(….) Have you ever seen Murnau’s Der Brennende Acker in black and white? Well then, forget it! The oil well in the devil’s field, in Murnau’s film, burns in a deep red colour, not in black and white. Under the familiar name of the title a different film is waiting for you.
After Nosferatu, another film by Murnau can now be seen in its original colour version……
Thanks to the collaboration of the Cineteca Italiana, the Bundesarchiv finally received the original material of the only existing copy of Murnau’s film and was able to start the work of restoring it, first making a colour internegative. Fortunately the original censor’s approval from February 28th 1922 was found with the text of all the intertitles. With this as a base, the Münchner Filmmuseum undertook to reconstruct the intertitles and the inserts (the pages of the newspaper, the letters, the will, etc.) with the collaboration of the Pfenninger laboratory. Lacking a model for the exact graphic form of the intertitles, other German films from the beginning of the 1920’s were referred to in order to arrive at a dark green for the intertitles and a clear yellow as the colour for the inserts. The copy from Milan was 2346 meters long including the Italian intertitles. Now the colour negative measures 2325 meters including the insertion of the new intertitles. Moreover, an important scene that had been missing was inserted after being found on a safety copy at the Gosfilmofond of Moscow. (Helmut Regel, Bundesarchiv)