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In the futuristic year of 2026, in the city of Metropolis,
wealthy industrialists reign from high-rise towers, while underground-dwelling
workers toil to operate the underground machines that power the city. Joh
Fredersen is the city's master. His son Freder idles away his time in a
pleasure garden, but is interrupted by the arrival of a young woman named
Maria, who has brought a group of workers' children to witness the lifestyle of
the rich. Maria and the children are ushered away, but Freder, fascinated, goes
to the machine rooms to find her. Witnessing the explosion of a huge machine
that kills and injures several workers, he also has a hallucination. The
machine is Moloch and the workers are being fed, some naked, into the flames
within Moloch. After the hallucination ends and he sees the dead workers being
carried away on stretchers, he hurries to tell Fredersen about the accident.
Grot, foreman of the Heart Machine, brings to Fredersen secret maps found on
the dead workers. Fredersen, upset with his assistant, Josaphat, that he was
informed about the explosion and plans from Freder and Grot and not from
Josaphat, fires him. Freder secretly rebels against Fredersen by deciding to
help the workers, after seeing his father's cold indifference towards the harsh
conditions they face.
  
Fredersen takes the maps to the inventor Rotwang to learn
their meaning. Rotwang had been in love with a woman named Hel, who left him to
marry Fredersen and later died giving birth to Freder. Rotwang shows Fredersen
a robot he has built to "resurrect" Hel. The maps show a network of
catacombs beneath Metropolis, and the two men go to investigate. They eavesdrop
on a gathering of workers, including Freder. Maria addresses them, prophesying
the arrival of a mediator who can bring the working and ruling classes
together. Freder believes that he could fill the role and declares his love for
Maria. Fredersen orders Rotwang to give Maria's likeness to the robot so that
it can ruin her reputation among the workers to prevent any rebellion.
Fredersen is unaware that Rotwang plans to use the robot to kill Freder and
take over Metropolis. Rotwang kidnaps Maria, transfers her likeness to the
robot and sends her to Fredersen. Freder finds the two embracing and, believing
it is the real Maria, falls into a prolonged delirium. Intercut with his
hallucinations, the false Maria unleashes chaos throughout Metropolis, driving
men to murder and stirring dissent amongst the workers.
  
Freder recovers and returns to the catacombs. Finding the
false Maria urging the workers to rise up and destroy the machines, Freder
accuses her of not being the real Maria. The workers follow the false Maria
from their city to the machine rooms, leaving their children behind. They destroy
the Heart Machine, which causes the workers' city below to flood. The real
Maria, having escaped from Rotwang's house, rescues the children with the help
of Freder. Grot berates the celebrating workers for abandoning their children
in the flooded city. Believing their children to be dead, the hysterical
workers capture the false Maria and burn her at the stake. A horrified Freder
watches, not understanding the deception until the fire reveals her to be a
robot. Rotwang is delusional, seeing the real Maria as his lost Hel, and he
chases her to the roof of the cathedral, pursued by Freder. The two men fight
as Fredersen and the workers watch from the street. Rotwang falls to his death.
Freder fulfills his role as mediator by linking the hands of Fredersen and Grot
to bring them together.
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Metropolis is a 1927 German expressionist epic
science-fiction drama film directed by Fritz Lang. Scripted by Thea von Harbou,
with collaboration from Lang himself,it starred Gustav Fröhlich, Brigitte Helm,
Alfred Abel and Rudolf Klein-Rogge. Erich Pommer produced it in the Babelsberg
Studios for Universum Film A.G. The silent film is regarded as a pioneering
work of the science-fiction genre in movies, being among the first
feature-length movies of the genre.
Made in Germany during the Weimar Period, Metropolis is set
in a futuristic urban dystopia and follows the attempts of Freder, the wealthy
son of the city's ruler, and Maria, a poor worker, to overcome the vast gulf
separating the classes of their city. Filming took place in 1925 at a cost of
approximately five million Reichsmarks. The art direction draws influence from
Bauhaus, Cubist and Futurist design.
Metropolis was met with a mixed reception upon release.
Critics found it pictorially beautiful and lauded its complex special effects,
but accused its story of naiveté. The film's extensive running time also came
in for criticism, as well as its alleged Communist message.[8] Metropolis was
cut substantially after its German premiere, removing a large portion of Lang's
original footage.
