The film adaptation of “Hamlet,” produced by Asta Nielsen herself, was based on a publication by the American literary scholar Edward Payson Vining, which questions the construction of Hamlet’s gender identity and completely reverses the prince’s gender. No original negative of the film, which was shot with two cameras, survives today. An English-language export version was deposited and preserved at MoMA in New York in 1935. Distribution copies of this American version were available in archival collections—in Germany at the DFF. Through a purchase in the fall of 2005, an original theatrical print of the German premiere version, which had been believed lost, entered our archive. The rediscovered original German version differs significantly from the American one, not only due to the use of different camera angles but also because of a completely distinct edit. The fundamentally different impact of the two versions is intensified by the expressive power of the color design in the German original. We present this restored version accompanied by the magnificent Uwe Oberg on the piano.

Germany 1921, 115 minutes, FSK: unrated