After 100 Years, Murnau's Faust Scrapbook Reveals Its Secrets

A new book publishes previously unseen photographs and drawings from the set of FW Murnau's Faust, released 100 years ago this month, finally pulling back the curtain on one of silent cinema's most secretive directors.

The Faust Bible: The Making of FW Murnau's Masterpiece is both a document of the production and, in a sense, an artefact from it. It offers a rare look at how Murnau actually built his images — something he spent his career hiding.

Murnau died in 1931 at 42, his career barely reaching the talkie era. In that short run he directed vampire tale Nosferatu (1922) and marital romance Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), films in which, as critics have long noted, he sent his camera roaming through changing vistas of shadow and light. His peers joked that he "had a camera instead of a head."

Why did the secrets stay hidden so long?

Murnau ran his sets like vaults. He banned producers from the set and refused to let executives watch his rushes (the raw daily footage). With a few exceptions, he prohibited on-set photography entirely, protecting the mechanics of his camerawork and special effects from view.

That secrecy had a cost. The mystique left room for speculation about who deserved credit — Murnau himself, or the talented crew working around him. Early collaborator Edgar G Ulmer called him "a great purist who worked under a sort of hypnosis."

What does the new book change?

The unseen images from the Faust shoot give the first sustained evidence of the collaborative way the film was made. For a director whose methods were deliberately obscured, that's not a footnote — it's the mechanism of his artistry finally becoming visible.

Faust, based on Goethe's play about a deal with the devil, remains Murnau's tour de force. A century on, the scrapbook tells us the images were built by more hands than one — and that we can now study exactly how.