Numerous attempts have been made to restore the film since
the 1970s. Music producer Giorgio Moroder released a truncated version with a
soundtrack by rock artists such as Freddie Mercury, Loverboy and Adam Ant in
1984. A new reconstruction of Metropolis was shown at the Berlin Film Festival
in 2001, and the film was inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in
the same year, the first film thus distinguished. In 2008 a damaged print of
Lang's original cut of the film was found in a museum in Argentina. After a
long restoration process, the film was 95% restored and shown on large screens
in Berlin and Frankfurt simultaneously on 12 February 2010.
Metropolis features a range of elaborate special effects and
set designs, ranging from a huge gothic cathedral to a futuristic cityscape. In
an interview, Fritz Lang reported that "the film was born from my first
sight of the skyscrapers in New York in October 1924". He had visited New
York for the first time and remarked "I looked into the streets – the
glaring lights and the tall buildings – and there I conceived Metropolis."
Describing his first impressions of the city, Lang said that "the
buildings seemed to be a vertical sail, scintillating and very light, a
luxurious backdrop, suspended in the dark sky to dazzle, distract and
hypnotize". He added "The sight of Neuyork alone should be enough to turn this beacon of
beauty into the center of a film..."
The appearance of the city in Metropolis is strongly
informed by the Art Deco movement; however it also incorporates elements from
other traditions. Ingeborg Hoesterey described the architecture featured in
Metropolis as eclectic, writing how its locales represent both
"functionalist modernism [and] art deco" whilst also featuring
"the scientist’s archaic little house with its high-powered laboratory,
the catacombs [and] the Gothic cathedral". The film’s use of art deco
architecture was highly influential, and has been reported to have contributed
to the style’s subsequent popularity in Europe and America.
The film drew heavily on biblical sources for several of its
key set-pieces. During her first talk to the workers, Maria uses the story of
the Tower of Babel to highlight the discord between the intellectuals and the
workers. Additionally, a delusional Freder imagines the false-Maria as the
Whore of Babylon, riding on the back of a many-headed dragon.
The name of the Yoshiwara club alludes to the famous
red-light district of Tokyo.
Much of the plot line of Metropolis stems from the First
World War and the culture of the Weimar Republic in Germany. Lang explores the
themes of industrialization and mass production in his film; two developments
that played a large role in the war. Other post-World War I themes that Lang
includes in Metropolis include the Weimar view of American modernity, fascism,
and communism.
Pre-production
The screenplay of Metropolis was written by Thea von Harbou,
a popular writer in Weimar Germany, jointly with Lang, her then-husband. The
film's plot originated from a novel of the same title written by Harbou for the
sole purpose of being made into a film. The novel in turn drew inspiration from
H. G. Wells, Mary Shelley and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's works and other German
dramas. The novel featured strongly in the film's marketing campaign, and was
serialized in the journal Illustriertes Blatt in the run-up to its release.
Harbou and Lang collaborated on the screenplay derived from the novel, and
several plot points and thematic elements – including most of the references to
magic and occultism present in the novel – were dropped. The screenplay itself
went through many re-writes, and at one point featured an ending where Freder
would have flown to the stars; this plot element later became the basis for
Lang's Woman in the Moon.
The time setting of Metropolis is open to interpretation.
The 2010 re-release and reconstruction, which incorporated the original title
cards written by Thea von Harbou, do not specify a year. Prior to the
reconstruction, Lotte Eisner and Paul M. Jensen placed the events happening
around the year 2000. Giorgio Moroder’s re-scored version included a title card
placing the film in 2026, while Paramount’s original US release stated that the
film takes place in the year 3000.
Filming
Metropolis began principal photography on 22 May 1925 with
an initial budget of 1.5 million reichsmarks. Lang cast two unknowns with
little film experience in the lead roles. Gustav Fröhlich (Freder) had worked
in vaudeville and was originally employed as an extra on Metropolis before Thea
von Harbou recommended him to Lang. Brigitte Helm (Maria) had been given a
screen test by Lang after he met her on the set of Die Nibelungen, but would
make her feature film debut with Metropolis. In the role of Joh Fredersen, Lang
cast Alfred Abel, a noted stage and screen actor whom he had worked with on Dr.
