Metropolis

Metropolis

1927

Directed by Fritz Lang

I've been waiting to see this for a while, wondering if it would live up to all the hype surrounding it. Hell yes it does. Metropolis is German director Fritz Lang's science fiction opus, a wild tale of a futuristic city run by great machines and fueled on the hard and thankless labour of a subterranean working-class. Unfortunately, as much as one third of the movie is considered lost; the version I watched, restored and distributed by Kino, drew from the original negative, partially destroyed, and scenes from later versions. Scenes that were not available are replaced by captions describing what would have been happening. These didn't really interrupt the flow of the movie as much as I thought they might. In fact, Metropolis was entertaining and very watchable in spite of its defects.

I don't know what sort of budget Lang had to work with, but Metropolis looks great. The city, the underground worker's city filled with giant machines, everything looks better than anybody could expect from a film made in 1927. The story is interesting enough. Drawing on the preoccupation with working-class struggles in its time, Metropolis is something of a call to arms for workers in an increasingly industrial and economically segregated society. But it also calls for compromise, as it is openly critical of violent revolt. The main story follows Freder, the pampered son of Joh Fredersen, the ruler of Metropolis, as he pursues his fascination with Maria, a socialist pedagogue and sort of worker's saint. This leads him from the leisurely high-society to the depths of the city, where workers slave away at great machines in a nightmarish industrial underground world. His support of the workers causes a rift between Freder and his father, and also leads Joh to discover Maria and her religious-toned oration. She is preaching that there must be mediation between the "brains" and "hands" of the city, but Joh wants to incite the workers to open rebellion so he can crush and demoralize them. To this purpose, he gets the unstable scientist Rotwang to create a robot in Maria's image. This alternate Maria is her opposite in every respect. Deceptive, sexual, she incites the male workers to violent uprising.

I feel that I should warn everyone that Metropolis is a silent film. It's hard to judge the acting performances without the benefit of dialogue; silent film acting is based on a different dynamic entirely. I thought they fit in well with the apocalyptic tone of the film, but I suppose they could be construed as being overly emotive. Brigitte Helm in particular seemed quite good, switching between the demure Maria and a vicious and feverish performance as the Machine Man impersonating her. There's a lot of hand-wringing and flailing about on the whole, but really, that's the way that actors had to express themselves before the dawn of "talkies."

Fritz Lang clearly set out to make a monumental film, and he certainly acheived that goal; he set the bar high for all science fiction to follow. I've never seen anything quite like it, and I doubt it will ever be imitated with much success. I have seen the anime by Rintaro and Katsuhiro Otomo, based on Osamu Tezuka's manga series; it's also quite excellent, but another animal altogether. In any case, Metropolis is a visionary work of art; I only wish the entire film was intact. I would highly recommend it to cinema nuts - but too much time may have passed for it to appeal to casual moviegoers anymore.

9.9