There is probably no one alive who has seen the 1927 Metropolis
Wealthy industrialists and magnates live in wonderful penthouses surrounded by gardens, while workers live in darkness and operate the machinery that powers the city. According to Fritz Lang, the film was born from his first sight of the skyscrapers in New York in October 1924. Even though it was conceived as a futuristic dystopia, Metropolis (1927) tells the story of class differences that have been present since the very beginnings of human societies.
In Metropolis, Freder (Gustav Fröhlich), the city master’s son, spends his time in the city’s wonderful gardens, used for leisure and sports. Suddenly, he sees Maria (Brigitte Helm), a young woman who brought the workers’ children to see how the rich lead a very different life. When she’s ushered out, he’s desperate to find her again in the city’s depths. There he witnesses an explosion of a machine that kills a number of workers, so he hurries to tell his father about the accident, only to find total disinterest and lack of empathy.
That’s when Freder’s quest to make things right starts. He meets with Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), an inventor who was in love with Freder’s mother and has thus created a robot (which inspired the look for C-3PO!) in her image. However, Freder’s father captures the robot and orders Rotwang to give it Maria’s likeness, so he can deceive people into believing that Maria, now the leader of a rebellion, is to blame for the chaos to come.
Joh Frederson: What were you doing in the machine halls, Freder?
Freder: I wanted to look into the faces of the people whose little children are my brothers, my sisters…
Co-written with his then-wife, Thea von Harbou, the film’s plot drew inspiration from German dramas and works of H. G. Wells and Mary Shelley. Lang, dubbed the “Master of Darkness” by the British Film Institute, was not only a precursor to noir (cf. M (1931)) but also to fantasy (Die Nibelungen (1924)) and science fiction.
Having grown up in the era of German expressionism, Lang lets its influence show in Metropolis as well. Such plots often dealt with intellectual topics, human emotions, and psychology, rather than the action films or love stories of that time. A film doesn’t need to reflect reality – it can create its own. A camera can peek into the human mind, and it can twist reality and turn it back again.
It was the era of discovering strange forces guiding our material world. A decade earlier, the general theory of relativity had been confirmed, dealing with peculiarities of gravity, space, and time. Two decades earlier, the special theory of relativity told us the story of an observer’s power. And at the same time, on the other side of physics, dealing with the minute world, the story of quantum mechanics had unfolded. Strange forces are driving all the particles in existence, and expressionist cinema at the same time – and under the same zeitgeist – is picturing such an unknown, shadowed world. Dark and moody scenes, shadows and lighting, elaborate set designs – modern cinematography still owes a tremendous debt to German expressionism. The cinema also seems tied to the architecture of that time, demonstrating sharp angles and great heights.
I’ve seen high-budget Netflix Sci-Fi films with worse special effects and cinematography than this precious gem, which is almost a hundred years old. One of the most important figures in this film was its cinematographer, Eugen Schüfftan. Elaborate sets of city miniatures were created for futuristic dystopian urban scenes, and he also developed the eponymous Schüfftan process, in which mirrors are used to insert actors into miniature sets. A large mirror was placed at a 45-degree angle to reflect either the miniature or the painted artwork, and the live footage of actors was projected in reverse. The actors were positioned several meters away from the mirrors, so they would appear the right size when projected. The silvering on the back of the mirror had to be strategically and carefully scraped off for each scene.
Lang was also a perfectionist in directing. For the Tower of Babel sequence, he required hundreds of bald extras. Since the scenes were shot in the hot sun, many people who had recently shaved their heads got sunburns. On the other hand, the Moloch scene was filmed in the middle of a cold winter, while the extras had to walk naked into Moloch’s mouth. The flood scene took weeks to shoot, which made many actors sick from being in cold water for hours at a time. For the explosion scene, the extras were thrown into smoke while harnessed, and Lang insisted that they should show pain, which wasn’t difficult since they already were in pain.
Seeing how realistic the scenes were, it all seems worthwhile. And even though it’s a silent film, you can hear every scream, feel every emotion, and sometimes cover your ears because the silence might even be too loud.
Since 1927, the masterpiece has survived only in shortened, edited versions. It was the clever thinking of film historian and collector Fernando Martín Peña that made the original full-length print available again. In 2008, film operators revealed that they had screened a version over two hours long decades earlier. The original version was 153 minutes long, while the restoration is 148 minutes, which makes us wonder whether there is a single soul alive who has seen the initial, complete version of this masterpiece. A century later, the film is almost whole again, and the machine finally runs again from start to finish, but its warning about the people kept down in the dark still hums underneath.
References
- Fujiwara, Chris (2010). A Tale of Two Cities: Metropolis lives! Film Comment.
- Jensen, Paul M. (1969). The Cinema of Fritz Lang. A. S. Barnes.
- Kracauer, Siegfried (1947). From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film. Princeton.
- Minden, Michael; Bachmann, Holger (2002). Fritz Lang’s Metropolis: Cinematic Visions of Technology and Fear. Camden House.