Vintage original 3.5 x 5.25 in. "country of origin" German Ross Verlag postcard from the 1920's silent film fantasy drama, FAUST, released in Germany in 1926 by UFA and directed by F.W. Murnau.
 
The image features a beautiful publicity shot of the film's leading lady, the beautiful German born actress Camilla Horn, in costume as "Gretchen," as she strikes a reverent pose that is enhanced by the strong side-lighting. This postcard was boldly signed in black ink by Camilla Horn in, we believe, 1926 (see "Provenance" below). Printed by the renowned Ross-Verlag company of Berlin, Germany, it is unused in very fine condition.
 
Provenance: We purchased a collection of two albums of vintage original German postcards from a rare book dealer at an antiquarian book fair in Pasadena, California. Approximately half of the postcards were signed by the respective personalities and the ones that were dated by the actors are all dated "1926." We were informed by the dealer that these photographs came from a film collector in Germany who acquired the postcards at the time they were issued and then had them signed by the respective actors when he met them in person. 
 
*"Faust – A German Folktale (German: Faust – Eine deutsche Volkssage) is a 1926 silent film produced by Ufa, directed by F. W. Murnau, starring Gösta Ekman as Faust, Emil Jannings as Mephisto, Camilla Horn as Gretchen/Marguerite, Frida Richard as her mother, Wilhelm Dieterle as her brother and Yvette Guilbert as Marthe Schwerdtlein, her aunt. Murnau's film draws on older traditions of the legendary tale of Faust as well as on Goethe's classic 1808 version.
 
Ufa wanted Ludwig Berger to direct Faust, as Murnau was engaged with Variety; Murnau pressured the producer and, backed by Jannings, eventually persuaded Erich Pommerto let him direct the film. Faust was Murnau's last German film, and directly afterward he moved to the US under contract to William Fox to direct Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927); when the film premiered in the Ufa-Palast am Zoo in Berlin, Murnau was already shooting in Hollywood. It has been praised for its special effects and is regarded as an example of German Expressionist film.
 
Murnau's Faust was the most technically elaborate and expensive production undertaken by Ufa until it was surpassed by Metropolis the following year. Filming took six months, at a cost of 2 million ℛℳ (only half was recovered at the box office). According to film historians, Faust seriously affected studio shooting and special effects techniques. Murnau uses two cameras, both filming multiple shots; many scenes were filmed time and again. As an example, a short sequence of the contract being written on parchment in fire took an entire day to 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)."
*(source: Wikipedia)
 
Ross Verlag in Berlin was a German publishing house specialized in photographs and photo postcards of artists. The owner of the company was Heinrich Ross (b. 10 August 1870; d. after 1954 as emigrant in the USA).
 
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