Metropolis Urbanities

By | TERRY JACK RUSSELL | The City of Tomorrow, over One-Hundred Years into the future: History is reconsidering the longevity of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis of 1927. While few films occupy as strange a position in cinema history as Metropolis. It is simultaneously one of the most influential movies ever made and one of the most mutilated, a work whose visual grammar shaped nearly a century of science-fiction filmmaking even as the film itself, for decades, existed only in fragments, cut apart by nervous distributors and reassembled, imperfectly, by generations of archivists. Directed by Fritz Lang and released in Germany in January 1927, Metropolis is at once a towering technical achievement, a politically muddled melodrama, and one of the strangest, most haunting artifacts to emerge from the golden age of Weimar cinema. Nearly a century later, it remains essential viewing, not despite its contradictions but because of them. Metropolis was produced by Universum Film AG, known as UFA, the dominant German studio of the era, and shot at the famous Babelsberg Studios outside Berlin. The scale of the production was staggering for its time and remains remarkable even now. The shoot consumed roughly 310 days and sixty nights, and the film reportedly employed as many as 37,000 extras in its crowd sequences, giving Lang the manpower to stage vast, choreographed scenes of laboring masses and city-wide chaos that few filmmakers before or since have attempted at such scale. Estimates put the cost of the production at around five million Reichsmarks, which by some modern adjustments has been valued at roughly $200 million in today’s terms, making it, by a wide margin, the most expensive silent film ever produced. That expenditure nearly bankrupted UFA outright, and the film’s disappointing initial box-office returns only deepened the studio’s financial troubles at a moment when Hollywood imports were already eroding Germany’s domestic film industry. The film premiered in Berlin on January 10, 1927, to an audience of the city’s cultural and political elite, and by most accounts the initial reception in the room was rapturous, with reports of spontaneous ovations and repeated curtain calls for Lang and his star, Brigitte Helm. That triumphant premiere, however, proved to be something of a high-water mark the film would not see again for decades. Immediately, Metropolis was edited for global distribution.

American Distributors Worried

American distributors, wary of the film’s political content and convinced that its narrative was too dense and controversial for mainstream audiences, commissioned a heavily altered version from the playwright Channing Pollock, who trimmed the picture substantially and, in the process, obscured much of its original plot logic. A similar truncated version soon appeared in Germany itself. The discarded footage was, in many cases, simply destroyed, and the original Berlin premiere cut effectively vanished. For most of the twentieth century, roughly a quarter of Lang’s original film was presumed lost forever, and the Metropolis that most audiences encountered, in scratchy public-domain prints or academic reconstructions, was a patchwork of compromises rather than the film Lang had actually made. Set, notably, in the year 2026, Metropolis imagines a towering vertical city of the future split cleanly along class lines. Above ground rises a glittering metropolis of skyscrapers, elevated highways, stadiums, and pleasure gardens, home to a wealthy ruling class that enjoys every comfort industrial civilization can provide. Beneath the surface, in a vast subterranean network of machinery and tunnels, toils an enslaved worker class, whose grinding, mechanized labor keeps the city above running while its own existence remains largely invisible to the people who benefit from it. The film’s narrative is set in motion by Freder, the pampered son of the city’s ruling master, Joh Fredersen, who by chance glimpses the underground world for the first time and is horrified by the conditions he discovers there. His growing sympathy for the workers, and his fascination with a serene, saintlike figure named Maria who preaches patience and eventual reconciliation between the two classes, drives him into direct conflict with his own father’s authoritarian rule. The plot thickens considerably with the introduction of Rotwang, a brilliant and slightly deranged inventor who has created a mechanical being, the Maschinenmensch, or “machine-man,” in a laboratory hidden in the city’s older quarters. Fredersen, alarmed by Maria’s growing influence over the workers and fearful that her message of patience might curdle into revolutionary fervor, conspires with Rotwang to have the robot reshaped in Maria’s exact likeness maybe, counter productive to their political ideologies, which at the time were viewed as hyper radical with anti-ism at its core planks.

