Faust (1926)

Interesting facts

Faust – A German Folktale is a 1926 silent fantasy film, produced by Ufa, directed by F. W. Murnau, starring Gösta Ekman as Faust, Emil Jannings as Mephisto, Camilla Horn as Gretchen/Marguerite, Frida Richard as her mother, Wilhelm Dieterle as her brother, and Yvette Guilbert as Marthe Schwerdtlein, her aunt. Murnau's film draws on older traditions of the legendary tale of Faust as well as on Goethe's classic 1808 version. Ufa wanted Ludwig Berger to direct Faust, as Murnau was engaged with Variety; Murnau pressured the producer and, backed by Jannings, eventually persuaded Erich Pommer to let him direct the film.

Production, release history and restoration

Murnau's Faust was the most technically elaborate and expensive production undertaken by Ufa until it was surpassed by Metropolis the following year. Filming took six months, at a cost of 2 million ℛ︁ℳ︁ (only half was recovered at the box office). According to film historians, Faust seriously affected studio shooting and special effects techniques. Murnau uses two cameras, both filming multiple shots; many scenes were filmed time and again.

The task of writing the intertitles was originally assigned to Hans Kyser, a German novelist and playwright who had moved into screenwriting. He decided to combine various lines from the original folk tale, Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Goethe's Faust, Part 1, as well as providing some of his own.

The film received a pre-release showing with Hauptmann's intertitles at the Ufa-Pavillon am Nollendorfplatz on 26 August 1926. Unfortunately, Ufa's directors felt that Hauptmann's titles were even worse: Ufa informed Hauptmann just a week before the premiere of "unexpected difficulties", and in the end Faust opened with Kyser's intertitles at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo on 14 October 1926.

There were several versions created of Faust, several of them prepared by Murnau himself. The versions are quite different from one another. Some scenes have variants on pace, others have actors with different costumes and some use different camera angles. For example, a scene with a bear was shot with both a person in costume and an actual bear. In some versions, the bear simply stands there. In one version, it actually strikes an actor.

Overall, five versions of Faust are known to exist out of the over thirty copies found across the globe: a German original version (of which the only surviving copy is in the Danish Film Institute), a French version, a late German version which exists in two copies, a bilingual version for Europe prepared by Ufa and a version prepared in July, 1926 by Murnau himself, for release in the U.S. market by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

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