Mabuse the Gambler. Lang also cast his frequent collaborator Rudolph
Klein-Rogge in the role of Rotwang. This was Klein-Rogge's fourth film with
Lang, after Destiny, Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, and Die Nibelungen.
Shooting of the film was a draining experience for the
actors involved due to the demands that Lang placed on them. For the scene
where the worker's city was flooded, Helm and 500 children from the poorest
districts of Berlin had to work for 14 days in a pool of water that Lang
intentionally kept at a low temperature. Lang would frequently demand numerous
re-takes, and took two days to shoot a simple scene where Freder collapses at
Maria's feet; by the time Lang was satisfied with the footage he had shot,
actor Gustav Fröhlich found he could barely stand. Other anecdotes involve
Lang's insistence on using real fire for the climactic scene where the false
Maria is burnt at the stake (which resulted in Helm's dress catching fire), and
his ordering extras to throw themselves towards powerful jets of water when
filming the flooding of the worker's city. UFA invited several trade journal
representatives and several film critics to see the film's shooting as parts of
its promotion campaign.
Helm recalled her experiences of shooting the film in a
contemporary interview, saying that "the night shots lasted three weeks,
and even if they did lead to the greatest dramatic moments – even if we did
follow Fritz Lang’s directions as though in a trance, enthusiastic and
enraptured at the same time – I can’t forget the incredible strain that they
put us under. The work wasn’t easy, and the authenticity in the portrayal ended
up testing our nerves now and then. For instance, it wasn’t fun at all when
Grot drags me by the hair, to have me burned at the stake. Once I even fainted:
during the transformation scene, Maria, as the android, is clamped in a kind of
wooden armament, and because the shot took so long, I didn’t get enough
air."
Shooting lasted over a year, and was finally completed on 30
October 1926. By the time shooting finished, the film's budget leapt to 5.1
million reichsmarks.
Special effects
The 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. This new technique was seen again just two years later in Alfred
Hitchcock's film Blackmail (1929).
The Maschinenmensch – the robot built by Rotwang to
resurrect his lost love Hel – was created by sculptor Walter
Schulze-Mittendorff. A whole-body plaster cast was taken of actress Brigitte
Helm, and the costume was then constructed around it. A chance discovery of a
sample of "plastic wood" (a pliable substance designed as
wood-filler) allowed Schulze-Mittendorff to build a costume that would both
appear metallic and allow a small amount of free movement. Helm sustained cuts
and bruises while in character as the robot, as the costume was rigid and
uncomfortable.
The Magic of METROPOLIS (Fritz Lang, Germany, 1927)
Made at the height of
the German Expressionist movement in the Weimar Republic, Metropolis almost
bankrupted German studio UFA, costing more than 500,000 Reichsmarks (at least
$1 million in 1927). But as a result,
Metropolis is one of the most spectacular and technically ground-breaking movies
of all time. Set in the far future (the
year 2000!), the film imagines a massive, industrially driven city, split
between the privileged industry leaders and their sons who live lives of
leisure in pleasure gardens and sports stadia, and the oppressed proletariat,
who live underground and are treated no better than lobotomized robots. In
addition to visualizing such a city–inspired in part by director Fritz Lang’s
first visit to New York City–Lang also imagined an actual robot, who through
some crypto-science and movie magic is transformed into a woman
indistinguishable from her human model (except for being oversexed–watch out
for her Art Deco striptease scene!).
George Lucas has admitted that C3PO in Star Wars was directly inspired
by Lang’s character.
Brigette Helm, who played both the virginal Maria and her
robotic doppelganger, was only 18 years old when Metropolis started
filming. Metropolis also features a
definitive performance by Rudolf Klein-Rogge as the mad scientist Rotwang, one
of many inspirations for Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. (Both have prosthetic/mechanical hands–a
trope that shows up in Star Wars too).
But despite their best efforts, the cast is ultimately
overshadowed by the special effects.
