STEPHEN'S MOVIE GUIDE

Metropolis (1927)  

At last, we come to the movie I’ve been introducing for so long… one of the great science fiction movies, ravaged by age, and yet its iconic moments and images form the root of art, movies, even architecture that followed. There would be no Bladerunner, without Metropolis.

To get into the spirit of this movie which is now going on 98 years old, it’s vital to understand the history behind it, the mood of German cinema of that time, and a little bit about the restoration itself which brings us the version you are about to watch.

At the end of WW I, the collapse of the Weimar republic revitalized artistic energy in Germany. Expressionism, which is identified by wildly non-realistic artistic and geometrically absurd mise-en-scenes, was taking root in arts and literature, then theatre, architecture, and eventually cinema.

The use of exaggerated style and symbolism was designed to add mood and layers of meaning to a movie, normally layers which delved into the darker elements of life, with death a common theme. This means to the modern viewer that watching movies from this era requires an artistic eye, rather than simply an appreciation for reactionary mass entertainment.

The German cinema flourished, with 400 to 500 movies a year being produced, thanks to rampant inflation of the German Mark. This meant that it was cheap and easy to export German films (after all, language was not a barrier, in silent movies), and hard to import relatively expensive foreign (i.e. American) movies. The series of movies starting with The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (see still, above) and then Murnau’s “Nosferatu”, had given German films prestige.. and it was into this background that a Viennese director started making movies, a certain Fritz Lang.

By the time Fritz Lang and his wife Thea von Harbou, wrote Metropolis in 1924, the wave of expressionism was coming to an end, and the Mark had stabilized. To survive, the German studio (UFA, the largest studio in Europe) signed an agreement with Paramount Pictures. This deal, which was to be catastrophic for Metropolis, was to offer Paramount 50% of the film output of the studio, in return for distribution rights on Paramount films, and a 17 Million Mark loan. So, Fritz Lang embarked on a trip to America to buy some American cameras and gain inspiration from New York, and return to start filming in May 1925. Observe though this important feature of the film – that it heralds the end of one age, the dawn of another – it is the last expressionist film – but the first in so called “New Objectivity”. Regard the opening credits – we see a stylized painting of the city, segueing into stylized models, and then actual documentary footage of machines.. in this one moment, we encapsulate the two different styles.

Making the film was a huge undertaking – 36,000 extras, 1,100 shaved heads, 200,000 costumes… not to mention the technical requirements. Several different types of cameras were required for different types of shots. And the special effects were challenging, with three main techniques being used – stop motion, which required detailed models and painstaking precision and patience (8 days work for ten seconds of film), as well as multiple exposures- where the camera negative was actually rerun in the camera, to achieve multiple images on the screen. And finally, the Shufftan process, which allowed by clever use of mirrors and cut outs in paintings or models, real action to take place in seemingly impossible sets.

Costing over 5 Million Marks to make – the movie only garnered 75,000 marks on its release. An unmitigated disaster for Ufa, which eventually brought the studio down. Movies then were shot with multiple cameras running side by side… one set of negatives would go to America, thanks to the Ufa / Paramount agreement, other negatives to other countries for editing and release there. The negative sent to America was deemed unsuitable, and the movie drastically re-edited, and the very fabric and story changed into something far simpler and more simplistic, a kind of Frankenstein story, by the American playwright Channing Pollack. So, UFA re-edited the movie for German release according to this American model, and the remaining negatives destroyed – silver nitrate film being considered too hazardous a material to store.

The movie was banned in the Soviet Republic, due to its socialist overtones, but there was huge demand to see it, in a country where cinema was being reinvented. Eisenstein himself had visited the set. And so it was somewhat ironic that it was the Soviets who attempted the first reconstruction. When they took Berlin at the end of WW II, they had seized hundreds or thousands of movies. In the early 60’s metropolis was discovered, and in Sweden the original censorship cards found, which helped explain the original intertitles, helping to restore the pieces back together from the butchered American version. However, it was in 80’s that Metropolis really hit the attention of the public, when Giorgo Moroder, purveyor of rock soundtracks, attempted a new reconstruction, this time using additional recently found photos of the missing scenes, colourising the film, and adding a soundtrack including Adam Ant, Freddy Mercury and Pat Benatar, amongst others. This version was about 90 minutes long.

In 2001 the most complete version to that point was meticulously digitally restored, using the latest techniques and all the best elements of negatives and positives that could be found, with the original score for the movie acting as a template for how it should be pieced together. This appeared to be the final word on how Metropolis would look.. However, in 2009, a dupe negative was discovered in an Argentinian museum – this version, finally, had the comeplte version of the film. However, it had been copied from a badly damaged negative, and only on to 19mm film, not 35mm, so much of the quality of the data was lost, and since it was a copy, the damage could not be repaired in the same way. Some digital processing was done, and this lost material has now been integrated with the 2001 restoration along with the original score.