Metropolis

The eight films already in this archive run from 1948 to 2019 — not one predates the end of the Second World War. Today fills in the earliest gap: Germany, 1927, silent, German Expressionism. The archive's first German film and its first silent film.

It pairs surprisingly well with today's other pick, Close-Up. Sixty-three years apart — one the most expensive industrial production of Weimar Germany, the other a low-budget 16mm hybrid by an Iranian director — both ask the same question: what happens when a manufactured image starts acting on its own? In Metropolis, an inventor's machine-double replaces the real Maria and a city catches fire. In Close-Up, a broke film buff borrows a director's name and ends up genuinely inside a film. One turns the runaway copy into allegory; the other lets it happen inside a documentary.

There is a technical reason too. The Metropolis you can watch today is a version only reassembled in 2010. A 16mm print found in Buenos Aires in 2008 brought back roughly 25 minutes that had not been seen since 1927. Before 2010, nobody had really seen this film.

大都会是一座被垂直分开的城市。地面上是花园、体育场和摩天楼，是统治者与他们的孩子生活的地方；地面下是机器大厅，工人穿着同样的制服，按班次操作庞大的机器，住在地下宿舍里。

城市的统治者是 Joh Fredersen。他的儿子 Freder 从小生活在上层，直到有一天他在花园里遇见一个带着一群工人孩子的年轻女子——Maria。她告诉那些孩子，地上的人和地下的人是兄弟。Freder 跟着她往下走，第一次看见机器大厅，看见一台机器在一次事故中吞掉了一个人。他回到地上，去质问父亲。

Fredersen 的反应不是悔改，而是派人去查 Maria 是谁。他找到的是发明家 Rotwang——一个住在古怪老房子里、装着一只假手的科学家。Rotwang 手里有一项技术：他能造出一个与人无异的机械人。

这是影片前半段能说的部分。后半段会发生什么，本文不写。

Director and origins

Fritz Lang, born in Vienna in 1890, began directing around 1919. Metropolis was produced by UFA (Universum Film A.G.) at the Babelsberg studio outside Berlin, with Erich Pommer producing. The screenplay was written by Thea von Harbou with Lang — von Harbou was then his wife, and her 1925 novel of the same name was written almost in parallel with the script, conceived from the outset as a film treatment.

Lang on the film's origin: 'the film was born from my first sight of the skyscrapers in New York in October 1924.' He went on to make M (1931), then left for the United States and continued directing in Hollywood.

A city built to order

Production design was by Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut and Karl Vollbrecht, entirely constructed inside the studio. The film's spatial logic has exactly one axis: vertical. Above ground sit the Eternal Gardens, the stadium and the towers; below sit the machine halls and the workers' dormitories. Elevators and shafts are the only connections. When Maria tells the workers' children the story of the Tower of Babel — a tower that collapsed because it was built too high — the sequence doubles as the film's architectural diagram.

The city's Art Deco design is widely credited with helping to popularise the style in Europe and America.

Craft: one mirror and one robot

Special-effects specialist Eugen Schüfftan developed the Schüfftan process for the film: a mirror combined the live actors with miniature sets on a single negative, so performers appeared to stand inside enormous architecture. Two years later Hitchcock used it in Blackmail (1929).

The Maschinenmensch was designed by the sculptor Walter Schulze-Mittendorff, who first took a full plaster cast of Brigitte Helm's body and then built the shell around it. The problem was material — it had to read as metal yet allow limited movement. His solution was a material called plastic wood. Helm plays both Maria and the machine in the film. Cinematography was by Karl Freund and Günther Rittau; Freund later went to Hollywood and shot Dracula (1931).

Music

Gottfried Huppertz wrote a complete orchestral score for the film — one of the earliest full-length original scores of the silent era. The 2010 restoration was screened with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra performing Huppertz's score, conducted by Frank Strobel.

Eighty years of cuts

Metropolis premiered at the UFA-Palast am Zoo in Berlin on 10 January 1927; the German release ran 153 minutes (4,189 metres of film). It was cut repeatedly thereafter: a 91-minute version appeared in 1936, the American release ran about 116 minutes, and in 1984 Giorgio Moroder issued a colourised version with a pop soundtrack.

The turn came in the 2000s. In 2005 the researcher Michael Organ found a print at the National Film Archive of New Zealand containing eleven previously missing scenes. On 1 July 2008, Berlin announced that a 16mm reduction negative of the original had been found at the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires, traced by the Argentine film historian Fernando Martín Peña and the museum's director Paula Felix-Didier. It restored roughly 25 minutes unseen since 1927 — close to a fifth of the film.

The restoration was supervised by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung with the Deutsche Kinemathek and the Museo del Cine; the team included Anke Wilkening, Martin Koerber and Frank Strobel. It premiered on 12 February 2010 at the Friedrichstadtpalast as the gala screening of the 60th Berlinale, with a simultaneous outdoor projection at the Brandenburg Gate broadcast live by Arte. The North American premiere followed on 25 April 2010 at Mann's Chinese Theatre, Los Angeles, at the TCM Classic Film Festival. Two passages were too damaged to restore — the monk's sermon and the fight between Rotwang and Fredersen — and are represented by explanatory title cards.

In 2001 the film was inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register, the first film so distinguished. On 1 January 2023 it entered the public domain in the United States.

Standing

Sight & Sound's 2022 critics' poll placed it 67th (35th in 2012). Rotten Tomatoes records 97% from 126 reviews, averaging 9.1/10; Metacritic 98/100. Roger Ebert: 'Metropolis is one of the great achievements of the silent era, a work so audacious in its vision and so angry in its message that it is, if anything, more powerful today than when it was made.' Martin Scorsese included it among his '39 Essential Foreign Films for a Young Filmmaker'.