All losses are restored” wrote Shakespeare in Sonnet 30, and while we can only wish that were true in terms of film survival, it remains remarkable how often titles long considered lost suddenly turn up out of the blue. Ein Sommernachtstraum, shot in 1924 and released in 1925, is one such film discussed (when mentioned at all) with cautious uncertainty in literature on Weimar cinema and Shakespeare adaptations. Contemporary reviews varied wildly, hindering scholars’ assessment of where to place it in the history of German film between the wars, yet the presence of so many major industry figures was tantalizing, from director Hans Neumann, cinematographer Guido Seeber, and designer Ernő Metzner, to actors Werner Krauss, Hans Albers, and even the great ballerina Tamara Geva. The fortuitous discovery in 2010 of an American-release print in Oregon, buried under a cellar floor, enabled the UCLA Film and Television Archive to make a hybrid reconstruction incorporating fragments from German archives, casting new light on this idiosyncratic charmer and its stubborn resistance to easy categorization.
In cinematic terms, A Midsummer Night’s Dream remains inextricably linked to the great impresario of the German stage, Max Reinhardt, whose 1905 Berlin theater production made him an overnight celebrity. His association with the play continued for decades, through his much-lauded New York staging in November 1927 and on to the 1935 Warner Bros. film in which he aimed to convey his thirty-year involvement with Shakespeare’s comic masterpiece. Reinhardt’s influence on early 20th century productions of the play is impossible to ignore, and it’s no accident that the first German film version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (believed lost) was released in 1913, the same year as a famed revival of Reinhardt’s production.
Neither can it be mere chance that so many people involved in the 1925 film version had close ties to the impresario. Further research is needed to pinpoint whether director Hans Neumann directly fit within Reinhardt’s circle, but the film’s cowriter, Hans Behrendt, studied with Reinhardt in 1911, while actors Werner Krauss, Hans Albers, Valeska Gert, and others all went through Reinhardt’s school. Yet it’s remarkable how fast and loose Neumann and Behrendt play with Shakespeare’s original while sticking close to the spirit of the work.
For starters, there’s the language: Neumann and Behrendt wanted to loosen up the Bard’s prose and remove the intimidation factor often associated with “high art.” To that end they hired the poet and playwright Klabund (pseudonym of Alfred Henschke) to write intertitles that good-naturedly toy with pastiche, especially in the early scenes, concocting lines in colloquial German addressed directly to the viewer that win the audience over to the coming hijinks. They must have been gratified by the assessment of the Berlin correspondent for the British trade paper, The Bioscope: “Although it is ‘costume stuff,’ it is an entirely modern film, full of grotesque humour and rather witty and up-to-date features.”
Neumann’s experience as a producer wouldn’t have made him the obvious choice for this kind of adaptation, as the projects he shepherded the year before Ein Sommernachtstraum were the rather heavy-going though innovative costume dramas Sanssouci (1923) and I.N.R.I. (1923), the latter through his newly-formed production company Neumann-Film-Produktion, which that same year also produced the Expressionist touchstone Raskolnikow. Yet digging further back in his career we find him directing Aladin und die Wunderlampe (1918), another lost film impossible to judge now, but the kind of fantasy story with parallels to Shakespeare’s feel for the wonderous. This type of imaginative fantasizing was especially present in the work of production and costume designer Ernő Metzner, whose first screen credit, for Ernst Lubitsch’s delicious Sumurun (1920), was an adaptation of Max Reinhardt’s famed pantomime.
Ein Sommernachtstraum opens with an extensive non-Shakespearean tongue-in-cheek prologue of Hippolyta and her Amazon warriors attacking Theseus in his Athenian stronghold and, while almost nothing survives from these scenes, we get a hint of what they looked like thanks to UCLA’s montage of surviving stills and production shots. In his largely favorable review, the critic of the Austrian newspaper Reichspost appeared to not want to admit he enjoyed the silliness: “In the prelude, the freedom with which the poetry is handled goes a bit too far, the travestied battle scenes between Theseus and the Amazon army seem too cartoonish, but in general, the tone of the high-spirited play is well taken….”
