Silent-ember: Metropolis (Dir Fritz Lang, 2h 30m, 1927)

The year is 2008, and in the archives of Museo del Cine, a set of reels sent to the country in 1928 of a silent black and white film, which have already been through the hands of a film distributor, a film critic, and Argentina's National Art Fund, before a copy was handed to the museum, are about to change the shape of one of cinema's crown jewels forever. The film, directed by Fritz Lang, is Metropolis, brutally cut down after its fateful 1927 premier in Berlin and largely known to the world in an abbreviated and disjoined format, most notably released widely in the English speaking world in the 1980s and, incongruously soundtracked by Giorgio Moroder, Freddie Mercury, et al. For the first time in nearly 90 years, even with footage badly scratched by transfer from 35mm to 16mm and hurried 1990s copy, Metropolis is nigh complete, five percent of the film still lost to time. A masterpiece breathes again. We see, but for a scant few minutes of painstakingly intertitled description, Metropolis as that dismissive audience would have seen (and indeed, with the return of Gottfried Huppertz's score) heard it.

And what they saw, what we see, is the bloody and viseral birth of an entire genre of cinema, a tale of futuristic cities and towering machines, of a downtrodden working class sacrificed in their scores to keep the upper classes, in their Babel-esque cities that stretch into the clouds, in comfort, and the struggle between them oiled and exarcabated by a vengeful scientist and his creation, and the man and woman from such different backgrounds that attempt to unite them. What they see is a tale of morality, of politics, of thinly-veilled and pointed political and social commentary on Weimar Germany, on faith, and beyond. What they see is the genesis of special effects and model making and prosthetics and actors costumed up to play robots and devils and seven sins. What they see is the pinacle of the ambition of the silent era, only eclipsed by the madness-or genius- of Abel Gance's Napoleon, that will release months later. What they see is a film that will influence figures as disparate as George Lucas, Osuma Tezuka and Kraftwerk over the 94 years since its release. What they see is the dawn of science-fiction cinema.

By the mid 1920s, Fritz Lang has already made such films as Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, a two-part, four hour character study of the titular criminal mastermind (which he would later return to in the sound-era), and the equally epicly scaled Die Nibelungen, an adaption of the Norse-German myth, together with Harikari, an adaption of the tale of Madame Butterfly (and marketed such in the States), and Destiny, a film that not only influenced the depiction of Death in Bergman's the Seventh Seal, but also inspired no less than Luis Bunuel to start making films. Together with writer, Thea von Harbou, who Lang married in 1922, Lang quickly became one of the most prominent film directors of Weimar Germany.

Metropolis, though, is more than simply a continuation of the narratives of death, corruption, and modernity that coloured much of the previous half decade of Lang's cinema, Beginning with Harbou's novellisation of the film, released in 1925, and essentially acting as both basis and marketing for the then upcoming film, so Lang set to work creating a visitation, a glimpse of an imagined world to come, complete with towering skyscapers, colossal machines, robotic emmisaries, and a beleaguered underclasss. Here, Metropolis' production enters that hazy world of the half truth, the mythic; the film's landscape, for example, undoubtedly took influence from New York, but Lang's story of sudden inspiration upon seeing the city for the first time is fanciful, if nothing else, because the script was almost complete by 1924, when he made the journey.

Nevertheless, Lang's control over the film is nigh infamous in its totality, with hundreds of takes required for several of the scenes, particularly involving our young heroes, where one moment in particular was repeated until one of the actors could barely stand, whilst Lang required his colossal number of extras (believed to be somewhere in the realm of twenty thousand actors), to throw themselves across scenes, dangle from ropes, be blasted by thousands of gallons of water, and walk naked through sets, heated only by alcohol or colossal blast furnaces. This, of course, is without mentioning the (hugely inflated budget of) 5 million Deutchmark (an estimated $200 million in today's terms) that nearly bankrupt UFA, and lead to the film being heftily edited, and subsequent attempts ot put it back together again from the early 1970s onwards.

What marks Metropolis apart, even from the films around it-it, after all, was released in the same year as Napoleon, The Jazz Singer, that brings sound crashing into the world, several of Walt Disney's first shorts with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, and Eisenstein's colossal October: Ten Days That Shook the World-is how fresh it is, how astonishingly modern it is, from its opening shot, to its final intertitles. Whilst much of this has to do with the Mitchell cameras (which wouldn't become industry standards for another three decades, and Lang rewinding multiple sequence to create double or triple (one sequence contains a still astonishing thirty-three exposures, layered in a whirling kaliedoscope of images that at once feel heady and disturbing, much of the film's stunningly freshness comes from its performances and visual design.

The visual design is supreme in Metropolis, and this is evident from the opening shot of the film, in the towering towers of the upper classes, as we are introduced to the father and son of Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abelto), the master of the city, and the young Freder (Gustav Fröhlich), who becomes fascinated by the figure of Maria (Brigitte Helm), a young woman from the undercity, where countless workers toil away on the colossal mechanical contraptions and factories that enable the upper classses a life of leisure. Maria herself is perhaps the best element of this film, a stunning debut performance from Helm, not only playing both versions of Maria, (both the original, and the wild and nefarious copy created by the nefarious scientist, Rotwang), but also the iconic Maschinenmensch, whose design can be  seen everywhere from Star Wars' C3PO to the stage costumes of musician Janelle Monáe, not to mention costume design and fashion from the birth of cinema onwards

