FW Murnau banned producers from his sets and executives from his rushes, and died at 42 before sound cinema could fully claim him. The mystery that surrounded his methods was not affectation — it was operational. He understood that the less people knew about how the images were made, the more the images could do. Faust, his final German film and the most expensive production Ufa had ever attempted, is the apex of that philosophy: a film so technically audacious that its crew kept a scrapbook of their own secrets, pressed into the pages of the film's own prop Bible. That scrapbook is now a book. The Faust Bible: The Making of FW Murnau's Masterpiece, published by Mubi Editions, is both a facsimile of a century-old object and a critical document of collaborative filmmaking. Art directors Robert Herlth and Walter Röhrig pulled the prop Bible from the fire used in the shoot, pasted designs, stills, and behind-the-scenes photographs across its pages, and presented it to Murnau as an end-of-production gift. He left it in his Berlin flat when he emigrated to Hollywood. He never came back for it. What followed is the kind of archival story that makes film history feel like detective fiction. Murnau's brother stored his belongings in Berlin basements — basements that flooded, then survived the Blitz, then were quietly dispersed. Film scholar Lotte Eisner searched for the Bible through the 1950s and found nothing. The book resurfaced in the 1960s when a German curator named Engelbert von Mallinckrodt told Henri Langlois at the Cinémathèque Française that he had bought Murnau's photo albums — including the Bible — from a restaurateur with film industry connections named Rolf Conscienze. Then Mallinckrodt vanished. His flatmate kept the book wrapped in brown paper on top of a cupboard for decades. Eisner spent her entire career searching for it. She died in 1983 without ever seeing it. The Cinémathèque Française finally acquired it in 2017. Conservator Laurent Mannoni and his team restored it — water damage smoothed, a few scuffs remaining, the metal crucifix and corner pieces pried off by some unknown opportunist along the way. The object inside is exactly as extraordinary as the provenance suggests: sketches for individual scenes arranged opposite matching production stills, detailed diagrams of special effects, playful collages of cast and crew, and the legendarily tall Murnau hunched over, coaching Emil Jannings on how to leer malevolently as Mephistopheles. The technical revelations are genuine. The Weltflug sequence — Mephistopheles flying Faust through the sky on his cloak, the world lurching below — is one of the most celebrated shots in silent cinema. The Bible contains the actual diagrams that explain how they did it: a low wooden trolley moving along a plaster ramp, an idea Herlth and Röhrig had after watching a truck being unloaded in the street. The facsimile edition reprints these diagrams on gatefold pages. The entfesselte Kamera (unchained camera) technique, which Murnau and cinematographer Carl Hoffmann developed from Karl Freund's work on The Last Laugh (1924), is made legible through the side-by-side arrangement of Herlth's sketches and the finished shots. Albrecht Dürer's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse woodcut, which directly influenced the film's opening scene, ghosts through the compositions. What the book ultimately documents is the question that surrounded Murnau throughout his career: how much of the genius belonged to him, and how much to his crew? Herlth's account is fond and precise — Murnau was cheerful, ambitious, relentlessly demanding that every stroke of the designer's pen be faithfully rendered on screen. "Each day on the set was a fresh opportunity to surpass ourselves in inventiveness and ingenuity," Herlth wrote. That's not the testimony of someone resentful of credit. It's the testimony of someone who understood that the director's obsession created the conditions for everyone else's best work. The book is published by Mubi Editions on 17 October, timed to the film's centenary. Faust itself streams on Mubi from 14 October, with live-scored centenary screenings in Paris on 17 October, Munich on 25 October, and Los Angeles on 1 November. The timing is right. This is a film that rewards being seen rather than merely referenced, and a book that deserves to be held rather than merely cited.