“High-spirited” is the right adjective, as the whole film delights in the sylvan mayhem of Puck, Bottom, Titania, and all the denizens of the enchanted forest (shot at the vast Staaken Studios just outside Berlin). Composed in lively scenes that swiftly follow one another, the film relies on audience familiarity with the play and its characters, whose exuberant frolics are contrasted with the more staid sequences of the court of Athens (and, yes, Hans Albers looks especially fetching in his short Grecian tunic). Werner Krauss makes a memorable Bottom, especially toward the end in the Pyramus and Thisbe scene, and influential performer Valeska Gert was an ideal choice for Puck, relishing the role’s license for over-the-top mugging and playfulness. In contrast, Tamara Geva, at just eighteen years old and already the wife of George Balanchine, projects a haunting gravitas as Oberon. Credited only as “Tamara” in this, her film debut, the renowned dancer was on the cusp of her international career.
The film’s most notable achievement, however, is its visuals. Cinematographer Guido Seeber, who also shot the 1913 version, made significant use of double-exposure in the enchanted forest scenes, creating painterly yet cinematic tableaux that no amount of stage-bound special effects could ever replicate. This is combined with Metzner’s appropriation of 19th century fairy paintings by artists such as Léon Frédéric, John Anster Fitzgerald, and Joseph Noël Paton, whose evocation of that era’s vogue for fairy subjects in general and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in particular is clearly reflected in the film’s mise-en-scène and costumes. More groundbreaking was Neumann’s choice for the musical accompaniment, selecting composer Hans May to write a score that unexpectedly shifts from classically inspired themes to thoroughly modern jazz tunes. Variety’s Berlin correspondent singled out the score for special praise: “Almost the best part of the evening is the music arranged and composed by Hans May and played by Eric Borchard’s American jazz band, strengthened by a few string instruments. It marks a real advance in scores for accompanying comedy pictures. At one moment Wagner is being seriously interpreted and the next the latest from ‘Tin Pan Alley.’ Often the music secured an outright laugh and applause for itself alone.”
German critics also focused on the music. “The best thing about the film is the really excellent music,” wrote the reviewer for Kinematograph, “which is full of witty ideas and brings a whole series of scenes to humorous prominence.” The writer praised the film but was convinced it would flop in the sticks, where less sophisticated audiences, he claimed, wouldn’t be able to appreciate its mischievous jumble of references: “For the theater owner in the provinces the film is almost useless, because in Kyritz or in Buxtehude one cannot presume knowledge of Greek history or of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and because jokes showing the city gate of Thebes as the Brandenburg Gate are not understood in large parts of the German Empire.”
In the English-speaking world, the reviews were more uneven. Mordaunt Hall in the New York Times praised the special effects but wrote, “the result is rather disappointing after one has seen Max Reinhardt’s magnificent stage production of the Shakespearean fantasy, for despite the camera’s magic possibilities, this is something that needs sound and color.” More curious still was the film’s British release, where it was given the dreadful title Wood Love. Oswell Blakeston (pseudonym of Henry Joseph Hasslacher), a rising voice in the film world, fell back on the novice critic’s conviction that snideness conveys cleverness, writing a peculiar review for the avant-garde journal Close Up that’s even less euphonious than the UK distribution title: “there are things in this picture more ineluctably Rabelaisian than I have ever discovered in the most boisterous German comedy.” The U.S. distributor removed all the modern flourishes of Klabund’s intertitles, replacing them with pure Shakespeare—UCLA happily went back and translated the original German into English, to preserve Neumann’s intentions—but Blakeston’s review makes it seem that the UK release was closer to the German. More research is needed, but while the surviving material is at least twenty minutes shorter than what was seen in Berlin in 1925, we can be grateful to finally have the opportunity of appreciating this unique adaptation.
Presented at SFSFF 2023 with live musical accompaniment by the Sascha Jacobsen Quartet (Sascha Jacobsen, Seth Asamow, Michele Walther, and Daniel Riera)