Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" restored
Jaime Jeske
Friday, July 12, 2002
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
A Restored German Classic of Futuristic Angst
By A. O. SCOTT
On Jan. 10, 1927, Fritz Lang's "Metropolis," a wildly ambitious, hugely
expensive science fiction allegory of filial revolt, romantic love,
alienated labor and dehumanizing technology opened at the Ufa Palast
theater in Berlin. Lang's film, of course, went on to become one of the
touchstones of 20th-century cinema, exhaustively studied and endlessly
imitated, but apart from its brief theatrical run in Berlin and
Nuremberg 75 years ago, the movie as Lang made it has never really been
seen.
What happened to "Metropolis" is, in some ways, a familiar
movie-industry story of a studio's interference with an artist's work.
(Or, if you prefer to side with the studios, of a filmmaker's profligate
indifference to economic necessity and audience response.) A few weeks
after the premiere, Ufa, the studio that had produced the film, pulled
it from theaters and cut out 7 of the original 12 reels.
Paramount, the American distributor, went even further, engaging a
playwright, Channing Pollock, to compose English title cards and to
reshape the story to fit his own tastes. "I have given it my meaning,"
Pollock boasted. Lang was so appalled that he swore he would never go to
the United States, a vow he broke a few years later, when Hitler proved
to be a much graver threat to his art (to say nothing of his life) than
Hollywood could ever be.
Much of the grandeur and strangeness of "Metropolis" survived
Paramount's butchery and the further desecration perpetrated in 1984 by
Giorgio Moroder, who added color tints to Karl Freund's eerie
Expressionist black-and-white cinematography and replaced Gottfried
Huppertz's lush, Wagnerian score with the music of pop stars like Freddy
Mercury and Bonnie Tyler.
Had Lang lived to see the age of the "director's cut" DVD, he might have
responded to those transgressions and reconstructed a definitive
"Metropolis." But now we have something nearly as good. Thanks to four
years of painstaking work by Martin Koerber, a German film
preservationist, and Alpha-Omega, a Munich company specializing in
digital restoration, there is now, at long last, a "Metropolis" with a
legitimate claim to being definitive.
Film Forum on Houston Street may lack the decadent Weimar glamour of the
Ufa Palast, but it does serve the best movie house popcorn in Manhattan
and, for the next two weeks, will be showing the latest version of
"Metropolis" in a spotless 35-millimeter print with a new recording of
Huppertz's score.
Much has been retrieved - more than 1,300 feet of film have been added
since the last rerelease, in 1987 - and the English titles have been
translated anew. There is also a second set of title cards, printed in a
plainer font, without multiple exclamation points, to indicate scenes
that are still missing. A subplot involving a character called the Thin
Man, a mysterious monk and visions inspired by the Book of Revelation
remains tantalizingly sketchy, but Lang's visual audacity and thematic
ambition are breathtakingly apparent, as is his astonishing sense of
scale, which enabled him to swoop from terrifying sublimity to piercing,
quiet intimacy with a single cut.
Pollock complained that, in Lang's version, "symbolism ran such riot
that people who saw it couldn't tell what the picture was all about." He
was not altogether wrong: Christianity, German romanticism, modernism
and Marxism stampede through the movie like the crowds of angry workers
and bourgeois revelers in the apocalyptic climax, but the confusion that
results ultimately resolves into hallucinatory, visionary clarity. Only
by pushing himself to the very edge of coherence was Lang able to
transcend the schematic moralizing that keeps so much science fiction
tethered, ultimately, to the mundane.
This is not to slight either the emotional impact or the political
resonance of Lang's fever-dream of the future. Quite the contrary:
"Metropolis" retains its power to overwhelm, trouble and move because it
is connected to the deep anxieties of modern life as if by a
high-voltage cable. The story of the scientist Rotwang (Rudolf
Klein-Rogge), a modern Pygmalion designing a female robot to replace his
lost love, stands between "Frankenstein" and "A.I." as an expression of
the defining modern preoccupation with machines that blur the boundary
between the human and the mechanical.
The early scene of workers trudging into the dark maw of their
underground factory has been copied to death (most recently in "Road to
Perdition"), but it remains unsurpassed as an image of how mechanized
work for another's profit can strip people of their individuality.
Later, as the mob of workers smashes the factory and unleashes a flood
of anarchy on the city, we see an equally chilling image of the
senseless destruction that revolt against exploitation can produce.
In 1927, "Metropolis" was attacked by the German left as implicitly
fascistic, and by the right for its Communist tendencies. But one of the
curiosities of the film is that its aesthetic extremity serves a mild
and moderate ideology. The city, run by the suave industrialist Joh
Fredersen, is a drastically polarized place, with lush gardens and
soaring skyscrapers above ground and infernal slums below.
In the depths, a young woman, Maria (Brigitte Helm, the Kirsten Dunst of
the Weimar Republic), prophesies the coming of a messianic figure called
the Mediator, whose name sums up the temperate, reformist message buried
in the movie's sweep and bombast. The Mediator turns out to be Freder
Fredersen (Gustav Fröhlich), the boss's sensitive son, whose infatuation
with Maria leads him to a moral awakening.
His ultimate triumph is delayed by obstacles and digressions too
numerous and wonderful for mere prose, and the audience is distracted
from the film's moral by its elements of horror, mystery, burlesque and
romance. Far from a historical curio, "Metropolis" arrives,
three-quarters of a century late, like an artifact from the future. At
last we have the movie every would-be cinematic visionary has been
trying to make since 1927.
"Metropolis" opens today at the Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street,
South Village. Tickets: $9.75; $5 for members and 65+ weekdays before 5
p.m. Box office: (212) 727-8110.
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved.
Jaime
KAR
"Jaime Jeske" <jaim...@cox-internet.com> wrote in message
news:uiupup2...@corp.supernews.com...
Cut/Reconstruction DVD will certainly be forthcoming on one of the most
lamented lost films in the history of cinema.
Can't wait to see it.
okerry
Paramount's butchery and the further desecration perpetrated in 1984 by
Giorgio Moroder, who added color tints to Karl Freund's eerie
Expressionist black-and-white cinematography and replaced Gottfried
Huppertz's lush, Wagnerian score with the music of pop stars like Freddy
Mercury and Bonnie Tyler.>>>
Let me be the first to admit that I *loved* this version of *Metropolis.* I
actually own a bootleg copy of it and played my cassette tape of the music
until it nearly wore out. I don't think it was "desecration" at all, though
I would love to see this new version.
okerry
Leigh Melton
Ditto. It was actually the first version I saw, when it came out in
'84, and then I saw the (English subbed) original. They are both
great and I'm really looking forward to this "version" too.
Wonder if there's a 'director's cut' of "Pandora's Box" waiting for us
one day?
Leigh
--
Consequences, shmonsequences, as long as I'm rich. - D. Duck
John Smith
KAR wrote:
Me too. Now if the gang at Cinamatheque Paris would get off their duffs and
find that missing print of von Sternberg's Underworld I will die a happy man.
John
John Smith
Leigh Melton wrote:
O, that would be wonderful. Who knows? It might just happen.
John
P.S. Good call. You have impeccable taste.
Boodikka1
>> one day?
There is supposed be be a great deal of "lost" footage from PANDORA'S BOX
(LULU). Supposedly Kenneth Anger had been tracking it down. It wouldn't
surprise me if most of it has been located and nothing has been made public
yet.