equal of men like Fritz Lang, G. W. Pabst, and Ernst Lubitsch. In her biography, published in the sixities, Lotte Eisner uncompromisingly calls Murnau the greatest film director the Germans had ever known. “For him�, she writes, “work was a kind of intoxication. He was fascinated and gripped by the actual processes, like a scientist performing an experiment in a laboratory or a surgeon during a complicated operation.�

Edgar G. Ulmer, as assistant cameraman on Faust, put it more simply: “Murnau had a camera instead of a head,� he told everyone.

It is sometimes said that Murnau’s reputation owes much to the skills of his collaborators – Mayer, Wagner, Hoffmann, and so on. That is certainly true, but it is equally true that those men did much of their finest work under Murnau’s direction.

His own very detailed scripts prove beyond any doubt that he was the innovator of many of the best things in his films. His collaborators used their skills to deliver what Murnau had so clearly visualised before sets were built or cameras turned.

Frank Hansen, one of his assistants at Fox, has given us the following account of Murnau’s total involvement: “Murnau was everywhere and did everything when he was making a film… He used to live each part, experiment with every possibility of the plot, draw up a mental picture of the sets, and perfect every detail of the whole with the greatest care. He was his own designer, his own artistic director, even his own studio manager.� The Faust legend has, inevitably, a tragic ending. Clearly there is no excuse for Faust to renounce his pact with the devil. Marlowe and Goethe accepted this. Even Gounod’s opera has Faust dragged off to hell by the furies while the angels are saving Gretchen’s soul, and that is what happened in Hans Kyser’s orignal script. Maybe UFA thought that a happier ending would enhance the film’s prospects abroad? Maybe Murnau’s own sentimental streak took over? Whatever the reason, the story now has a final twist – in heaven!

Today, Murnau’s Faust is an important legacy of a film-maker to whom the gods gave great gifts but took them back before he had done all that he could have done with them.