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Review
METROPOLIS
Rating: 
Germany. 1927.
Director – Fritz Lang, Screenplay – Fritz Lang & Thea von Harbou, Producer – Erich Pommer, Photography (b&w) – Karl Freund & Gunther Rittau, Visual Effects – Eugen Shuftan, Production Design – Otto Hunte, Erich Kettlehut & Karl Vollbrecht. Production Company – Ufa.
Cast:
Gustav Froelich (Freder), Brigitte Helm (Maria), Alfred Abel (Joh Fredersen), Rudolf Klein-Rogge (Rotwang)
Plot: A vast future city of sixty million people is divided between its proletariat, who slave at the machines in the city’s depths, and the administrators who live in palatial comfort high in the city’s towers. Freder, son of the city’s leader Joh Fredersen, is struck by the beautiful Maria when she leads a delegation of children up into the upper towers from down below. He follows her down to the city depths. Horrified at seeing the state the workers exist in there, Freder implores his father to make changes. But instead his father goes to the scientist Rotwang and gets him to build a robot double of Maria that invokes the workers to rebel and bring the city smashing down.
Metropolis is maybe the most famous silent film ever made. It is certainly the most enduring and one that manages to amaze audiences as much today as it did when it was first screened in 1927. It was the work of Fritz Lang, one of the most visionary of all silent directors. Born in Austria in 1890, Lang was the son of an architect. Expected to follow his father’s footsteps, Lang instead chose to become an artist. After wandering through Asia, Lang returned to serve in World War I, where he rose to the rank of lieutenant and was wounded three times. Following the War, Lang started work at Decla Bioscop film studios, initially as a writer, where he quickly progressed through the ranks to become a director, premiering with the lost The Half-Caste (1919) and then catching attention with the two-part adventure film The Spiders (1919). Lang first broached fantasy subjects with Destiny (1921), a multi-episodic cross-historical drama about an incarnate Death. Lang reached his heights with Dr Mabuse (1922), his classic about a criminal mastermind ruthlessly manipulating the underworld of a decadent Berlin, and the two-part Niebelungen saga Siegfried (1924) and Kriemhild’s Revenge (1924), a colossally scaled interpretation of the Mediaeval myth. But it was with Metropolis that Lang will be forever remembered.
The period from around 1913 and in particular from 1919 to the early 1930s was an unparalleled era of fantastic cinema in Germany. Although there were antecedents, it was the Expressionist classic The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919), also made at Decla Bioscop, that opened the floodgate. The era went onto produce epics like F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and Faust (1926), Paul Leni’s Waxworks (1924) and several versions of Alraune, The Golem and The Student of Prague, among many others. Few other eras of fantastic cinema have produced such epic visions, either architecturally or stylistically.
What strikes most about German fantastic films is almost invariably their sets. They were marvels of architectural fantasy and came built on a colossal scale. Metropolis, for instance, was the most expensive film ever made in the world at the time – costing 7 million marks (which would be around $200 million today). It took the combined resources of two studios and nearly bankrupted them when it received a middling box-office reception. The scale of Metropolis is staggering. Some of the set pieces rank as some of the great images of fantastic cinema – Moloch devouring the workers, Freder working the arms of the clock, the Tower of Babel story, Mecha-Maria’s erotic dance, and especially the sequence where Rotwang brings the robot to life. Lang wields big crowds (some 37,000 extras) into stylised pantomimes. And his gigantic multi-layered sets overwhelm the eye. Part of the reason for the expense of these films was that all the sets would be built in forced perspective – larger up close, smaller further away – to make them seem much bigger than they were. (This is the reason why the camera rarely moves about the room but usually stays in master shot and then cuts to closeups and medium angles – if you change the angle that you look at a forced perspective set from the illusion vanishes). The striking thing about such extravagant fantasies was also the social backdrop against which they were made. Following the War and the establishment of the short-lived Weimar Republic, Germany was thrown into financial chaos by massive War reparations levied by the League of Nations and was virtually ruined by massive overinflation. That somebody in the midst of this could lavish the time and money to make such an extravagant fantasy is remarkable.
It’s reputation aside, Metropolis is a rather lunatic film. The plotting is a naive mishmash, especially when it comes to the politics. It was a function of the times, more than any real comment on the Marxist revolution. This was the era of Germany’s Weimar Republic, which was as naive in its democratic outlook as this film’s thinking. Dialogue is as flowery as the hammy contorted acting – it’s hard to imagine any trade union leader today getting anywhere with an epithet like “The heart must mediate between the hands and the brain” on their placard. All of Metropolis’s effect lies in the visuals, not the story.
