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METROPOLIS
by Frtiz Lang
Fritz Lang’s first glimpse of the New York skyline is claimed to be what inspired the making of ‘Metropolis’. The result is the grandest science fiction film of the silent era, a seminal prediction of a megacity where the masses work as slaves for the good of a ruling elite. Chosen this week purely by coincidence…honest.
A huge portion of sci-fi cinema of the past century can be traced back to Lang’s production: from the mad-scientist’s creation of the robot Maria, which would feed to ‘Frankenstein’ (1931); to the imposing Art Deco cityscapes (ingeniously made using miniatures by Eugen Schüfftan), which became the model for later depictions of dystopian cities, from ‘Blade Runner’ (1982) to ‘Brazil’ (1985); to the strikingly angular set design, which is now seen as a key characteristic of the German Expressionist cinema of the 1920s.
Lang worked for over a year on his most expensive movie (equivalent today = $200 million), only to see it exhibited around the world in shortened, differently edited versions. Below is the full version of the film, as he intended:
REASONS TO WATCH
– The first film ever to be registered in the “Memory of the World-Register” of UNESCO in 2001.
– Restoring the film to its original 150 minutes became the holy grail of film archivists. The historian David Bordwell picked it as one of the greatest 150 films in the 2001 symposium Film: The Critics’ Choice, stating “it survives in several variations and a complete version may never be reconstructed”. But he added: “Nonetheless, all the footage we have displays mesmerising inventiveness.”
– The film included more than 37,000 extras including 25,000 men, 11,000 women, 1,100 bald men, 750 children. 310 shooting days were required – that’s an insane production, even by todays standards!
– Like a bit of history? Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels were big fans of the film, much to Fritz Lang’s dismay. Goebbels met with Lang and told him that he could be made an honorary Aryan despite his Jewish background. Goebbels told him “Mr Lang, we decide who is Jewish and who is not”. Lang left for Paris that very night.
– Effects expert Eugen Schüfftan created pioneering visual effects for Metropolis. Among the effects used are miniatures of the city, a camera on a swing, and most notably, the ‘Schüfftan process’, in which mirrors are used to create the illusion that actors are occupying miniature sets. The establishing shots of the city – with cars, planes and elevated trains moving about – were shot using stop-motion photography (which seem fairly simple now, but remember this was the 20s). The cars were modelled on the newest taxicabs driving the streets of Berlin. It took months to build the city model and several days to film the few short sequences. Then the lab ruined the first shots. The backgrounds in the shot had been dimly lit to create a greater sense of depth, but the head of the lab, who developed the film himself, decided that was a mistake and lightened the backgrounds, thereby destroying the sense of forced perspective. All multiple exposures were done in camera, with the film rewound and re-exposed. For some scenes, this required up to 30 different exposures.
– At the film’s premiere in Berlin on January 10, 1927, the audience burst into applause at some of the more spectacular scenes.
– Writer David Foster Wallace wanted to make a photo of Fritz Lang directing this film the cover of his most famous novel: ‘Infinite Jest‘. This was most likely due to how harsh the director was on his cast and crew, putting them through a physically strenuous and gruelling shoot. This went along with themes in the novel, in which ‘Metropolis‘ is mentioned several times. Wallace was denied permission to do so, as publishers feared his eleven hundred page book was difficult enough to market already. The book went on to be a bestseller, and Wallace remained bitter about the cover.
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Enjoy the film!