Fritz Lang (1927)

The story of the discovery in Buenos Aires in 2008 of a negative of the original premiere cut of the film, including almost all the lost scenes, sounds like a good film drama in itself.  The speed of the major restoration work that followed and allowed Metropolis to be screened in early 2010 is remarkable too.  I was apprehensive about going to see the film because it’s a classic, and a science fiction classic at that.  It was great to find the picture so gripping and elating.  It’s one of the few sci-fi movies I’ve seen which is thoroughly, not just technically, imaginative, and genuinely visionary – clairvoyant (from the hordes of refugee-like worker families to the anticipation of CCTV:  at one point we see an aircraft passing close to the top of a skyscraper, which inevitably calls to mind two other planes).   Because Metropolis is famously futurist, in story and design, I was unprepared for how medieval it also is.  The traction of those two things reaches its climax when the machine-man is burned at the stake.   Religious imagery and metaphors, which are as essential to the film as its explicitly political themes, range from the seven deadly sins to the redemptive ‘Mediator’ Freder.   The physical scale of the work and Fritz Lang’s choreography of the many crowd scenes are extraordinary.

Freder is played by Gustav Fröhlich and Alfred Abel is his increasingly careworn, guilt-ridden father Joh, the leader of the urban dystopia of Metropolis.  Rudolf Klein-Rogge is the crazed scientist Rotwang.   The outstanding performer is Brigitte Helm as Maria.  She uses her body as well as her face brilliantly, to differentiate between the human Maria and the mechanised version of her:  Helm is as comic as she’s alarming.  The screenplay is by Thea von Harbou, Lang’s wife at the time.  (They divorced shortly after she joined the National Socialist Party in the early 1930s.)  The superb score is by Gottfried Huppertz:  the music for this new version was performed by the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Frank Strobel. Metropolis really does communicate the excitement felt by early film-makers like Lang, who saw in the nascent medium of cinema its potential to synthesise multiple art forms in one.

23 November 2010