Murnau's Faust (1926): light, darkness and the pact with the devil
Emil Jannings as Mephisto, the demon's wings over the town and the sources of the myth: an analysis of the Faust F. W. Murnau made for UFA in 1926.
The myth of Doctor Faustus, the scholar who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and pleasure, had travelled through the centuries in chapbooks, puppet theatres and the great works of Marlowe and Goethe. In 1926 it arrived in one of the most ambitious films of German silent cinema: Faust – Eine deutsche Volkssage, directed by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau for UFA, the largest production company in Weimar Germany.
The sources: chapbook, Marlowe and Goethe
The subtitle, a German folk legend, makes the intention clear. Hans Kyser's screenplay does not follow Goethe's Faust alone but also draws on the Historia von D. Johann Fausten, the book printed in Frankfurt in 1587 by Johann Spies, on Christopher Marlowe's tragedy and on the tradition of puppet plays. The film opens with a wager between the archangel and the demon over a man's soul, a motif Goethe had taken from the Book of Job for his Prologue in Heaven.
Faust is played by the Swedish actor Gösta Ekman, who moves from the old scholar bent over his books to the young man rejuvenated by the pact. Mephisto is Emil Jannings, one of the great stars of the age, who makes him a figure both terrifying and grotesque, cynical and mocking, close to the comic devil of the medieval mystery plays. Gretchen is entrusted to the young Camilla Horn.
The plague and the demon's wings
The most remembered scene shows a gigantic Mephisto spreading his dark wings over a medieval town, and from that cloak the plague spreads. To achieve it Murnau and the cinematographer Carl Hoffmann used models, artificial fog, superimpositions and careful lighting. The image takes up an ancient iconography: evil as a shadow that descends from above and envelops the whole community.
Equally famous is the conjuring of the demon at a crossroads, at night, inside a magic circle drawn on the ground. Murnau does not show a rite to be imitated but builds an atmosphere of smoke, flames and figures emerging from the dark. It is the cinematic version of a scene that German popular theatre had staged for centuries with tricks of trapdoors and fire.
A work about light
Film historians have often read Murnau's Faust as a meditation on light. The scenes are built on strong contrasts, with beams crossing the fog and faces emerging from darkness as in Rembrandt's paintings. The struggle between good and evil becomes a struggle between brightness and shadow, and the ending entrusts love with the power to overcome damnation, in line with Goethe's interpretation.
It was Murnau's last German film before he left for Hollywood, where he would make Sunrise in 1927. The Faust of 1926 remains a bridge between different traditions: the sixteenth-century chapbook, the Elizabethan drama, the Romantic poem and the new language of images. In it the legend of the German magician perhaps finds its most complete visual form, and the figure of Mephisto the mask of irony and menace that later cinema would long imitate.