Faust

Plot

Murnau’s epic adaptation of Goethe’s tragedy stands with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis among the supreme achievements of German silent cinema. Gösta Ekman plays the alchemist who, his faith shaken in a time of plague, is offered the gift of healing and eternal youth… in exchange for his soul.

About Faust

Faust – A German Folktale (German: Faust – Eine deutsche Volkssage) 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. Faust was Murnau's last German film, and directly afterward he moved to the United States under contract to William Fox to direct Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927); when the film premiered in the Ufa-Palast am Zoo in Berlin, Murnau was already shooting in Hollywood. Faust has been praised for its special effects and is regarded as an example of German expressionist film.

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