Metropolis

Last year the tireless folks at Kino on Video released a new version of the Fritz Lang film Metropolis, only eight years after their much-lauded "restored authorized edition" of the same movie. I recently watched my copy again and felt inspired to write up a little something about it for those who might not be familiar with this interesting piece of film history.

Most people are probably dimly aware that Metropolis is a famous science fiction film from the silent era, but not everyone knows its tortuous and larger-than-life story. The film was made in Germany in 1927 and was directed by the great Fritz Lang, who at the time was considered one of the preeminent filmmakers of his country and perhaps the world. Lang had had an international hit with Die Nibelungen three years earlier, and his new project, a film about an impending class war in a futuristic society, was to be one of the most ambitious movies made to date. It was budgeted at 1.5 million marks but ended up costing 5.3 million, and the finished product clocked in at two hours and thirty-three minutes. It featured gargantuan sets, 36,000 extras, and state-of-the-art special effects that frankly still look pretty damn cool.

The movie was given a limited release in Berlin with much celebratory hype, but to everyone's surprise it received only mixed reviews. Panicked that they might not even recoup their production costs, the studio decided that the film might draw a larger audience upon wider release if the running time was trimmed down (the American distributor, Paramount, had already chopped it up for its own audiences), and so they excised more than half an hour from it before distributing it to the rest of Germany and the world. Almost a quarter of the film was cut out and destroyed, and some of the intertitles were also replaced to remove certain overtones that could be interpreted as Communistic (i.e., pro-labor).

In the end Metropolis was a financial disaster, and it came close to bankrupting one of the most powerful and prestigious movie studios outside of Hollywood. The film made an impression on moviegoers, however, and for the remainder of the century slowly degenerating prints of the various truncated versions continued to be screened in revival houses and film schools. I saw it myself, but despite my high regard for Fritz Lang I never thought much of it; it seemed simplistic and naive, and frankly even a little dull; it was as though there just wasn't enough for the mind to grasp onto. To me it was one of life's typical ironies that the director's most dull and pretentious film had somehow become his most famous.

All that was to change. In the late 1980s work began at the F.W. Murnau Foundation/Transit Films to compile the best possible negatives from all the various versions of the film in order to make a restored version; meanwhile, the orginial score and intertitle submission to the German censors were found, allowing the film historians to be able to rehabilitate the story and at least sketch out the missing plot elements. The result that debuted in 2001 was amazing—not only was the picture crisp and bright, but by adding improved intertitles and filling in the gaps in the plot with still photographs and summaries of missing scenes one now at least got a sense of the larger story with more thematic elements and fuller detail.

One might think that story would end there, but fate had one more card to play. It turned out that way back when the film was first released in 1927 an Argentine film distributor had seen the full-length version in Berlin and had acquired a copy of that cut for screening in South America. Afterward this print lay in a vault for forty-odd years until being sloppily transferred to poorer-quality 16 MM film stock for fear that the silver nitrate original would cause a fire. To make a long story short, this print was discovered in 2008, and suddenly now there were materials to reconstruct almost all of Lang's original film.

A remarkable journey! It almost boggles the mind to think that film enthusiasts have literally scoured the earth for pieces of this lost and ruined work, and what was taken apart in 1927 could be pieced back together into some semblance of the original a long lifetime later.

I can say now, too, how wrong I was about Metropolis. It's strange to think that adding footage to a film that I had thought was boring could make it an interesting one, but it's true. The minor characters now finally seem like real individuals, continuity is improved everywhere, and there are completely new settings and sequences that round out the imaginary world and make it whole. Most importantly, the restoration of the film's rhythm has transformed a pencil sketch into a living story that unfolds in its own time.

Now, before I let myself get carried away with praise I must admit that there yet remain core elements that are, shall we say, politically facile, and beyond that the film might be a classic example of what people love to call a "flawed masterpiece." If anything, Metropolis is too big: the crowds, spectacle and melodrama are exhausting, and and when jaw-dropping shots are piled one on top of the other you run the risk of having the jaw drop all the way down into a yawn.

