Metropolis

Metropolis (1927)

Recommendations: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009), Requiem for a Dream, Dawn of the Dead

Reflections: My First Silent...

...was Metropolis.

No way I’m alone on this one. Metropolis is probably the most famous silent film among people under 60, and they can find it everywhere: on television, tape, laserdisc or DVD; legit or bootlegged, at lengths ranging from one hour to nearly three. I’ve seen Metropolis more times than any other silent film. Metropolis is the only silent film most of my friends have watched. And it seems we’ll all get to see it fresh again: in 2008, a batch of new footage was discovered in Argentina, prompting talk of another restoration.
Metropolis still resonates because of the potent, standalone images it provides. The plot is basic, not terribly convincing, and not even stable, considering the radically different cuts viewers have been exposed to through the decades. It’s the pictures that last, and appropriately, it’s through still pictures that I first came to know the film.
In 1984, in our town library, in the dusty back shelves, was a beat-up science fiction film book. It charted the development of science fiction movies from their origins in 19th century popular novels all the way to the present day—that being the early-60s. (Our library wasn’t blessed with many benefactors when I was young.) The book’s editors mused about the effects a successful moon-landing might one day have on the genre.
I was only eight, and I don’t remember much else about the book, aside from its fatness and photos. It must have devoted space to A Trip to the Moon (1902) and the Flash Gordon serials, and The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and The Forbidden Planet (1956). Those last two are terrific sound films, both of which left us iconic robots:






But I don’t recall Robbie or Gort in those pages. I do remember this:




 

If you’d asked eight-year-old-me what the future looked like, I’d have held up my plastic Rebel snow-speeder. The future was filled with machines, yes, and great, tall shining towers; but all of it was in colour, and loud and fast. Black-and-white meant old. I’d never seen a black-and-white movie, other than first quarter of The Wizard of Oz, and really, wasn’t the point of that to wow you with what colour could do? And by the way, the future had too many rocket engines and laser guns blasting to ever be silent.




Ask me what a robot was and I’d have set down the snow-speeder and picked up Optimus Prime. To me, the idea of a sentient robot was not strange. Depicting one with feminine form? That certainly was. These pictures were not simply strange to me; they were transgressive. They stepped over the boundaries my pop culture had marked for me. They made the future look old, and in so doing, taught me that the future is a concept informed by the present, not a set of predictable and inevitable developments. Most importantly, they broadened my sense of the age of film. I thought the 1940s were plenty ancient, since they produced my parents. The 1920s? They produced my grandmother, for pete’s sake.




If I’d had access to a World Wide Web in the early-80s, I would have tracked down a copy of Metropolis. But there was no ’Net, nor even a big-box video store where I lived. I closed the book on this film (literally) for many years. About six years, actually. And I owe my re-awakening to pretty base circumstances.

A fourteen-year old boy from a good home in a developed country has few real challenges, but I did have a small one: finding movies with boobs in them. Like any young gentleman in the early, ’Net-less 90s, I had only three options:

1. Porn.
Bootlegged, of course. Rickety VHS tapes were occasionally smuggled between houses, usually without parental crackdown. But urgent, vigorous rewinding diminishes the performances within, and really, these flicks weren’t as erotic as we’d hoped.

2. Erotica.
You couldn’t rent porn from the local indy video store, but you could rent this stuff. Too bad the front counter was always manned. Erotica guaranteed boobage and humiliation in equal volume, forcing every teenage boy to choose between two, temporary masters: Dignity and Desire.

No contest.

For starters, you made sure no one would be behind you in line. If the store was busy, you just wandered around until it wasn’t. This could take a long time. Step two was removal of the tape-sleeve from the rack, to be performed briskly and without halt—same principal as a drive-by shooting. The sleeve was to be held cover-side down, obscuring the artwork between your forearm and thigh. The transaction was to be made without eye contact or small talk of any kind.
I had an extra tactic: I’d rent something classy alongside the dirt. I remember renting Citizen Kane and Wild Orchid on the same day. (It wasn’t a problem to watch them both in an evening, thanks to fast-forwarding.) I thought this made me look like less of a loser sleazebag. I may have been wrong.

