Metropolis

I was fortunate enough recently to see the digitally restored complete version of Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent masterpiece Metropolis at the Film Forum in New York City. Following its premiere in Berlin the 153-minute film was substantially edited and the complete film was thought to be lost forever. However, in 2008 Argentine film archivist Fernando Peña found the newly discovered footage, roughly 25 minutes in length, in the archives of the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires. The film, which will be available on DVD later this year, has clearly stood the test of time and, after 83 years, merits its reputation as one of the great German expressionist works. I encourage everyone to see it while you can on the big screen. It’s playing around the country through the summer. There’s a link at the end of this article to the film’s website where you can find screening times and locations. But although I was caught up in the story throughout the screening, as I sat watching it I couldn’t help think about what Metropolis says about the motion picture industry in the digital cinema era.

First some background on Metropolis:

The movie takes place in the massive, sprawling futuristic mega-city Metropolis, which was founded, built, and is run by the autocratic Joh Fredersen. In the city of Metropolis the culture is divided into two classes: the elite, who live high above the Earth in luxurious skyscrapers; and the workers, who live and toil underground.

Fredersen's son Freder lives a life of luxury in the theatres and stadiums of the skyscraper buildings. One day, as he is playing in the Eternal Gardens, he notices that a beautiful woman has appeared with many children of the workers. She is quickly shooed away, but Freder becomes infatuated with her and follows her down to the worker's underworld. There, he experiences firsthand the horrors of the worker's life, and is disgusted when he sees an enormous machine violently explode and kill dozens of workers.

This sets off the movie’s two central plots, a love story between Freder and the beautiful woman and the story of how Freder convinces his father to reconcile with the workers and treat them with more dignity. This summary does not begin to do the film justice and doesn’t touch on its interwoven subplots. Only by seeing it, ideally on the big screen, could a person adequately capture what a visual tour de force the movie is. There are story problems but they are minor in retrospect. The makeup is too heavy and the acting is broad as was typical in the silent era but they do nothing to diminish what are strong performances by virtually the entire ensemble. In short, the film is breathtaking.

At a cost of roughly five million Reichsmark (reportedly, in one source I found, as much as $200 million today) Metropolis was the most expensive silent film ever made. It was produced by Universum Film and nearly bankrupted the studio. The film was initially a moderate box office success in Berlin but outside Germany most exhibitors refused to book a movie that long and it was subsequently cut and re-edited to approximately 90 minutes. Perhaps even worse, many theatres projected the movie at the already standard sound film speed of 24 frames per second rather than the standard silent film speed of 16 frames per second, the frame rate at which the movie had been made. As a result few people outside Berlin ever saw the movie Lang envisioned.

The missing footage restores the story, in particular by amplifying the actions and motives of two supporting characters. And it’s very easy to see which scenes are the newly found clips because, understandably, they are seriously damaged with scratches and dirt. They stand out in sharp contrast to most of the rest of the film, which is remarkably pristine and that was the first thing that made me think about our current digital era.

Thanks to digital technology, the shame of what happened to Metropolis need never happen again. In theory at least, if not in actual practice, there should always be a clean, digital master of any movie made today. To take a $200 million gamble from our own time as an example, regardless of what some distributors or future generations think of the story or running time of Avatar there will always be a complete copy of the film somewhere.

But I also thought about the broader implications of Metropolis in what was a very similar transition era. And again it was Avatar that came to mind. Both films were made in a time when the movie industry was beginning to change; for Metropolis it was the end of the silent era; for Avatar it is the beginning of the digital 3D era. Both films are long, technologically ambitious movies made by talented directors with enormous egos. Both films have similar classic good-versus-evil themes wrapped around a simple love story. Both films were huge financial gambles that were an enormous risk for their producers. But Avatar succeeded where Metropolis failed.

Sync sound shorts had already become a staple of the movie business by the mid-1920s. In 1926, the year before Metropolis debuted, Warner Bros. released its first feature length sync sound movie, Don Juan with John Barrymore. And, of course, a few months after Metropolis was released, Warner Bros. premiered The Jazz Singer in New York. As the saying goes the rest was history. Obviously, Lang could have elected to shoot Metropolis in sync sound if he had really wanted to but I’ve not been able to find a reference that explains if it was ever a consideration or why he decided not to.

One possible reason for the success of Metropolis in Berlin and its failure in the rest of the world was the fact that it became a favorite of the burgeoning Nazi party. Years later in an interview with Peter Bogdonovich Lang said he had come to hate the film. The experience seems to have contributed to Lang’s divorce from his wife Thea von Harbou who co-wrote the Metropolis screenplay. She later joined the Nazi party while Lang fled the country when he learned that the Nazis considered him to be Jewish.

Would Avatar have failed if it hadn’t been shot in 3D? Would Metropolis have succeeded if it had been shot in sync sound? Who can say? By 1931 Lang had settled in Hollywood where he made M, what is probably his true masterpiece and what was his first sync sound feature film.

“It's very hard to talk about pictures,” Lang told Bogonovich in that interview, which can be found in the book Who the Devil Made It. “Should I say now that I like Metropolis because something I have seen in my imagination comes true, when I detested it after it was finished?”

Click here to access the official web site for the restored, complete Metropolis. There you can find times and locations of screenings.