Ultimately Resolves Conflict

The resulting false Maria is sent among the workers not to preach patience but to incite exactly the kind of violent uprising Fredersen claims to fear, a deception that plunges the city into chaos, floods the workers’ underground quarters, and endangers the very children the real Maria has been trying to protect. The film ultimately resolves its class conflict not through structural change but through a symbolic reconciliation, delivered in one of cinema’s most quoted and most criticized lines: the idea that the “heart” must mediate between the “head” and the “hands,” between the city’s planners and its laborers. It is a resolution that has struck generations of critics as politically naive at best, offering an almost fable-like sentimentality in place of any concrete vision of social transformation. The film’s cast, largely composed of actors closely associated with German silent cinema, brought considerable range to roles that the screenplay, co-written by Lang and his then-wife Thea von Harbou, sometimes rendered more as archetypes than as fully realized characters. Gustav Fröhlich played Freder with an earnest, wide-eyed physicality suited to the character’s journey from sheltered aristocrat to reluctant revolutionary. Alfred Abel brought a cold, controlled authority to Joh Fredersen, the city’s master, while Rudolf Klein-Rogge, a Lang regular, gave Rotwang a wild-eyed intensity that has echoed through nearly a century of mad-scientist performances since. The film’s true center of gravity, though, belongs to Brigitte Helm, who was cast in the demanding dual role of the saintly Maria and her mechanical double. Helm was remarkably young when the film went into production, and the shoot proved to be a genuinely grueling experience for her; she would later describe the making of Metropolis as one of the worst experiences of her professional life, a testament to Lang’s famously exacting and sometimes punishing directorial methods, which reportedly left few members of the cast or crew unscathed. Whatever the human cost of achieving it, Helm’s performance remains the film’s most electric element, particularly in her portrayal of the false Maria, whose leering, serpentine physicality stands in stark, deliberate contrast to the real Maria’s stillness and grace. The image of the robotic Maschinenmensch, gradually transformed through a striking visual effects sequence into Helm’s likeness, remains one of the most reproduced and referenced images in the entire history of science-fiction cinema. Revolutionary, with respect to time — at the early dawn of film making technology and its future—unprecedented.

Simplistic Political Vision

If the film’s political vision has often struck critics as simplistic, its visual achievement has never been seriously disputed. Metropolis stands as one of the defining works of German Expressionist cinema, and its production designers, Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut, and Karl Vollbrecht, built a vision of the future city that has proven astonishingly durable in the popular imagination. The towering skyline of Metropolis, with its dense clusters of skyscrapers and elevated roadways, anticipates the visual language of urban science fiction that would follow it for the rest of the twentieth century; critics and filmmakers alike have repeatedly traced a direct line from Lang’s imagined cityscape to later landmark works, most famously Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, but also to Star Wars and countless other films that borrowed the film’s iconography of soaring towers, oppressive machinery, and workers dwarfed by the architecture of industrial power. The design of the Maschinenmensch itself, with its sleek, articulated metal body, established a visual template for cinematic robots that filmmakers were still drawing on generations later. Lang achieved many of the film’s most celebrated effects through techniques that were, in 1927, at the very edge of what was technically possible, including elaborate miniature work and the Schüfftan process, a mirror-based special-effects technique that allowed models and live actors to be combined seamlessly within a single frame, years before such compositing became standard practice in special-effects filmmaking. The result is a film whose images have retained their power to startle even in an age saturated with digital spectacle; the crowd sequences of workers marching in mechanical unison, the flooding of the underground city, and the eerie transformation of the robot into Maria’s double all remain images of genuine, unsettling force. Perhaps no aspect of Metropolis‘s history is more remarkable than the decades-long effort to recover the film Lang had actually made. Because the discarded footage from the original cut had largely been destroyed, restorers were forced to work for years with incomplete materials, patching together the clearest available prints and using intertitles to summarize scenes that could not be recovered. Reconstruction attempts appeared in 1972 and again in 1984, the latter most widely known for pairing a re-edited version of the film with a controversial new synthesizer-driven score by the composer Giorgio Moroder, a version that, whatever its historical fidelity, helped introduce the film to a new generation of viewers a cult following.

Restoration Efforts Continue

Continuing restoration efforts followed, in 1987 and again in 2001, when the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung commissioned a new 75th-anniversary version that was widely regarded, at the time, as the definitive edition. Then, in 2008, came an extraordinary discovery. A damaged sixteen-millimeter print, held for decades in a film archive in Buenos Aires, was found to contain a nearly complete copy of Lang’s original 1927 cut, including roughly twenty-five minutes of footage long believed lost entirely. The find was the product of years of dogged searching by archivists including Paula Félix-Didier and Fernando Peña, and its significance to film history is difficult to overstate. Incorporated into a new restoration that premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2010, this newly recovered footage filled in crucial narrative gaps, restoring entire subplots, including material involving mistaken identity and additional character motivations, that had been stripped from every version audiences had seen for more than eighty years. Critics who saw the restored version often described the experience as encountering the film anew: a work that finally cohered as the story Lang and von Harbou had actually constructed, rather than the fractured, sometimes baffling narrative that circulated in prior decades. Metropolis has never been a film beloved for the sophistication of its politics. Its vision of class reconciliation through sentimental mediation rather than structural change has struck many critics, across nearly a century of commentary, as its weakest element, a fable’s answer to a problem the film itself takes seriously as tragedy. And yet the durability of Metropolis has very little to do with the persuasiveness of its social message and everything to do with the sheer, sustained force of its imagination. It is a film that essentially invented the visual vocabulary later science-fiction cinema would spend generations refining, and its central images, the divided city, the false prophet in mechanical form, the workers swallowed by the machinery of industry, remain as potent today as they were to the astonished audience in Berlin in January 1927. Recovered, restored, and finally complete, Metropolis stands not merely as a historical curiosity but as one of the true foundational texts of science-fiction cinema, a monument built, appropriately enough, from ambition, excess, and no small amount of human cost should be noted.

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