Critics reviews

Though Murnau was hardly the first director to realize the potential of cinema, he was one of the first filmmakers to see the format completely outside its relationship to previous art forms. The director uses the same kind of Expressionist sets that defined German cinema of the 1920s, but where earlier films deliberately called attention to Expressionism's two-dimensional artificiality as reflections of characters' tormented psyches, Faust emphasizes three-dimensional depth.

It's an astonishing directorial feat: a silent version of the central work of German literature. Coming in at under two hours, it's also a severe condensation of the plot of Goethe's poem. It also features drastic, dramatic transformations of the material, as if using the story as a basis for a mere screenplay. Yet Murnau is after something altogether different and more daring: a demonstration of the power of cinema to deliver visual poetry on the order of Goethe's language.

The imagery in the first half of the film is stunning: skeleton horsemen hovering in the mist, Mephisto spreading his wings over an entire village, an acrobat dying of plague mid-act, Faust's Moses-esque haircut and facial hair. But it is not until the second half of the film, when Faust's insatiable thirst for pleasure leads him to try to corrupt an innocent peasant girl (a plot lifted from Goethe's version) that the film finds its tragic focus.

The last film that Murnau made before his fateful relocation from Germany to Hollywood, Faust is a towering work of expressionism from its first frames. The director's Nosferatu (1922) might contain more momentous stand-alone images and The Last Laugh (1924), the film that encouraged William Fox to give him his studio contract, his most poignant storytelling, but to me Faust is the most sustained work of pictorial daring he made in his home country.