Faust review – FW Murnau’s silent masterpiece is a devilishly dazzling vision

The centenary of FW Murnau’s silent fantasy-melodrama from 1926 is the occasion to ponder this mysterious film, taken from Goethe’s 19th-century depiction of the alchemist and natural philosopher who sells his soul to the devil but, in a very high-minded climax of German romanticism, is redeemed by love. (Not love of God precisely, but love of a good woman; the word “Liebe” finally appears at the centre of Murnau’s radiating vision of concentric circles conjured by the heavens, which annul his debt to the Evil One.) It is therefore very different from Christopher Marlowe’s scarier and more unforgiving account of Doctor Faustus.

Murnau’s Faust is (obviously) concerned with and animated by evil, and there are echoes of his Nosferatu, made four years previously. In this film, Faust, having struck his bargain on a provisional 24-hour basis with Mephisto, finds that he is scared of a crucifix, like a vampire. It is also very much a film of Weimar Germany with its mad energy and streaks of garish satire and black comedy; the book-burning scene in which Faust immolates all his necromancy volumes, along with the Bible, is one which resonated with later events. (Perhaps it indirectly inspired Klaus Mann’s novel Mephisto, later to be filmed by István Szabó.)

Gösta Ekman plays Faust, ancient and grey-haired like an Old Testament prophet (or like God himself), and the veteran stager Emil Jannings (who, two years later, made Hollywood history by winning the first best actor Oscar) is the grinning, gurning Mephisto who makes a celestial wager that he can corrupt a decent man. This, of course, is Faust, who is wretched at the plague and devastation everywhere about and despairingly throws his learned books in the fire, but is then captivated by a charred page which tells of how to sell your soul at a distant crossroads. (Did this start the tradition carried on by bluesman Robert Johnson, who reputedly did something similar?)

Mephisto offers him whatever he wants, including a “bacchanal” or orgy, and gives him an opportunity to dally with the Duchess of Parma, “the most beautiful woman in Italy”. But Faust ultimately wants to go back to his home village as the young man he once was, and there falls in love with comely innocent Gretchen (Camilla Horn), while Mephisto, that capering lord of misrule, has knockabout high-jinks with Gretchen’s blowsy Aunt Marthe (Yvette Guilbert). It is to lead to horror, with Gretchen sentenced to be burned at the stake for murdering the child she conceived with Faust, who is in turn wanted for killing Gretchen’s outraged brother Valentin (William Dieterle, himself to become an Oscar-winning Hollywood director) in a duel.

The ambition, scale and drive of Faust are obvious: there is some wonderful model work for the landscape and cityscape that Faust and Mephisto look down on, flying above. And the still, painterly image of Mephisto as a vast evil angel, brooding over the city like a gigantic cloud, shrouding it in his black wings, is inspired.