Regardless, this restored Metropolis further entrenches my long-held belief that Fritz Lang was one of the most important directors in film history, perhaps second only to D.W. Griffith in terms of shaping our narrative film language. What's odd about Lang, though, is that it can be hard to put one's finger on precisely what those contributions are. We can marvel at F.W. Murnau's evocative camerawork in The Last Laugh, we can talk about Eisenstein's innvations in editing, but what is it about Fritz Lang's films from the 1920s that makes them feel so darn modern?

I think the answer is twofold, the first part being the director's understanding of kineticism and rhythm (which was all-too-often absent in a medium that had not quite yet shaken itself free of its theater roots), and the second being what you could call "efficient film storytelling." Regarding the latter, there is an old story that Sergei Eisenstein acquired a copy of Lang's Dr. Mabuse Der Spieler and as an exercise took the film apart into its consituent pieces and then put it back together, much in the way that a novice mechanic might take apart a motor and then rebuild it. Even if the story is apocryphal, it still makes a compelling point, which is that Lang's films have the tight precision of a stopwatch, and this is precisely why the editing of Metropolis damaged the story so badly in 1927.

Anyway, all this is a roundabout way of saying that I would strongly recommend that anyone with even a passing interest in the history of film language (or really just anyone who has the guts to try something different) check out Kino on Video's "Complete Metropolis" DVD, which is also available on Netflix. Far from being slow and old-fashioned, viewers might instead be shocked by the speed and strangeness of the film, with its images of rioting crowds, rooftop battles, demonic robots, chases through catacombs, wicked industrialists and the giant specter of death towering over a city cathedral. Forgive the occasional goofiness, take frequent breaks during the nine-way climax, and try to wrap your head around the idea that Metropolis doesn't look like a blockbuster action movie, blockbuster action movies look like Metropolis.

Emir Kusturica Film Festival

In 1997, my then-girlfriend-now-wife and I went to see a three-hour Serbian movie called Underground. We knew almost nothing about it except that it was about Yugoslavia and that it was supposed to be good. We did that sort of thing a lot back in those days. Anyway, when the lights came up afterwards my date said, in a very matter-of-fact way, "that was the best movie I've ever seen." I was pretty close to thinking the same thing as well; the movie had had an epic feel to it that was different from anything I had ever experienced before. I actually felt as though I had lived through decades of history, and, as sappy as it might sound, I was feeling a bit tearful at having to say goodbye to the characters. The director's name was Emir Kusturica, and for a while I went out of my way to look for more of his stuff. I later got to see Black Cat, White Cat at the New York Film Festival, and I was also able to rent a copy of Arizona Dreams, the only film he ever made in America, but neither of these were quite at the same level of Underground even if there was a unique sensibility there that I enjoyed.

Flash forward to a few months ago, when I stumbled across the VHS tape of the movie that I had bought all those years ago. I had only watched it once, maybe twice (as much as I loved it, it’s long and somewhat exhausting) so I figured I probably ought to give it another go before my VCR conked out and all my VHS tapes turned into garbage. Meanwhile it occurred to me that I also ought to take advantage of my Netflix subscription to dig up whatever other films by the director that were available.

So, anyway, I had a modest Emir Kusturica film festival, which was made up of three movies: Do You Remember Dolly Bell? (1981), When Father Was Away on Business (1985) and Underground (1987).

Do You Remember Dolly Bell? is the coming-of-age story of a teenager living in a small village outside of Sarajevo in the 1970s. A local thug asks the boy to hide a young prostitute in the second story of his family's chicken coop, and, as one might expect, the young man falls in love with the girl and must later face the harsh realities associated with her situation. The youth also comes into contact with the political realities of the time; his father is a passionate communist who is yet disaffected with the political regime in Yugoslavia, and so is nursing a wounded idealism perhaps not unlike a young man who has fallen in love with a whore.

Though the film has warmth and charm, it also has an aimless, wandering feel to it. I got the sense watching it that the director was still a bit green at that time and still finding his way as a storyteller. While the movie certainly wasn't bad, I wouldn't recommend it to a casual viewer who didn't have a particular interest in Kusturica or Yugoslavia.

