Carl Mayer wrote the script nothing less than a work of poetry. The film follows his words painstakingly. Unbelievable how he rushes through passages, pressing, breathless, with just two indications. Wonderful how he knows at other times when to pause, easy, almost persistent, as when the lights of cars reflect on the rain-soaked asphalt of the big city streets, or when the sea churns or the pale sun rises how he repeats passionately again and again throughout the story: 'Dear spectator, this belongs in the film, it is part of the storyline.' Or how he invents elegant flourishes like the scene with the wounded foot of the woman who is supposedly a farmer and one can feel the dainty air of creativity. Or when he lets the woman confess to her husband that she is in love with another man: three words, then she bows over his hand nothing more. All these moments are unforgettable, as simple and inexplicable as life itself, as casual and tirelessly convincing as fate."
According to Lotte Eisner, Henri Langlois discovered the original nitrate negative of the film, which since 1945 was believed to be lost, at the Staatliches Filmarchiv der DDR (the state film archive of the German Democratic Republic), and had a new print struck. However, the negative was incomplete: there were no titles present and reel 3 was missing in its entirety. The film was shown in this mutilated form throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The new digital restoration by the Munich Filmmuseum draws directly on the original camera negative, now held at the Bundesarchiv, as well as on a print from Gosfilmofond and Murnau's complete shooting script. By studying these materials intensively and comparing them with existing contemporary reviews from newspapers and magazines, slight corrections could be made to the editing as well as to the frequency, position, and wording of the intertitles. The colour tints and the font of the intertitles were reconstructed following the conventions of the time. Historian David Bordwell has rhapsodized about the experience of seeing the new restoration: "The Munich Filmmuseum's team has created one of the most beautiful editions of a silent film I've ever seen. You look at these shots and realize that most versions of silent films are deeply unfaithful to what early audiences saw. In those days, the camera negative was usually the printing negative, so what was recorded got onto the screen. The new Munich restoration allows you to see everything in the frame, with a marvelous translucence and density of detail. Forget High Frame Rate: This is hypnotic, immersive cinema."
Stefan Drössler
