Celebrating the 125th anniversary of its foundation and the 89th (…) anniversary of the film´s Portuguese premiere, Lisbon´s São Luís Municipal Theatre last weekend showed Metropolis accompanied by a 14 piece orchestra playing a gorgeous new soundtrack composed by the Cinemateca Portuguesa´s resident silent film pianist, Filipe Raposo.
Metropolis was the 13th feature film, and 11th surviving, directed by Fritz Lang, arguably the greatest cinematic genius Germany ever gave the World, in whose work Fate and Ethics are permanently and aptly capitalized, The MacMahonian holding with those who find that his work in Tinseltown, after fleeing the Nazis in 1936, trumps his more famous German output, matter to be revisited if and when.
For the record, Metropolis tells the story of the son of magnate and merciless enslaver of the proletarian population of the eponymous techno-industrial dystopian megacity 100 years into the future (that is, in 2026) for the benefit of a privileged few Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel), Freder Fredersen (Gustav Frölich), who falls in love at very first sight with Maria (Brigitte Helm, who thus wrote her name in golden letters in film History never to attain remotely comparable notoriety again) a sort of (now) retro-futuristic Joan of Arc/Pasionaria, who clandestinely mobilizes the oppressed masses to rebellion, in the process of which she is captured by Joh crony evil mad scientist Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), who sort of transfuses her body and soul into an Art Deco cyborg which subsequently roams the city giving the Cause a bad name till in the cusp of catastrophe Freder (spoiler alert) becomingly saves the day and harmony ensues.
Metropolis is one of maybe a handful silent films which retain household notoriety to this day in spite of, or rather due to, which, it has undergone an exceptionally tumultuous history of versions, restorations and remasterings, ranging from the original 1927 German premiere´s 153 minutes to the 1984 Giorgio Moroder horrible pomp rock soundtracked colored-in 83 minute version, culminating in a restoration based on a celluloid master found in Buenos Aires in 2001 – year in which the film was a inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register, the first film ever thus distinguished, just going to show how clueless UNESCO is – which was completed with another copy found in New Zealand that brought it to 148 minute length, presumably the closest that can be got to the original, premiered in Berlin in 2010 under the assuming title The Complete Metropolis. I had seen what may have been the 1936 91 minute version in a Fritz Lang full retrospective in the Cinemateca back in the early 80s and the dismal Moroder version alluded to above at the time of release. The version under review lasted some 2 hours at 24 frame per section projection so I suspect it was the 2001 Friedrich Murnau Stiftung version, to which the opening credits referred, and which lasts 124 minutes. So there, if anyone from Cambridge University Press ever reads the above they may offer me a job. As for Metropolis, it mixes a Marxist morality play (for which it was at the time much maligned, although we´re talking about Marxism of the reformist persuasion, viz the last minute reconciliation between Capital and Labour) with heavy Hebraic connotations of Good and Terrible Mother Goddesses and (techno, but, still) Golems, adequately camouflaged by biblical references and occasional crucifixes so as to assuage the antisemitism of the time and place.
If ever a film was (almost) saved by brilliant set design, art production, visual effects and dynamic editing in the fashion of what was, and sometimes still is, misleadingly referred to as German film expressionism, that film was Metropolis, as the hand-waving and eye-rolling acting and cartoony dramatic twists were tacky even back in 1927. François Truffaut once wrote that once a film attains a certain level of notoriety the question of its quality becomes secondary, meaning – I think – for the purposes of evaluating its socio-cultural impact. By this benchmark, Metropolis is up there with the likes of Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939) or West Side Story (Robert Wise, 1961).