The second film I watched was made four years later, and the improvement in the director's ability to carry the audience along with his story was remarkable. This time the main character was a young boy growing up in the late 1940s or early 1950s. His father makes a casual disparaging remark about a Soviet political cartoon and is sent to a work camp by the local party leader; complicating matters is the fact that the local party leader is the boy’s uncle on his mothers’ side. An even further entanglement is that the uncle had taken an interest in the father’s mistress just before he sent him away. Was it really a idealogical ostracizing, or was it something else? It is a difficult time for all involved, but eventually the political tide turns; Yugoslavia distances itself from Moscow, and the father’s black mark vanishes in a puff of nothing. However, the bitterness of lost time remains.

That may all sound like rather grim fare, but the film is much richer than that, as it is a human story with a political backdrop rather than a political polemic disguised as a human story. There’s warmth and humor, and I felt myself becoming absorbed into the lives of the people as they celebrated their happy moments and found their way through the difficult ones. There were times when I had to concentrate to follow what was going on, and times when I had the suspicion that I was lacking some piece of cultural context that would shed more light on what I was seeing, but regardless I thought it was a fantastic movie. I would recommend it enthusiastically to everyone, although there were a couple of scenes that people with “aggressively modest” sensibilities might find objectionable.

I finished up my mini-festival with a re-viewing of Underground. The story follows a love triangle through more than fifty years of history, from the German invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941 to the terrible Bosnian War of the 1990s. The three main characters are the larger-than-life “Blackie,” his charismatic and conniving best friend Marko, and the beautiful but cowardly actress Natalija. In the first hour of the film we see Marko and Blackie channel their everyday criminal activities into supporting the resistance movement, while at the same time Blackie tries to wrest his mistress Natalija away from an admiring Nazi officer. The adventures are wild and hilarious, with bombs and brawls and prison escapes, and as the film moves on into darker territory these early scenes take on a kind of mythic quality as of some distant golden days of the past. The long middle of the film depicts the cold war in a kind of surreal, symbolic way; the hero Blackie is in hiding in an enormous underground complex while Marko convinces him and his followers that the war is still going on; meanwhile Marko has become a powerful politico under Tito, and he has taken Natalija for himself. The lies and deceit collide when Marko and Natalija must go underground to celebrate the wedding of Blackie’s son, who was an infant when the film started and is now a grown man. When Blackie realizes that he has lost Nataljia, he and his son escape to put an end to World War II once and for all, though twenty years too late. The results are bizarre, hilarious and sad. The end of the film brings us to the present, where the Bosnian war rages. Blackie is a cold-blooded militant who fights for the sake of fighting, while Marko and Nataljia have become profiteering arms dealers who are wanted by the UN as war criminals. It is as though time and sorrow has caused them to become the worst possible versions of themselves. However, this tragic ending is softened by a sweet coda which is one of the most touching scenes I have ever seen on a movie screen.

According to Wikipedia, the movie was originally a miniseries on Serbian television that aired in 1995, and that the directors’ cut of the theatrical version was a whopping 320 minutes. The film was chopped down to almost half that length, and as a result it is at times disjointed; strange ideas will suddenly appear and then be quickly left behind, and the viewer becomes unsure as to how much importance should be attributed to what he is seeing. It is also unquestionably an exhausting film to watch; at times it is almost too frenetic, with too much information being thrown at the viewer too fast, but then on the other hand it also lingers on the crazy set-piece of the rollicking underground wedding for what seems like a small eternity.

That said, I think it is an incredible film. The images and ideas are wild and wonderful, and they tell the story in a way that seems mythical but at the same time very real and human. There are tigers and monkeys and tanks and brass bands and flying brides and watermelons and birth and death and murder and suicide and war and politics and singing and pretty much every other thing that one could think of. It also helps that the three leads are incredibly charismatic in their roles; the sly huckster Malko is impossible to forget, and Mirjana Jokovic’s performance is hysterically funny; she could easily hold her own against Charlie Chaplin in a mugging contest. I wish I there were a handy youtube video of the scene where she is dancing around in a black slip to Yugoslavian pop music and whacking Marko on the head with the heel of her shoe.

