In the years of the Weimar Republic, between the Armistice and Hitler, German Expressionism brought a fierce, frightening pictorialism to the German cinema. It was a strange time, tragic yet hopeful, in the shadow of the two deadliest wars in human history. The German cinema seemed to be less a documentary medium than a psychological one, and the cinema seemed to be an inkblot for the public and private anxieties of a nation in turmoil. Political violence, a democracy struggling to survive infancy, the anguish of a million war dead, and economic depression -- all these found a voice in films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Metropolis. The years 1919-1932 were years of the locust in Germany, but they were also years of incredible artistic plenty, as the cinema found a way to speak of the deepest anxieties in the human soul and the body politic. This was truly a time, wrote Lotte Eisner, of the haunted screen.

And no artist was more astute in capturing these torments than F.W. Murnau. In a sustained burst of creativity, he wove a skein of masterpieces of Expressionism: The Lost Castle, Nosferatu, The Last Laugh, Tartuffe, and finally, Faust. Faust is the old story of the devil's bargain, an allegory that can be found in several of Murnau's films. It is an old story because it has such ever-renewing power: we fear that which we most desire, and we know that what we are willing to do to get it can kill something at the very center of our moral selves. But Murnau was not interested in any such moralizing. Instead, his films study the very texture of that bargain, watching the selling of the soul with keen, almost clinical interest.

Faust occurs in the medieval nowhereland that Murnau made his own in Nosferatu and much of Sunrise, a place of ancient, unreasoning fears. (It is Murnau's shadowed and diabolical towns, where superstitions walk the night, that has inspired countless American imitators, from Frankenstein to Sleepy Hollow.) The familiar story of Faust as a plot is flooded in startling visual effects, from the film's prologue, in which letters of fire illuminate the hellish contract, to the freakish flight through the dark heavens on Mephistopheles' cloak. Faust becomes a seer and saviour to his town, and the town becomes a party to his statntic agreement. The sick are cured, but the town seems to grow more huddled, its gables seem steeper, its shadows even darker, as some of Faust's guilt seeps flows silently through the cramped alleys and angled doorways Murnau's mythic place. Finally, there is the reckoning, and Mephistopheles explodes across the screen in what must have been one of the most terrifying moments of the silent screen.

Faust saw Murnau use all the tools of the cinema -- lighting, special effects, costuming, scene design, performance, camera movement -- to craft his portrait of the possession of a man's soul. This is no mere story, but a three-dimensional, almost architectural telling of a fable basic to Western culture. Rhetorical, dialectic, disdaining bourgeois notions of character, Faust is nonetheless as tightly wound and suspenseful a narrative as the cinema could offer, then or now. With Faust, Murnau had reached the very pinnacle of film's possibilities as a plastic art form.

Did Murnau view something in the creative compact as Faustian? After Faust, he was brought to the United States with great fanfare by William Fox, then one of the leading American producers. He was given lavish filmmaking resources beyond even those of the great UFA studios at home in Neubabelsberg, outside of Berlin, to make the stunning Sunrise in 1927, one of the handful of unquestioned masterworks in the history of the cinema. There would be more great work, capped by an unlikely and brilliant collaboration with the documentarian Robert Flaherty, on Tabu, in 1929.

But in the spring of 1931, Murnau would be killed in a freak highway accident in the Southern California sunshine. The rumored circumstances of the accident were so strange and decadent that mourners stayed away from the funeral; only ten friends and colleagues of one of the greatest artists in the history of medium came to bid him farewell.

One of them was Murnau's only competitor in the German cinema, Fritz Lang. At Murnau's coffin, Lang stepped forward and said solemnly, "It is clear that the gods, so often jealous, wished it to be thus."

-- Kevin Hagopian, Penn State University

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The following is taken from a recent Chicago Sun-Times review by Roger Ebert that appeared May 8, 2005:

The greatest master of horror in the silent era was a cheerful man, much loved by his collaborators, even though they might lose consciousness from time to time while enveloped in clouds of steam or surrounded by tongues of flame. F. W. Murnau (1888-1931) made two of the greatest films of the supernatural, Nosferatu (1922) and Faust (1926), both voted among the best horror films of all time on the Internet Movie Database: Faust surprisingly in fourth place, just ahead of The Shining, Jaws and Alien.

Murnau had a bold visual imagination, distinctive even during the era of German Expressionism with its skewed perspectives and twisted rooms and stairs. He painted with light and shadow, sometimes complaining to his loyal cameraman, Carl Hoffmann, that he could see too much -- that all should be obscured except the focus of a scene. Faust, with its supernatural vistas of heaven and hell, is particularly distinctive in the way it uses the whole canvas. Consider the startling early shot of Mephisto, his dark wings obscuring the sky as he hovers above a little village that huddles in the lower right corner. Murnau treated the screen as if it offered a larger space than his contemporaries imagined; long before deep focus, he was creating double-exposures like shots in Faust where a crowd of villagers in the foreground is echoed by faraway crowds in the upper corners.

His screen encompassed great breadth and depth, so that when Mephisto takes Faust on a flight through the sky, we really do seem to see the earth unreeling beneath them: towns and farms, mountains and rivers. Murnau used a model of the landscape, of course; as his art director, Robert Herlth, remembered, "there were pines and larches made of reeds and rushes, glass-wool clouds, cascades, fields of real turf carefully stuck on plaster. When Murnau saw us at work, he bent his great height to help us make our little rocks and trees."

