Faust: Eine deutsche Volkssage

Due to the success of F.W. Murnau's previous film, Der letzte Mann (1924), the studio promised him an unlimited budget with which to make this film.

There were several versions created of Faust, several of them prepared by Murnau himself. The versions are quite different from one another. Some scenes have variants on pace, others have actors with different costumes and some use different camera angles. For example, a scene with a bear was shot with both a person in costume and an actual bear. In some versions, the bear simply stands there. In one version, it actually strikes an actor. Overall, five versions of Faust are known to exist out of the over thirty copies found across the globe: a German original version (of which the only surviving copy is in the Danish Film Institute), a French version, a late German version which exists in two copies, a bilingual version for Europe prepared by Ufa, and a version prepared by Murnau himself for MGM and the US market (July 1926).

Edited into Histoire(s) du cinéma: Fatale beauté (1994)