Murnau's Crew Drew Hell Before They Filmed It

The object weighs 12 kilograms and measures 45 by 52 centimetres. It began as a leather-bound Bible, and its metal crucifix and corner fittings are now missing ^[2].

The Bible was a prop in F.W. Murnau's Faust, the German silent film that premiered on October 14, 1926 ^[2]. Once shooting ended, the film's art directors, Robert Herlth and Walter Röhrig, turned it into something else: a scrapbook of designs, film stills and behind-the-scenes photographs, a gift for the director ^[1][2].

The original has belonged to the Cinémathèque Française since 2017 ^[1][2]. What is new is that a wider public can now see it. A book from MUBI Editions, produced with the Cinémathèque, is due on October 17, 2026. It reproduces and comments on the album and ends with a miniature facsimile ^[1][2].

The scrapbook is not a fresh discovery. The Guardian reports it was identified in the 1960s ^[1]. But the hundredth anniversary of the premiere is a good moment to open it, because it shows how a film that lost money in 1926 and is now counted among the great silent films was actually built ^[1].

A gift for a man leaving

Faust was Murnau's last German film before he left for Hollywood ^[1]. He was 42 when he died in 1931 ^[1]. The scrapbook was a farewell present, according to Filmdienst, which calls it a visual diary of 412 images ^[2].

The pictures come from several hands. There are set photographs by Hans Natge, photographs of the designers' drawings, and stills enlarged from the original negative shot by the cinematographer Carl Hoffmann ^[2]. The pages put sketches opposite the film frames they became. Forced perspective, hard contrasts of light and dark, shadow, steam and flame all appear first as pencil and then as image ^[1].

That layout is the whole argument of the album. You do not have to take anyone's word that the film followed the plan. You turn the page and see the plan and the frame side by side.

The frames deserve a second look. They were enlarged from the negative Hoffmann shot, so the images beside the sketches come straight from the film's own camera work ^[2].

The sketch as contract

Herlth later described how strictly this worked. According to the Guardian, he said Murnau insisted that every pen stroke be faithfully rendered. In Herlth's own words:

"The sketch became the equivalent of a contract." ^[1]

It is a revealing sentence from a designer. A drawing in a studio is normally a suggestion, to be argued over and trimmed by schedule and budget. Here it was binding on everyone, and the people who had to keep the promise were the camera and lighting crew.

That is where Hoffmann's work comes in. A drawing of a dark street with a single blade of light across it is only an instruction. Hoffmann had to make the light behave that way on set, and make the camera linger on it.

The Guardian describes the film's camera movement as entfesselte Kamera, the "unchained camera," a technique associated with Karl Freund's work with Murnau on The Last Laugh ^[1]. The camera of this period had stopped being a fixed witness and started to travel, and the album shows the places where it was asked to.

A trolley and a ramp

The most striking pages concern the Weltflug, the flight around the world. The scrapbook preserves diagrams for it ^[1].

The diagrams explain a trick that looks nothing like its result. Herlth and Röhrig used a low wooden trolley moving along a plaster ramp to create the sense of flight ^[1]. On screen, the effect is a world rushing past at speed. Behind the lens, the crew had a small wheeled platform and a sloping plaster surface.

That gap between the effect and the machinery is the best reason to love silent cinema. There was no software to repair a mistake afterwards. The sky, the speed and the dizziness had to exist in front of the lens, built by people with wood and plaster who had worked out in advance what the camera would see.

The album also keeps the steam and the flames, which are the same kind of problem at a smaller scale. Each one had to be arranged, lit and photographed so that it matched a drawing Murnau had already approved ^[1].

Whose hell was it?

The usual picture of Murnau is of a solitary visual genius. The scrapbook complicates it, and I think it improves the picture.

The designs were made by Herlth and Röhrig. The camera was Hoffmann's. The album was assembled by the designers and given to the director, and it is stuffed with the crew's work ^[1][2]. A man who simply imposed his vision on a set would not have been given this. It reads as a gift from collaborators, and it makes their shared authorship visible.

The scrapbook cannot settle every question. It does not tell us, page by page, who made which choice, and the sources do not say how far the book's essays push that argument. But Herlth's remark about the sketch gives a strong hint. Murnau enforced the drawings strictly, and the drawings were not his.

Faust was a commercial flop on release ^[1]. The public of 1926 did not reward the people who drew this hell and lit it, and the album is one place where their work was kept and prized.

A director, on this evidence, was the person who made a team's imagination binding. That is a harder job than it sounds, and it is not a smaller one.

What a basement keeps

The object's own history is a lesson in how fragile such things are. Murnau left the Bible in his Berlin home when he went to Hollywood ^[1][2]. After his death, his brother distributed his belongings among cellars in Berlin ^[1][2].

How the Bible fared between the war and 1961 cannot be reconstructed from what has been reported ^[2].

The Guardian gives one thread. In the 1960s, the curator Engelbert von Mallinckrodt told Henri Langlois, the Cinémathèque's co-founder, that he had bought Murnau photograph albums, the Bible among them, from a restaurateur named Rolf Conscienze. How Conscienze came by them is unknown ^[1].

So a weighty book of a great director's private work passed from a house to some cellars to a restaurateur to a curator, and nobody can say which hands held it in the dark years. The metal crucifix and corner fittings did not survive the trip ^[2]. The original was later restored by Laurent Mannoni, the Cinémathèque's heritage director, and his team ^[1][2]. Nobody should assume a cellar was kind to it.

What survived is the part that matters to film history: the pictures, and the order in which they were pasted.

Where to look next

The film can be seen alongside the album. Faust streams on MUBI from October 14, 2026. Centenary screenings with live scores are scheduled in Paris on October 17, in Munich on October 25 and in Los Angeles on November 1 ^[1].

Murnau died in 1931, long before the verdict on Faust turned from failure to acclaim ^[1]. He never saw the film's reputation reversed, but the album he was given shows what his collaborators thought of the work while it was still new.

The practical advice is to watch the flight sequence first, then open the book, then watch it again. Knowing there is a low wooden trolley on a plaster ramp under that sky does not spoil the illusion. It makes the illusion more impressive.

The book ends with a miniature facsimile of the 12-kilogram original ^[1][2]. The Bible Murnau's designers made for him will, at last, fit in a reader's hand.