Devil in the detail: 100 years on, FW Murnau’s Faust scrapbook reveals the secrets of his silent masterpiece

A rediscovered collection of drawings and on-set photos finally reveals the intricate on-set mysteries of one of early cinema’s most gifted pioneers FW Murnau was one of the greatest of all silent film-makers, with a rare genius for making beautiful images on screen. His peers liked to say he “had a camera instead of a head”. The director of such stunning films as vampire tale Nosferatu (1922) and marital romance Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) died at the age of 42 in 1931, meaning that his career barely scraped into the talkie era.

Still, Murnau’s tremendous run of silent pictures included some beautiful, often disturbing classics, in which he sent his camera roaming through changing vistas of shadows and light, and plumbed the depths of the human soul. Nowhere more so than in his tour-de-force Faust, released 100 years ago this month, based on Goethe’s play about a deal with the devil. And the making of Faust is depicted in a stunning new book, which is both a document of, and in a sense an artefact from, the production of this classic film. Murnau was also one of the most mysterious of directors: secretive about his methods, with an intense devotion to his work. Early collaborator Edgar G Ulmer called him “a great purist who worked under a sort of…