Like all silent-film directors, Murnau was comfortable with special effects that were obviously artificial. The town beneath the wings of the dark angel is clearly a model, and when characters climb a steep street, there is no attempt to make the sharply angled buildings and rooflines behind them seem real. Such effects, paradoxically, can be more effective than more realistic ones; I sometimes feel, in this age of expert CGI, that I am being shown too much -- that technique is pushing aside artistry and imagination. The world of Faust is never intended to define a physical universe, but is a landscape of nightmares. When the elderly Faust is magically converted by Mephisto into a young man, there is a slight awkwardness in the way one image is replaced by another, and oddly enough that's creepier and more striking than a smooth modern morph. Murnau and his contemporaries were inventing their techniques while they were using them. Herlth recalled that while Murnau was filming an opening scene of an archangel enveloped by clouds, the director "was so caught up in the pleasure of doing it that he forgot all about time. The steam had to keep on billowing through the beams of light until the archangel -- Werner Fuetterer -- was so exhausted he could no longer lift his sword. When Murnau realized what had happened, he shook his head and laughed at himself, then gave everyone a break."

Yes, but he was entranced again in the scene where Camilla Horn, playing the beautiful Gretchen, "had to spend hours tied to the stake, with flames leaping round her from 20 lykopodium burners. When she fainted, she was not acting." And the famous Emil Jannings, who played the doorman in Murnau's Last Laugh, and is Mephisto here, stood for hours above three powerful fans which blew clouds of soot to make his cloak billow 12 feet above his head. All of these facts I take from the book Murnau, by the invaluable critic Lotte Eisner, who never met Murnau but talked to his collaborators after his death in 1931, at 43, in a traffic accident….

Some of the early scenes remind us of Nosferatu in their evocation of a terrified population. Faust (played young and old by Gosta Ekman) is seen as a bearded scholar, surrounded by his books, until the plague strikes the land. From his window, he sees hooded figures carrying corpses to a charnel-pit; he is called to the bedside of a dying woman, but all of his wisdom and art are helpless to save her, and after praying to God, he is tempted to invoke Mephisto. There is true horror as he burns his books and stands within a ring of fire to call down the devil; when he finds he has the power to cure dying villagers, he thinks he has made a good bargain, but soon his power intoxicates him….

Silent films like this deal more in broad concepts than in the subtleties of personality. Like Greek myth and comic books, they present characters clearly defined by their strengths and weaknesses. There's no small talk….

It's worth mentioning that William Dieterle, who plays Gretchen's brother Valentin, fled Hitler, came to Hollywood and had a long career as a director, distinguished by "The Devil and Daniel Webster" (1941), itself a version of the Faust legend.

Murnau died before he was able to express himself fully in the sound era, where there is no telling what he might have accomplished; soon after he moved to America, his Sunrise (1927) shared the first Academy Award for best picture. In death, he is surrounded by legend, not least in E. Elias Merhige's strange film Shadow of the Vampire (2000), where John Malkovich plays the director as a man whose star, Max Schreck (Willem Dafoe), is in fact a vampire. Murnau promises Schreck that he can eat the leading lady as his payment, but the vampire grows hungry and devours the cinematographer, and in desperation, Murnau muses, "I do not think we need the writer." The movie is not, by the way, a comedy, but feeds on the real horror that Murnau created. He was an original, and no one else ever made films that looked like his. They are strange and haunted; you reflect that if such satanic dealings were possible, they would probably look very much like this.

The following is taken from a review by Gary Johnson that appears on the webzine, ImagesJournal.com:

After the great success of The Last Laugh (1924), Murnau earned increased creative freedom on his next productions for UFA. Significantly, the studio also provided Murnau with the monetary backing to do almost anything he wanted. Murnau responded by choosing to film one of the classic German stories, Faust. But Murnau had more in mind than just filming Goethe's classic tale. Working with screenwriter Hans Kyser, Murnau cobbled together the legend of Faust using bits of Marlowe and Gounod and German folk legends.

Precisely because of this approach to Faust, contemporary German audiences reacted in outrage. It wasn't the Faust they expected. One of the great historians of German silent cinema Siegried Kracauer said, Faust "misrepresented, if not ignored, all significant motives inherent in its subject matter. The metaphysical conflict between good and evil was thoroughly vulgarized." However, Lotte Eisner wrote (in The Haunted Screen), the film "starts with the most remarkable and poignant image the German chiaroscuro ever created. The chaotic destiny of the opening shot, the light drawing in the mist, the rays beaming through the opaque air, the visual fugue which diapasons round the heavens, are breathtaking." Both writers were onto something. In Murnau's Faust the struggle between the devil and Faust never becomes particularly complex or profound, but at the same time, Murnau imbues the proceedings with truly astonishing imagery. French New Wave director Eric Rohmer wrote a book-length study of Faust where he argued that "Murnau was able to mobilize all those forces which guaranteed him complete control of the film's space. Every formal element--the faces and bodies of the actors, objects, landscape, and such natural phenomena as snow, light, fire, and clouds--have been created or recreated with an exact knowledge of their visual effect. Never has a film left so little to chance."….