Moreover, Metropolis is an oddly schizophrenic film. It is one that seems to stand between two differing visions of Germany that on one side glorifies its mythic Mediaeval past, and on the other stretches towards a vision of a modernist industrial Utopia. This dividing line runs right through German silent fantastic cinema. The Cabinet of Dr Caligari was an exaggerated fantasy that takes place inside the distorted world of a madman and employed the Expressionist stylism of art and theatrical movements – all twisted, angular sets and heavy shadows. By its nature, it was anti-realism, full of exaggerated movements that were intended as outward expressions of inner states of mind. It was the first film to take cinema away from realism and a literalistic depiction of events. And its success gave birth to these huge studio-based spectacles that drew upon the same stylised Expressionism in their design. A substantial number of these films returned to a mythologized historic past and took themselves from Teutonic Mediaeval mythology – Lang’s Niebelungen saga, Murnau’s Faust, Paul Wegener’s Golem films. Many other films of the era such as Nosferatu, Lang’s own Destiny, The Student of Prague (1913, 1926) and The Hands of Orlac (1925) seem shrouded by Gothic superstition and Mediaeval worldviews. If one wants an idea just how strong these Mediaeval notions struck in the German mindset at the time, look nor further than Adolf Hitler’s mystic obsession with the Knights Templar and his deification of the Teutonic heroism of Richard Wagner. Many of these films – Homunculus (1916), the Golem films, the various versions of Alraune – also centre around the Gothic notion of human-like artificial creations that go amok.
Silent German fantastique cinema seems caught between on one hand this backward-looking reverence of mythic heroism and the Gothic Mediaeval worldview, and on the other a drive toward industrial modernity. At the same time as all this was happening, both the Weimar Republic and, following that, Nazi Germany was shucking all remnants of the Kaiser’s empire and becoming a relentlessly modern nation. Many films of the later half of the 1920s and beyond celebrated epic feats of engineering and human triumph – Lang’s Woman in the Moon (1929), F.P.1 Does Not Answer (1932), The Tunnel (1933), Gold (1934). Indeed, you can draw parallel between Lang’s vast city of the future and Nazi architect Albert Speer’s plans for the architectural rebuilding of Berlin as an shining monument of modern industrialism, and indeed between Lang’s crafting of crowds here and the way that Leni Riefenstahl later used the crafting of huge crowds as political propaganda for Hitler in films like The Triumph of the Will (1934) and The Olympiad (1938).
Metropolis seems caught between these two strands of thought – the fearful occlusion of the Mediaeval Gothic and on the other hand the bold, optimism of the New Germany reaching toward marvels of technology. Yet, for all its celebration as a visionary science-fiction film, underneath Metropolis is fearful, Gothic and anti-science in nature. Rotwang is a sorcerer rather than a scientist and even comes with a pentagram above his door, while social progress is seen in terms of lurid images of Biblical enslavement – the machine as Moloch, the building of the Tower of Babel.
Metropolis is certainly confused in terms of its motives and messages. You are not even quite sure what all the Biblical imagery is meant to represent. The Tower of Babel, for example, is traditionally about visionary idolatry; here it becomes a heavy-handed symbol for oppressed workers. It is not clear why Fredersen inspires his own workers to revolt and tear down his own city (although the restored versions give the impression that this was Rotwang subverting Fredersen’s orders out of revenge because Fredersen stole his wife Hel). Indeed, you can debate if Metropolis is as much on the side of the exploited working classes as it would appear to be. Notedly, it is the mad scientist, not the industrialist, who is responsible for the evil and upsetting the balance of labour classes and is the one who is punished for his actions, while the industrialist benevolently restores the status quo. After all, the working class masses seem docile and only move about in a group without any individuality and seem to require the machinations of an evil mirror robot version of the film’s saintly heroine in order to be inspired to revolution – the implication seeming to be that disgruntled workers are only stirred to revolution by malevolent influence. (In other Fritz Lang films such as Dr Mabuse and Spies (1927), people are often seen as weak and easily manipulated by strong dominant leaders). The end is not a resolution so much as it is a restoration of the status quo with promise of more communication. A classical Marxist would almost certainly blame the exploited condition of the workers on the industrialist and merely regard the mad scientist as their lackey. Lang’s Woman in the Moon is a film that is much more forward thinking, less anti-progress. Metropolis rallies against the inhumanity of the Industrial Revolution in sentimental Marxist cliches and is fearful of progress, while Woman in the Moon is a film that celebrates the great vision that built the cities we see here and more. Lang later disliked the sentimental ending and said he didn’t think it worked, although was never clear about his reasons for thinking so.
