A grand cinematic salto mortale archetypically told (one woman – two men); no more need be said. The other story – a detective tale of the restoration of a canonical silent film – begins in the early 1960s at the National Film Archive in Prague. A stored duplicate copy of Varieté with Czech intertitles became the source for the first version distributed by the Murnau Foundation in 1976, allowing a new generation of viewers to discover the film. Only after entering the new century did it become possible to achieve an authentic re-creation of Dupont’s film with the aid of copies (no longer merely duplicates) from the archives in Vienna, Washington, New York, and Rome. The search for the original negative was the trickiest. To get past US censors of the day, the movie was shortened. As soon as the license expired and Germany’s Ufa Studios were once again in possession of the material, they attempted to return it to its original form but without complete success. Nevertheless, thanks to comparisons between all extent sources, the 2015 Berlinale gave us a Varieté that comes closer to the premiere version of November 1925 than anything audiences have seen in past decades.