3. The third way.
The biggest longshot, but also the least embarrassing. If you could stay up until 1:00 a.m. on a Friday night in my town, you could see one of City-TV’s ‘baby blue’ movies. They were ‘blue’ because they always—always—gave you a sex scene. But you had to wait for it. Plus, City-TV punished you by going to commercial (it seemed) every five minutes, for five minutes, shilling Bad Boy Furniture and Three-for-One Pizza while you got anxious.
The better the movie, the worse it was. The truly gratuitous sex movies at least brought you the goods on a regular basis. But films that tried to elevate the sex (while still giving you gobs of it) usually put you through a first hour of overwrought, way-too-celibate ‘meaning’ that still pretty much sucked. So teens like me, who had no taste but were capable of developing some, learned what times were safest to switch the channel. The ideal time was immediately after a sex scene had ended. And I remember doing just that one night, flipping channels rapidly upward with no destination in mind, when I found Metropolis on the French-language station.



 

It was well into the third act. The hero and heroine, Freder and Maria, were trapped in the underground city that housed the labouring class. The labourers were above ground, rioting; no one remained in the caverns but their children, and now water was rushing into the caves, threatening to drown them all. Freder and Maria drew the children out of the tenements and up to the highest point they could find. On the surface, the workers’ uprising raged on and its evil robot-instigator was burned alive.
Imagine a fourteen-year old, sitting cross-legged on a hard carpet in front of a small TV, in the middle of the night, with every light in his house switched off, seeing all this. Sexier entertainment had fixed my eyes to that screen well before I found the French station; fear of being caught had tuned my ear to the slightest meaningful sound—creaks, toilet flushes, footfalls on floorboards. No matter how base my reasons, I was absolutely in the right state of mind for Metropolis’ pivotal third act, and it gave me much. I perceived film in a wholly new way



 

 
My town had its own Blockbuster by now, so the next day I headed there to rent Metropolis. Blockbuster did not carry it, but they could order it. Six weeks later I marched back into the store, straight to the cashier, and with half-a-dozen people in line behind me, paid for my first silent film. Now, that tape spurred me to watch hundreds more silent films, and eventually, to start this blog. So it seems right to conclude this entry with a thank you to the casts and crews of Under Cover, Animal Instincts, Bodies of Evidence, Sheer Passion, Intimate Deception, Animal Instincts III: The Seductress, and all their colleagues. Without you, I wouldn’t be here.

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Last updated: 2010-04-13 02:12:16 by user06

The Holy Grail?

Is Metropolis finally complete? Ain't It Cool says yes.

Count me among the thousands who'll be buying a ticket to see this one--in the theatre, as God and/or Lang intended--when it arrives in Toronto. Metropolis is the world's most famous silent film, and deservedly so. Not only has it inspired thousands of filmmakers, it's also been the first step to silent film-fandom for hundreds of thousands of cinema lovers, myself included. Love it or hate it (and it does inspire its own brand of passionate haters), Metropolis remains a uniquely accessible silent film. I can't wait to see what I've been missing.

For a story about how I first discovered Metropolis (and by extention, the very subject of this blog), click here.

Last updated: 2010-04-10 23:38:52 by user06

METROPOLIS

METROPOLIS is the mother of them all -- not only is it the first science fiction epic to grace the world's theatre screens, it set the standard for futuristic imagery that has not been surpassed even to this day. Utilizing a stunning mixture of Germanic Gothicism and Art Deco, Director Fritz Lang's vivid vision of a future dystopic world where the urban proletariat workers must live and toil underground continues to haunt viewers today just as much as it did upon its initial theatrical release in 1926.

Taking almost two full years to shoot and utilizing over 37,000 extras, METROPOLIS was produced on a scale that staggers the imagination. It is a cinematic classic set in the distant future, where the splendid skyscraper city of Metropolis is divided into two distinct castes: the workers, who toil in the gloomy underground and go drearily about the chore of running machines that power the city; and the elite, who inhabit the gleaming towers of the surface world and live a life of luxury. Two groups of citizens, separate from one another in physical space and social influence, where one works and has little wealth while the other has wealth and does little or no work.

When a beautiful young girl implores the son of the Master Industrialist that the subterranean workers are "his brothers," it is feared that she is a threat to the order and security of the status quo. A crazed inventor is ordered to build a robot in the girl's likeness and a convoluted plan to quell any surging hope for a better, more equitable life for the underground laborers backfires. The ensuing revolt destroys much of the city. In the end, however, labor and capital join hands to make a better place for one and all.

Director Fritz Lange's plea for human dignity is inexorably tied to the social climate of Germany in the mid-twenties. It serves as a cultural mirror of a time and place heavily influenced by the horrors of the First World War, when Victorian infatuation with mechanical progress became fouled with the massacres and inhumanity created by the industrialism that produced conscript armies where millions died in front of machine guns and tanks and flame throwers and other mass-produced mechanized instruments of destruction. Back then scientific progress was usually measured in terms of productivity, not on mankind's betterment. Sadly, things aren't much different today.