For all its muddiness of thinking, Metropolis is an astonishing film. It is a visual triumph despite the silliness of the plot and the naivete of its politics. Alfred Abel gives a coldly controlled performance and Brigitte Helm makes an extraordinary change between virginal beatitude and gleeful malice, the latter none more so demonstrated than the nightclub dance scene, daring for its time and still carrying a highly erotic charge today.
Alas, the Metropolis seen on screens today is an incomplete vision. The search for a complete version of Metropolis has become regarded as akin to a quest for the Holy Grail. For the film’s American release in 1927, nearly a quarter of the reels were removed in order to make the film’s approximate 2½ hour running time more palatable for audiences and to eliminate any possible Communist messages. There were varying other alternate cuts made for German and other international releases too. Much of the original missing footage has been irretrievably lost – the scenes at the Yoshiwara nightclub, the backstory about Rotwang’s wife Hel and his resentment over Fredersen stealing her and the explanation of how he builds the robot in her image to destroy the city in revenge. Lang was voluble about the butchering of his vision and once said that “Metropolis no longer exists.” An extensive digital restoration project was conducted by Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung foundation and the German federal film archive Bundesarchiv Filmarchiv beginning in 1998 and premiered in 2001. This is still missing much of the original vision but should be considered the most complete version of the film to date.
And then there was the Giorgio Moroder Metropolis, released in 1984. Moroder, the producer of several of Donna Summer’s disco hits and Top 10 crossovers from films like Flashdance (1983) and Cat People (1982), and an Oscar winning composer with the score for Midnight Express (1978), scoured the world in search of varying prints. Moroder succeeded in tracking down material never before shown, inserting stills where he couldn’t find it and re-released the film. The order of some scenes have been rearranged the way Moroder believes the late Fritz Lang would have wanted them, based on screenwriter Thea Von Harbou’s novelization. Unfortunately, the new material adds up to less than a minute’s worth of time. There are some scenes added where the worker that Freder replaces goes to the Yoshiwara nightclub that are shown only in stills, and some later scenes of the robot Maria enticing men there. There is also a brief scene of Rotwang climbing a pile of vehicle wrecks, blindly thinking Maria is Hel. A few stills are also added of cityscapes and the Garden of Pleasure.
The Moroder version tightens some scenes editorially, particularly by the replacement of intertitle cards by simple subtitles, allowing much slicker editing. (The new subtitles now refer to the automaton as a robot, a term that was not in popular use in 1927). Moroder also adds sound effects and a music score. The sound effects add a great deal – the robot’s unveiling, heralded by the dull clank of its footsteps, or the roar as the crowds suddenly revolt proves startling. There is an effective electronic score – the pop songs aren’t that memorable but work well enough in the context. One other highly impressive effect added is the tinting of footage. The film is still principally in b/w alternated with sepia tone, but some scenes come with beautifully rotoscoped-in bubbling potions, boiling coloured clouds and glowing neon signs. It is a surprisingly effective move and one that for all the sacrilege cried at the time only succeeds in enhancing the film.
Metropolis has often been mentioned as a remake, although nobody has yet tried to do so. However, the Japanese anime Metropolis (2001) loosely reworks the basics and is a dazzling film in its own right. Echoes of Metropolis can be found in science-fiction films everywhere. Mad scientists of the 1930s hold many influences of Metropolis, with the creation of Maria being strongly echoed in the reanimation scenes in Frankenstein (1931). Rotwang also casts his shadow over Peter Sellers’ essayal of the title role in Dr Strangelove or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), while the Maria android clearly influenced C3P0 in Star Wars (1977). The vision of the city of the future was copied and echoed in films such as High Treason (1929), Just Imagine (1930), Blade Runner (1982), Brazil (1982) and Dark City (1998).
Fritz Lang’s other films of genre interest are:– Destiny (1921) wherein Death incarnates two lovers throughout various historical periods; Dr Mabuse, The Gambler (1922) concerning a ruthless criminal mastermind; the two-part Niebelungen saga, Siegfried (1924) and Kriemhild’s Revenge (1924), based on the Teutonic myths; Woman in the Moon (1929), a realistic attempt to portray a Moon landing; M (1931), a thriller concerning the hunt for a child killer; The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933); the afterlife fantasy Liliom (1933); the film noir psychological thriller Secret Beyond the Door (1948); and a further Dr Mabuse sequel The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1960). Last updated: Tuesday, 22 December 2009
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