Sommernachtstraum, Ein

Alternative title: Midsummer Night’s Dream, A Wood Love Heiteres Fastnachtsspeil, Ein
Synopsis: Feature film which appears to have combined great charm and ribaldry. Ball, summarising contemporary reviews, writes: ‘Theseus was shown at the telephone, Amazons and Athenians moved into battle to the accompaniment of Eric Borchards’s Original-Jazzband. Klabund’s titles were not bridges between sequences, but in their smart-alec, sometimes amusing, sometimes banal, way directed the spectators to unconventional interpretations an became the centre for the whole film. sequences. The court of Athens, man, Shakespeare himself were ridiculed. The tone was mocking, ironical, parodistic’.

The film was believed to be lost but nitrate fragments were found in the Deutsches Historisches Museum in the 1990s and may now be in the Bundesarchiv (unconfirmed 3/2013).
Country: Germany
Medium: Film
Technical information: Black-and-white / Silent
Year of release: 1925
Recording date: 10 Mar 1925
Duration: 92 mins; 8,298 feet

Director

Hans Neumann

Producer

Hans Neumann

Cinematographer

Guido Seeber; Reimar Kuntze

Screenplay

Hans Neumann

Music

Hans May

Production Design

Ernö Metzner

Costume

Ernö Metzner

Cast

General: The intertitles were commissioned to Klabund (Alfred Henschke) a poet, novelist, historian and journalist well known at the time for his association with Expressionism.

The music for the jazz score which accompanied the film was composed by Hans May.

Tamara Geva, playing Oberon, was a Russian ballet dancer.
Stills: The Museum of Modern Art, New York City, has acquired stills from the film.
Reviews: Ball, Robert Hamilton. Shakespeare on Silent Film: A Strange Eventful History. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1968 (pp297-99, 378).
http://bioscopic.wordpress.com/2008/01/15/ein-sommernachtstraum/ (accessed 1/2008).

Shakespeare, "Sommernachtstraum, Ein". https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/shakespeare/search/index.php/title/av68847 (Accessed 26 Nov 2024)

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