Anyway, it's becoming a very hard-to-find film now, so if you ever get a chance to see it, I recommend you grab the opportunity. It's long, it's demanding, but it's also sorta kinda wonderful.

Here's a taste; the trailer is Spanish, but that's okay because there isn't any dialogue in the clips:

NYFF '95–'99

From 1995 to 1999 I was lucky enough to be able to go to the New York Film Festival and see some cool & different movies. This past week I was cleaning out my closet and discovered that I still had the Playbills; I kinda want to chuck 'em, but I also feel like I want some record of what I saw, if only for my own entertainment. Well, anyway, here it is:

1995

Georgia. Probably my wife picked this one. I remember thinking that the main character was just too unlikeable, and I've pretty much forgotten it all except for the cringe-inducing concert towards the end.

The Neon Bible. I wanted to see this one because it was based on an early novel by John Kennedy Toole, author of Confederacy of Dunces. It was surprisingly dull.

Guimba. I figured the film festival was an opportunity to see really far-out stuff that I wouldn't be able to find anywhere else, so I was really excited about this bizarre-sounding African movie. Afterwards I had to admit that I just didn't get it.

Cyclo. I think? I have no memory of this film, though I do remember wanting to go.

Open City. An old Rossellini film that was screened. Afterwards they announced that Isabella Rossellini was in attendance. I turned around and thought "well, I don't see Isabella Rossellini, but who is that gorgeous woman up there?" No, actually that was her. I understand why they call some women "radiant" now...it was like she was a source of light. Later when I was leaving the theater I happened to glance around and she was walking behind me; she was so gorgeous it was actually kind of unnerving.

1996

Secrets & Lies. We took my mother to see this one, as she is a big Mike Leigh fan. It was one of the better Mike Leigh movies that I've seen; I seem to recall that he kept the cello music down to the bare minimum.

Sling Blade. An amazing performance by Billy Bob Thornton, back when no one knew who Billy Bob Thorton was. If anything it's almost too show-offy. It was a pretty good movie, as I recall.

Breaking the Waves. I was completely knocked out by this one; it was almost like an ordeal, painful but also very beautiful and moving. My reaction afterwards was "that was fantastic, and I hope I never see it again."

Underground. Afterwards my wife said "that was the best movie I've ever seen," and I was debating with myself as to whether I agreed with her; certainly it was the best movie I saw in my five years of going to the festival. It was epic in a way like I'd never experienced before; I felt like I had lived another lifetime's worth of living watching it. Years later I got the movie on VHS and tried to watch it again, but sadly it didn't quite capture that same feeling; maybe long movies work better in the theater, since there's nothing around to distract you. It's two hours and forty-nine minutes, and I've since learned that it was put together from a five-h0ur TV miniseries. Anyway, I keep reminding myself that I ought to hunt down more Kusturica movies.

Movies that I didn't see at the festival but saw afterwards in the theater: Le Voleurs, The People vs. Larry Flynt.

1997

The Kingdom Part 2. "Danish scum!!!" Over four and a half hours long, and I loved every minute of it. Since then I've come to feel like von Trier was too hostile to the audience with this one, going too far with the grotesquery and absurdity, but at the time I was just happy to see all the zany characters doing their thing. For weeks afterwards I kept hearing "hepatosarcoma" in my head.

The Saragossa Manuscript. A Polish movie from 1965 which is completely off the wall. Unfortunately, the experience was practically ruined by the woman behind me, who kept coughing into my hair. I've gotten it on DVD since then and re-watched it a couple of times; I even read the novel, which is from 1815 and which is also completely off the wall. I wish I knew someone I could show this to, just so I could have the pleasure of watching them turn to me and say "what the hell is going on with this crazy-ass movie?"

Hana-bi. A lot of people like this movie; I hated it. It bounced back and forth between dull, drippy sentimentality and "cool" violence. I wanted to stand up and yell at the guy's wife, "come on, just die already!"