Massive scale-model sets were built to convey the scope of the
futuristic city with its layered overpasses and airplane traffic. Each of the 300 automobiles in the photo
above were moved by hand in a frame-by-frame stop-motion process. The production also took advantage of Eugen
Schufftan, who invented “the Schufftan process,” which uses mirrors to insert
live-action footage of actors into the same shot as miniatures. Multiple exposure was also used to combine
many images in one (as in the images of eyes ogling the robot Maria)–this was
done all in-camera, rewinding the same film over and over again to get each
additional piece. The film took more
than 310 days to shoot and required hundreds of technicians.
Lang is notable not only for his visual genius, but also for
his “legendary cruelty” toward his cast.
According to Frank Miller for TCM:
Whether it was just perfectionism or a sadistic streak
(which could be mirrored in the violence in his films), Lang drove cast and
crew relentlessly, with little regard for their health or safety. He spent two
days rehearsing and shooting a simple scene in which Frohlich collapses at
Helms’ feet. By the time he was finished, the actor could barely stand. During
a fight scene, Frohlich dislocated his thumb, but Lang only gave him a
half-hour to recover going back to work on the scene. During the flooding of
the worker’s living areas, he kept directing the extras and children to throw
themselves at the biggest water jets until they were almost drowned. When it
came time for the workers to burn the robot Maria at the stake, he insisted on
using real flames for the shots of Helm. At one point, her dress accidentally
caught fire.
The original conception for Metropolis was a collaboration
between Fritz Lang and his (second) wife, Thea von Harbou. Lang has claimed
that Josef Goebbels offered to make him the head of UFA, directing films for
Adolf Hitler (whose favorite film was reported to be Metropolis). According to the legend, Lang fled Germany by
train that same night, in fear because of his Jewish heritage. (Although raised
Roman Catholic, his mother was Jewish.) Von Harbou, a Nazi sympathizer, did not
follow and they divorced, ending their decade-long collaboration. He eventually emigrated to Hollywood, where
he directed such influential noir films as Fury and The Big Heat.
METROPOLIS
Metropolis Movie
Review
METROPOLIS (1927)
Roger Ebert
June 2, 2010
The opening shots of the restored “Metropolis” are so crisp
and clear they come as a jolt. This mistreated masterpiece has been seen until
now mostly in battered prints missing footage that was, we now learn,
essential. Because of a 16mm print discovered in 2008 in Buenos Aires, it
stands before us as more or less the film that Fritz Lang originally made in
1927. It is, says expert David Bordwell, “one of the great sacred monsters of
the cinema.”
Lang tells of a towering city of the future. Above ground,
it has spires and towers, elevated highways, an Olympian stadium and Pleasure
Gardens. Below the surface is a workers' city where the clocks show 10 hours to
squeeze out more work time, the workers live in tenement housing and work
consists of unrelenting service to a machine. This vision of plutocracy vs.
labor would have been powerful in an era when the assembly line had been
introduced on a large scale and Marx had encouraged class warfare.
Lang created one of the unforgettable original places in the
cinema. “Metropolis” fixed for countless later films the image of a futuristic
city as a hell of material progress and human despair. From this film, in
various ways, descended not only “Dark City” but “Blade Runner,” “The Fifth
Element,” “Alphaville,” “Escape From L.A.,” “Gattaca” and Batman's Gotham City.
The laboratory of its evil genius, Rotwang, created the visual look of mad
scientists for decades to come, especially after it was so closely mirrored in
“Bride of Frankenstein” (1935). The device of the “false Maria,” the robot who
looks like a human being, inspired the Replicants of “Blade Runner.” Even
Rotwang's artificial hand was given homage in “Dr. Strangelove.”
The missing footage restored in this version comes to about
30 minutes, bringing the total running time to about 150 minutes. Bordwell,
informed by the chief restorer, Martin Koerber of the German Cinematheque,
observes that while the cuts simplified “Metropolis” into a science-fiction
film, the restoration emphasizes subplots involving mistaken identities. We all
remember the “two Marias”: the good, saintly human and her malevolent robot
copy, both played by Brigitte Helm. We now learn that the hero, Freder, also
changes places with the worker Georgy, in an attempt to identify with the
working class. Freder's father, Fredersen, is the ruler of Metropolis.
