A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Long considered lost, this German adaptation of Shakespeare’s romantic farce was able to be reconstructed when a nitrate print of the North American version was discovered buried under a cellar floor in Oregon in 2010. Shakespeare’s four bewitched lovers populate this fantastic production along with fairies, gnomes, mermaids, and animals of the forest.

Source Information:
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Ein Sommernachtstraum) was restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive and The Film Foundation with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. Laboratory services by Roundabout Entertainment, Inc. and Fotokem. This hybrid restoration reflects choices by the UCLA Film & Television Archive to restore the film to the approximate spirit of the original release. It utilizes the surviving North American version and the previously preserved fragments from the Bundesarchiv The North American release featureed two key changes from the original German release. First, it did not have the film’s lengthy opening sequence. Production stills were used to fill in shots from this lost preluce. Second, the North American release featured English intertitles that attempted to closely follow Shakespeare’s text and were a departure from the German intertitles. Adapting from text in German censorship records, this restoration primarily reflects the German intertitles (translated to English), augmented with a few American titles for continuity.

Special thanks to Oliver Hanley, Henry Esau, Kathleen Grimpe, Bundesarchiv, Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum, Deutsche Kinemathek, Filmarchiv Austria, Filmmuseum Potsdam, Austrian Film Museum