The Apostle. This was not what you would call a happy-fun-time movie, but I remember that it was well made and engrossing. I heard that they re-edited it before the official theater release, so we got to see a version that no other movie-goers saw. Too bad it was thirteen years ago and I don't remember anything about it.

Some movies that I didn't see at the festival but on saw in the theater or on video afterwards: Year of the Horse, Taste of Cherry (awful), Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, The Sweet Hereafter, Boogie Nights (fantastic).

1998

Strike. Sergei Eisenstein's first film. Had I seen it before? I don't think so. There was an accompanying score played by two percussionists and a keyboardist. It was incredibly good for a movie from 1924.

Gods and Monsters. Forgettable, apparently.

Black Cat, White Cat. More Kusturica. I had high hopes for this one after the amazing Underground, but it was just a goofy bit of fluff in comparison. Still, it was funny and charming in its own way. I should track it down and watch it again.

Movies I saw afterwards in the theater or on video: The Celebration (really good), Happiness (ouch), Rushmore (my least favorite Wes Anderson movie, but still pretty great).

1999

Beau Travail. Holy cow, did I ever hate this navel-gazing movie. What the hell even happens? And how do you come up with a faulty compass? A broken compass, sure, but a faulty one? Like, one that sometimes points North and sometimes doesn't? Or one that points East? How does that work, exactly? I guess you just can't trust those cheap magnets.

There is such a thing as a crappy art film, but the problem is that a lot of people don't expect art films to make sense anyway, so they say, "well, I didn't understand it, but I guess it was pretty great!" I mean, heck, there were all these cool shots of guys doing calisthenics in the desert, that's pretty interesting, right? And when the guy suddenly starts dancing frenetically in the disco, that probably means something important, right? Yeah, or not.

We had already moved to Connecticut by this time, so I guess I only came in to see one movie.

Movies I saw later on video: Princess Mononoke, Being John Malkovich, Dogma.

So, there it is, saved for posterity. I miss those days of fanatical movie-going, to be sure, but it's also nice to be a bit more centered in myself and in-the-moment. That reminds me: time for more cleanup.

Spring Thinking

I was thinking today about how much I disliked Easter as a kid. There's a whole cluster of childhood sensations that still comes back to me: uncomfortable clothes, pastel colors, soggy pale daylight, dreary extra-long church service, the blank dishwater smell of my grandmother's apartment. I see the pictures and every year was the same: kielbasa, rye bread with butter, Kosciusko mustard and kapusta. That sounds really good to me now, but back then the overload of savory-sweet flavor was strange.

It's ironic, the disconnect between the message and the messenger. Underneath everything it's all about death and rebirth, and I see so clearly that the world needs death and rebirth, it's one of the great central gears that makes everything turn and function. And yet, the Catholic church never dies; it's like a living relic. It seems to believe it ought to be immortal, and I think even God scoffs at that. It grasped too much, it's afraid to let go, and it drags everyone down with its weight.

I want to celebrate in a different way this year, but how? March 20, the vernal equinox, falls on a Saturday, so that's good, but we need something to be reborn. Maybe we need to rebirth ourselves...a long hike in the rain and cold, but with food, music and games waiting at the end of it. Kielbasa, rye bread with butter, Kosciusko mustard and kapusta....

A Puzzle

I created this puzzle a couple of years ago, but it didn't get published. Click on the picture to see it full-size. There's a one-word answer. It's a little tricky, but it's doable. Can you figure it out?

Nature Happens, or The Best-tasting Bug in Town

Blue jays are ordinarily pretty noisy birds, but yesterday there was a racket coming from a tree behind my house that was excessive even by their high standards. It was two or more jays squawking loudly, and as I looked over to find out what the deal was I saw one of the birds flop down from one branch to another in a clumsy flutter and with a startled chirrup that I assume translated to "Ow! I mean, I meant to do that." At the same time I became aware of a loud, high-pitched buzzing, like something you might hear from a high-voltage electrical device that was getting ready to explode. The buzz got louder and started moving in my direction, and then there was a loud thunk! on the porch post right next to my shoulder. After a stunned pause, the buzzing continued on away from me, and I just glimpsed an oversized bug droning off into the lower branches of a spruce twelve or fifteen yards away.