Over eighty years later, METROPOLIS remains a thought-provoking cinematic experience; a timeless warning against fascist tyranny, communist oppression and capitalism run amuck. As the closing of the film declares, "There can be no understanding between the hand and the brain, unless the heart acts as a mediator." A simple missive from a previous age of anxiety. It was true then. It remains true today.

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Robert A. Nowotny

Movie Review - Metropolis

See, I told you that I would eventually get this review up. I watched it last night because it was a combination of wanting to and having to. I wanted to because I heard it was a good movie, and I had to because I have to write a short paper on it about how it uses film elements for my final assignment. So basically it all worked out in the long run.

Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang, is a science fiction silent movie set in a futuristic - well, what better word for it than metropolis. Alfred Abel plays John Fredersen, the man who runs the metropolis with the help of his engineer Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) and with information from Grot (Heinrich George), who helps maintain the giant machine and is like the manager of the workers. But these workers, the lowly people, are sent under the sprawling city into the factory, where they are worked almost to death in ten hours of torture running the machines. People die and they just bring in new workers. There's much disregard for anyone as human being from the higher powers, and mainly the machines are what is the most important thing about the metropolis, because if they are not maintained, the city's water reservoir will flood everything. Fredersen's son, Freder (played by Gustav Frolich, and how awkward would it be to be named Freder Fredersen?) stumbles upon the hardships of the workers' factory after he is led underground by the mysterious Maria (Brigitte Helm), who wants to find a heart to the brains of the metropolis, or Freder's father, and the hands of the metropolis, or Grot. Freder begins to work alongside the lowly people to know how it feels, and after Maria tries to let the workers know that a moderator will come along to allay their troubles in the factories, Rotwang kidnaps Maria to make a robot that looks exactly like her. John uses the robot to incite a riot in the workers so that he has the ability to use force against them, but chaos ensues as the reservoir floods the city and the townspeople go after Maria.

Metropolis was well ahead of its time. The factories and the shots of the metropolis all look fantastic and life-like. The giant machine is just amazing, and the workers toiling inside of it just adds to the incredible realism of the thing. I was completely shocked by the explosion of the giant machine towards the beginning of the film, and then the replacement of the dead workers by casually bringing in new ones. When we think of advancements in technology, we think of better lives for ourselves, but right from the get-go, Metropolis shows us that this new technology has brought out slaves in the ordinary people.

Brigitte Helm as the robot was fantastic, as her very exaggerated movements create the realism of a newly-designed cyborg. Also, Helm's eyes really shine forth in this movie, as she needs few words but just her expressions to be effective. Klein-Rogge as Rotwang is a creepy individual, a seedy man who has deep and dark eyes, who has lost his arm creating this technology that inevitably destroys their "perfect" metropolis.

The film truly shows how the men and women are slaves in this city. Not only are they all the same, they are easily persuaded by any man smart enough to come along and engage their interests and anger. The use of just one robot who tears the city down brick by brick has great implications even in our age, where technology has become increasingly more sophisticated to the point where there is not much more to go before we start replacing humans with robots.

Though a silent film, the expressions and breathtaking shots of caverns, city vistas, and the activity of the machines creates enough of a pace where one won't get bored. I thought a few shots hung around a little too long, such as the chase scene between the real Maria and Rotwang in the lower dungeons. But other than that, the movie does a good job of keeping the pace up for it's 2 hour runtime.

The impact of the themes presented here trace throughout science fiction films and books. Though there are some crazy parts to the movie that don't add a whole lot to the plot, such as the Seven Deadly Sins scene or when Freder sees Moloch in the giant machine, the good majority of the movie is straight forward. The plot twists aren't so hard to see, as towards the end of the movie you'll probably know exactly what's going to happen. But not only is the film energetic and frantic, it's also spooky. Unintentionally, the giant machine and the robot both have a facade about them that gives them a terrifying feeling.

Unfortunately, the movie does require people to read, and in 2008, people don't love to read when they don't have to (see such films as ANY FOREIGN FILM WITH SUBTITLES). If you can get through minimal dialogue and readings, then you'll be fine watching this film. It's entertaining, it's intense, it's interesting, and everything else you can think of that you would want in a movie.

If you haven't seen this movie, you should probably do so. It seems like a really influential film in the science fiction genre, and it's amazing what they did in 1927. Oh, and by the way - this is a much better film than Blade Runner - let the bullets fly.

Last updated: 2010-01-18 03:18:32 by user01