‘UFA Film Nights’

Based on themes from Goethe and Christopher Marlowe, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau tells 'Faust' as a mediaeval 'German folk tale'. After a wager between the demon Mephisto and the Archangel Gabriel, the devil tempts the scholar Faust, promising him eternal youth and all the world's riches in exchange for his soul. Faust agrees to the pact, falls in love with Gretchen and becomes partly to blame for her death, after her newborn child freezes to death and she is sentenced to be burnt at the stake for murdering the baby. Overcome with remorse and love, Faust climbs up alongside Gretchen to be burnt at the stake with her.
 

Conceived as a project for the international market, this Ufa production provided everything that was expected of a trademark German film of the time: big name actors like Emil Jannings, 22-year-old newcomer Camilla Horn and the attractive Gösta Ekman. The latest special effects and numerous visual allusions to works of Western art from Caravaggio, Caspar David Friedrich, Holbein to Vermeer. With some good old German crown glass window romanticism thrown in. This mixture met the expectations of producer Erich Pommer, and was intended to lure the educated classes worldwide to the cinema, a group which had not yet really been exploited by the mass medium. With his last film shot in Germany, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau reached the zenith of his artistic expression to date, before continuing his career the same year under different conditions in Hollywood.