The blue jays had the bug's number, though. Two of them flew to the top of the spruce and started squawking again while another flew down to where the bug was. There was some more rough-and-tumble bonking of branches and then the buzz got quieter and stopped.

I don't know if the birds disliked that particular kind of bug or if they just really really wanted to eat it, but the whole thing was like a sloppy mob hit; it was like when a stool pigeon escapes from a basement and runs down the middle of the street shrieking while a bunch of freaked-out gangsters chase after him with whatever blunt objects happened to be nearby, like hammers or a tennis racket.

Maybe I've just been watching a little too much film noir lately.

Battleship Potemkin

My brother-in-law and his wife gave me a copy of the Kino DVD of Battleship Potemkin for my birthday, and I watched it earlier this week. It's a restoration that was done a few years ago in Germany, based on the Soviet reconstruction of the film that came out in the 1970s. The DVD features improved picture quality and a new soundtrack, the latter being an adaptation of the original film score from the Berlin premiere.

I have a VHS copy of the '70s Soviet reconstruction, which up to that point was arguably the best version of the film available and the closest approximation to what the "director's cut" might have looked like.* However, as the documentary in the supplementary materials explains, the Soviets did not feel that it was fitting to have the score to their national treasure be written by a foreigner, so they substituted Edmund Meisel's score with music by Shostakovich. The problem is that rather than tailoring the music to the film, they tailored the film to the music, specifically by slowing the film down down in certain places, sometimes dramatically.

The Kino version shows the film at the correct speed, and the difference is amazing. Suddenly the film is a lot more kinetic; the screen is constantly in motion, and there is a sense of rhythm that moves everything along. By comparison the old Soviet version is dull and lugubrious, since parts of the film are literally in slow motion; this is particularly the case in Act III, in which the people of Odessa come to see the dead sailor lying on the waterfront. In the film we see throngs of people moving towards the water and passing by the dead man, and in the Soviet version this forceful, wave-like movement is slowed to a crawl and the film all but grinds to a halt. It's just plain boring.

The new version, however, crackles with constant, clashing movement across the screen, and now we can better see Battleship Potemkin for what it is, not a boring old artifact from back when people didn't know how to have fun, but something which was experimental, avant garde and really kind of far out there. Since the 1800s the cinema had slowly been extricating itself from the swampy legacy of the theater and trying to find its own language and storytelling tools, but Eisenstein's movies were like a rocket sled barreling off into the new era. We are no longer a fly on a fourth wall, watching a scene play out from a distance and only occasionally buzzing in to get a closer look, instead we are everywhere, seeing the action from every angle, flashing up and down and back and forth. Instead of being built in massive clunky clods, Battleship Potemkin is an intricate mosaic of fragments which, when viewed from the right distance, tell an intense and detailed story. One of the most famous examples is the critical moment of a sailor reaching his breaking point and smashing an officer's dinner plate; instead of having this act be all one camera shot, it is broken up into seven or eight smaller shots that are cut together quickly. It was completely unnecessary, and yet incredibly effective; the cutting up of the motion creates a a sense of frenzy and violence that would be hard to create otherwise. It transforms a hissy fit into a revolution.

So with this new DVD release one of the most important films in the history of the medium is suddenly much, much more watchable for the average viewer. You might even say it's entertaining. It's still a tricky movie, though; beyond the uncomfortable ickiness of the propaganda, there is also sometimes a kind of intellectual coldness to the film. The movie is not really about characters, but rather about "the people," whoever they are; individuals tend not to fare very well in Battleship Potemkin, and that can be jarring to those of us who have grown up with the opposite propaganda, that the individual is everything. Also, there are times when the action on screen borders on abstract dance, like Man Ray, but with sailors instead of nails.

Still, the Odessa steps sequence is a jaw-dropper, even for modern audiences, and those who have only seen censored versions will really be in for a shock. It's violent, man.


*The film had been recut and censored many times over the years, with no copy of the original cut surviving; the soviets made a reconstruction by following a listing of the individual shots.