The Devil in the Details: 100 Years Later, FW Murnau's Faust Notebook Reveals the Secrets of His Silent Masterpiece

A collection of rediscovered designs and on-set photographs finally uncovers the secrets of one of early cinema's most gifted and least-known pioneers. His peers loved to say he 'had a camera instead of a head.' The director of stunning films such as the vampire tale Nosferatu (1922) and the marital romance Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) died in 1931 at the age of 42.

F W Murnau was one of the greatest silent filmmakers who had a rare genius for creating beautiful images on screen. His peers liked to say that he "had a camera instead of a head". The director of such stunning films as Nosferatu (1922) and The Marriage Romance of Sunrise: The Song of Two Men (1927) died aged 42 in 1931, meaning his career barely reached the talkie era. However, Murnau's vast collection of silent photographs included some beautiful and often haunting classics in which he wandered his camera through shifting landscapes of shadow and light, probing the depths of the human soul. Nowhere more so than in his Faust tour, released 100 years ago this month, based on Goethe's play about a deal with the devil. And the making of Faust is chronicled in a stunning new book that's both a document of the production of this classic film and an artifact of sorts.

Faust was Murnau's last German film before he left for Hollywood, and at the time it was the most expensive and complex film Ufa had ever produced. The film is an adaptation of Goethe's tragedy about the scholar Faust (played by Swedish actor Gusta Ekman) who sells his soul to the devil, represented by the black-clad demon Mephistopheles (German star Emil Janning). A commercial failure at the time of its release, Faust is now hailed as one of the greats. French New Wave director Eric Roemer, a fan of Murnau, wrote his doctoral thesis on this film. The biblical Faust shows how Murnau and his team achieved some great shots and special effects in this film, but it's also a more sophisticated portrayal of a filmmaking artifact that survives against all odds to reveal its secrets.

Film researcher and archivist Lotte Eisner came to Berlin in the 1950s in search of Murnau's archives, but found no sign of the Bible. It was in the 1960s that a German curator of the academy in the city, Engelbert von Mallinckrodt, told Henri Langlois at the French Cinematheque that he had bought some of Morneau's photo albums for a small sum from a restaurateur named Rolf Consisen, who had connections to the film industry. It turns out that the albums also include the Bible – although no one knows how it ended up on Conscienze. Then, to deepen the mystery, Mallinckrodt disappeared and his housemate became the book's guardian for decades: the book was wrapped in brown paper and sat on top of a cupboard. Eisner searched for Faust's Bible all his life but never saw it. He died in 1983.

The book is now in the storage of France's Cinematheque, which bought it in 2017, and there it remains, a reminder of the once-disputed collaborative nature of Murnau's methods. I went to see it this summer, and on the right scale, it's a gloriously unusual notebook. Restored by Cinema Heritage Director Laurent Manoni and his team, this book looks good for a 100-year-old abandoned prop. The water damage has been repaired, leaving only a few scratches and shadows that the ingenious theft of the metal cross and corner pieces have separated from the leather.

Every day on the set was a new opportunity to surpass oneself in genius

Inside, art director Robert Herlth arranged sketches for individual scenes against matching stills from the film. Flipping through these sacred pages, you can see how the compositions of figures and objects by designers known as "film architects"—forced perspectives, contrasting juxtapositions of light and dark, sweeping shadows, steam, and flames—are recreated by Murnau and his talented cinematographer, Carl Hoffman. The director encouraged his designer to draw not only the spaces but also the actors, creating something closer to a storyboard image than a set design.

"The plan became the equivalent of a contract," Herleth later wrote. [Murnau] insisted that every stroke of the pen must be executed faithfully. Not only did this mean building the sets as planned, but Murnau and Hoffman made extensive adjustments to the lighting to create the velvety shadows the director required. Hoffman then directed these settings with bold, fluid camera movements in a technique called entfesselte Kamera (unchained camera), invented by cinematographer Karl Freund while working with Murnau on The Last Laugh (1924). Murnau was not short of visual sources. He had a strong interest in the occult, and his background was in art history. Albrecht Dürer's woodblock print of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had a direct influence on the opening scene of the film.

Herleth recalls the experience of working with Murnau as pleasant, if challenging, as the director was cheerful but always ambitious to create shots and camera effects that had not been achieved before. The crew spent long days and nights discussing and testing new ideas. "Every day on set was a new opportunity to surpass myself in creativity and ingenuity," he said.

As more biblical reviews, chiaroscuro sketches and stills give way to playful collages, images of the cast and crew having fun on set, the legendary Murnau hunched over and teaching Jennings how to snark maliciously. And there are pages that talk about this limitless technical genius. One of the most famous moments of the film is the Weltflug (Flight Around the World) sequence, in which Mephistopheles sends Faust flying through the sky with his cape and the world below them. The Bible preserves diagrams that explain how they achieved this strange flight simulation. The secret was a low wooden cart that ran along a plaster ramp, an idea Herleth and Roerig came up with when they saw a truck unloading on the street.

The facsimile version reprints the Weltflug diagrams on Gitfeld pages so you can study the century-old secrets of film technique at your leisure. It also comprehensively reprints all the biblical images with descriptions, enlargements, and quotations from the script written in allegorical, almost poetic prose. There are also additional articles and drawings from the Cinematheque archive.

We may never fully understand the workings of Murnau's mysterious "camera head" and his collaboration with his team. But this fascinating souvenir brings us closer.

The Faust Bible: The Making of FW Murnau's Masterpiece was published by Mubi Editions on October 17. Faust airs on Mobi from October 14, with live centenary shows in Paris on October 17, Munich on October 25 and Los Angeles on November 1