From here, Freder journeys deep into the undercity, and here, Lang begins to pull the narrative and conceptual threads together of Metropolis-an accident causes one of the machines to explode, the frantic undercutting gathering pace, as workers teem like ants, the chaos and mounting panic only heightened by Huppertz' score, the work of Eisenstein a palapable influence. The machine reaches critical, mass, explodes, and in its wake, as a shocked Freder looks on, a disturbing vision of how he imagines the machinery to be appears, appeaing from the smoke with the intertitle, MOLOCH! identifying this horrifying visitation as some (genuinely still unnerving) manifestion of the ancient Babylonian god, into which workers are dragged and thrown, to fuel the machinery that keeps Freder, his father, and the upper classes in leisure. Here, the expanded stretch of the 2010 version, for all its degraded footage, puts vital meat back on the bones, fleshing out life on the upper levels of Metropolis itself, the power play between Joh Fredersen and one of his lieutenants, who is eventually fired by the old man, the maps that slowly uncover the uprising of the workers, and Freder's own resolve to help them, as he sees his father's complacence at the death of hundreds of workers. 

It is, of course, the film's political aim in miniature-the film's politics are vermently anti-capitalist, its depiction of downtrodden workers being, quite literally chewed up and fed to the machinery of capital to allow the upper classes to lead luxurious lives; the film's uprising towards its middle section, though, is more ideologically complex, the false Maria leading those who follow her into the excesses of Weimar Germany, the drunken maddening bacanalia of the Yoshiwara Club, where the attempts of brotherhood and a coming together of the workers and the upper class, the meeting of the head and hands, both in search of the "heart" of brotherhood, of co-operation are pushed aside in pure hedonism, where Maria becomes not the beaufatic angel of revolution, but the hedonistic spirit of self-indulgence. Metropolis is not a film about utopia, just as it's not a film purely about a dystopia to be rebelled again.

It is here that the remastered version of the film truly shines; given its full length, several characters are fleshed out, and none more so than the figure of Rotwang. In the heavily edited version, Rotwang is little more than the stereotypical mad scientist, (his laboratory is practically a prototype of that later seen in 1933's Frankenstein) and a figure of motiveless malignity, a shock-haired, wide eyed figure of utter madness-the performance, complete with artificial hand would later inform Peter Sellers' Nazi scientist, Dr Strangelove. The Complete edition, however, fleshes Rotwang out to such a degree that, whilst still the film's antagonist-he, after all, is the one to kidnap Maria and create a machine that wears her face-his motive, revenge against Fredersen, and his city, for the loss of the beloved Hel, who left Rotwang for the industrialist and died bearing Freder, is now the energy driving the entire film, his revenge meted out against both the lower class that the false Maria tricks to near-destruction, and the upper classes that the destruction of the machines will lay low.

It's here thus, that the film's central concept, its fusing of science fiction and religion, of Old Testament God and space age technology, come together perfectly. The false Maria is compared to the Whore of Babylon, her salacious appearance mirroring the illustration, as the Priest (a role almost entirely lost from the original film), condems her. Death and the Seven Sins, an uncredited octet, haunt the dreams of the invalided Freder, laid low by the loss of his beloved Maria as her doppleganger turns to villany. It is a film where key biblical concepts are wrote large against the science-fiction world-Metropolis itself becomes a Babel brought low, the finale is essentially a great flood in which the city comes close to complete destruction until the holy Maria makes her return. It is a film, where. for all its revolutionary technical trappings, the story is elemental and practically feels like the medieval morality play writ large.

The false Maria is uncovered and burned at the stake, Rotwang is killed falling from the walls of the very people he set out to doom, and the two halves of Metropolis are united at last, by Freder. For a film of such lavish scale, such ambition, it is emotion that powers its finale, into a simple joining of hands between the Upper and Working classes. Perhaps it was too ambitious, too laden with religion and philosophy-the butchers ar UFA cut the film to ribbons, in perhaps the greatest act of cinematic vandalism till 1942's The Magnificent Ambersons-and western critics see the film in a variety of cuts, with much of Rotwang's motives hacked out of the film, and many ancillary plotlines excised. It clunks into cinemas, with critics largely divided by this shadow of the masterpiece.

The film. of all things, becomes a cause celebré of the Nazi Party, with Goebbels not only making it the focus of a typically inflamatory speech in 1928, in which he twisted the tale of the oppressed workers railing against their lot into an attack on the excesses of Weimar, but also later confiding to the (Jewish by heritage) Lang that Hitler wanted him to direct Nazi propaganda, with Von Harbou remaining in Germany to do just that in 1933, leading to the couple's separation.. So Metropolis glides on through history, regaining its reputation, its majesty, piece by piece. Following Morodoer's likable if poppy remaster comes a renewed interest in the film. The reels, kept in Munich, are remastered once again, and in 2001, an international effort sees the film pieced back together from collections around the world, before, like the Holy Grail, the quest comes to an end in a vault beneath the streets of Buenos Aires. Metropolis, but for a few fragments that may still surface in the years to come, is reborn, rejuvenated. The masterpiece towers once more.

Cinema without Metropolis is unthinkable-in 2001, the film became the first (and to date, just one of two, the other being 1939's The Wizard of Oz)to be inducted into the UNESCO Memory of the World Register, a nigh peerless collection of the world's art, artefacts and media, that includes the Bayeux Tapestry, the Gutenberg Bible, the archives of figures as illustrious as Louis Pasteur and Søren Kierkegaard. This is the Big Bang of science-fiction cinema, the arrival of special effects as an artform, and in its wake come myriad films, practically the entire genre leaping, fully formed, like some reverse Athena, from the head of the Maschinenmensch. This is tbe birth of science fiction complete at last after eighty plus years and still staggering in its scale, ambition, and salience.

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

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