Made four years after Nosferatu, F. W. Murnau’s retelling of the Faust legend is — visually and metaphorically — a similarly striking battle between darkness and light, as God and Mephisto gamble for a man’s soul.
There are odd sections to this, which coul be though to belie the tragic nature of Goethe's play.
The dated romance and bawdy humour of the ‘Heimat’ section are at odds with the brooding power of the beginning and end, but capture the distinctively Germanic folksy roots of the myth.