Metropolis

1927

If you are unaware of the 1927 silent masterwork, Metropolis, then I give up. In fact, I’m sure I would be appalled amazed at how many of you have never seen the movie. Or (dare I imagine it?) who have never seen any silent movie. (Give me a second to faint and revive…ok…moving on.)

Even if I assume that you have seen Metropolis, I would not be able to guarantee which version you had seen. After pouring massive amounts of energy, time, and resources into a true movie spectacle, director Fritz Lang found his movie recut and bowdlerized by the people who make these dumb decisions. (It’s their money, so don’t they want it to all show on screen? Don’t they trust the artists they’re bankrolling? LOLOLOL!) With the desiccated corpse they left behind, it’s frankly amazing that the film ever did garner such fame. Thankfully, almost 100 years after it was made, a complete cut of this landmark film was discovered in Buenos Aires. (How a major German film print ended up in Argentina might be a question worth overlooking.)

I first saw Metropolis at The Staircase Theatre in Hamilton, Ontario (where I’ll be performing “The Wreck of the Deutschland” in a couple of months). My experience was very positive, and I talked the film up for years. Lately, I watched a cheap DVD version and couldn’t believe that I had liked this film at all. Now, finally having seen the 2010 restoration, the movie has again impressed me (although not quite as much as it did the first time).

The restoration does a number of things. It puts back the entire plot and all subplots. It pairs the film with the original score (which would have been performed live in the 1920s). It does wonders with what scenes were not too damaged to restore, providing a dazzlingly clear and beautiful visual experience of all the special effects and surging crowds and robot doppelgängers (we’ll get there). And all of this allows the audacity of Lang’s technical and artistic achievements to shine. Camera shots way ahead of their time mingle with startlingly complex visual collages and gorgeous (expansive and expensive) FX wizardry.

If you have yet to watch this seminal classic, make sure that you pick up the 2010 restoration (“The Complete Metropolis” from Kino Lorber). What will you like and dislike? I’m sure I can guess.

Pros

• The exciting action sequences, including a mind-boggling flood scene.

• The heaps of Biblical allegory and allusion. Moloch! The Revelation of St. John! The cathedral! Babel! Babylon!

• The similarly abundant social commentary. The French Revolution! The Nazis (yes, in 1927)! The Industrial Revolution! The many Workers Revolts! Mob mentality!

• The proto-steampunk spin on H. G. Wells’s Eloi and Morlocks.

• The grand scale of the whole thing.

Cons

• German Expressionism: the stylized look of this type of film will distract many.

• The “Machine-Man,” who is clearly a machine woman and just as clearly an inspiration for C-3P0 50 years later.

• Brigitte Helm. The poor woman’s acting is long out of vogue, but she had the hefty task of (almost literally) playing the Virgin Mary and the Whore of Babylon (and a gender-confused machine-man). Sadly, her take on both pure innocence and pure evil is to frantically clutch at her chest. It hasn’t aged well.

• Freder Frederson’s effete pancake-makeup Nazi-chic look and the masculine physicality that nowadays is only ever read as “homoerotic.”

• Back to Brigitte to mention her wild dancing and the faces and eyeballs of angry lust it inspires.