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.