The purpose of the tall, cadaverous Thin Man, assigned by
Freder's father to follow him, is also made more clear. And we learn more about
the relationship between Fredersen and the mad scientist Rotwang, and Rotwang's
love for the ruler's late wife. This woman, named Hel, was lost in the shorter
version for the simplistic reason that her name on the pedestal of a sculpture
resembled “Hell,” and distributors feared audiences would misunderstand.
“Metropolis” employed vast sets, thousands of extras and
astonishing special effects to create its two worlds. Lang's film is the summit
of German Expressionism, with its combination of stylized sets, dramatic camera
angles, bold shadows and frankly artificial theatrics.
The production itself made even Stanley Kubrick's mania for
control look benign. According to Patrick McGilligan's book Fritz Lang: The
Nature of the Beast, the extras were hurled into violent mob scenes, made to
stand for hours in cold water and handled more like props than human beings.
The heroine was made to jump from high places, and when she was burned at a
stake, Lang used real flames. The irony was that Lang's directorial style was
not unlike the approach of the villain in his film.
The good Maria, always bathed in light, seems to be the
caretaker of the worker's children — all of them, it sometimes appears. After
Maria glimpses the idyllic life of the surface, she becomes a revolutionary
firebrand and stirs up the workers. Rotwang, instructed by Fredersen, captures
this Maria, and transfers her face to the robot. Now the workers, still
following Maria, can be fooled and controlled by the false Maria.
Lang's story is broad, to put it mildly. Do not seek here
for psychological insights. The storytelling is mostly visual. Lang avoided as
many intertitles as possible, and depends on images of startling originality.
Consider the first glimpse of the underground power plant, with workers
straining to move heavy dial hands back and forth. What they're doing makes no
logical sense, but visually the connection is obvious: They are controlled like
hands on a clock. When the machinery explodes, Freder has a vision in which the
machinery turns into an obscene, devouring monster.
Other dramatic visual sequences: a chase scene in the
darkened catacombs, with the real Maria pursued by Rotwang (the beam of his
light acts like a club to bludgeon her). The image of the Tower of Babel as
Maria addresses the workers. Their faces, arrayed in darkness from the top to
the bottom of the screen. The doors in Rotwang's house, opening and closing on
their own. The lascivious dance of the false Maria, as the workers look on, the
screen filled with large, wet, staring eyeballs. The flood of the lower city
and the undulating arms of the children flocking to Maria to be saved.
Much of what we see in “Metropolis” doesn't exist, except in
visual trickery. The special effects were the work of Eugene Schufftan, who
later worked in Hollywood as the cinematographer of “Lilith” and “The Hustler.”
According to Magill's Survey of Cinema, his photographic system “allowed people
and miniature sets to be combined in a single shot, through the use of mirrors,
rather than laboratory work.” Other effects were created in the camera by
cinematographer Karl Freund.
The result was astonishing for its time. Without all of the
digital tricks of today, “Metropolis” fills the imagination. Today, the effects
look like effects, but that's their appeal. Looking at the original “King
Kong,” I find that its effects, primitive by modern standards, gain a certain
weird effectiveness. Because they look odd and unworldly compared to the slick,
utterly convincing effects that are now possible, they're more evocative: The
effects in modern movies are done so well that we seem to be looking at real
things, which is not quite the same kind of fun.
The restoration is not pristine. Some shots retain the scratches
picked up by the original 35mm print from which the 16mm Buenos Aires copy was
made; these are insignificant compared to the rediscovered footage they
represent. There are still a few gaps, but because the original screenplay
exists, they're filled in by title cards. In general, this is a “Metropolis” we
have never seen, both in length and quality.
Although Lang saw his movie as anti-authoritarian, the Nazis
liked it enough to offer him control of their film industry (he fled to the
United States instead). Some of the visual ideas in “Metropolis” seem echoed in
Leni Riefenstahl's pro-Hitler “Triumph of the Will” (1935) — where, of course,
they have lost their irony.
“Metropolis” does what many great films do, creating a time,
place and characters so striking that they become part of our arsenal of images
for imagining the world. Lang filmed for nearly a year, driven by obsession,
often cruel to his colleagues, a perfectionist madman, and the result is one of
those films without which many others cannot be fully appreciated.
Note: Some of the restored footage shows small black bands
at the top and left side, marking missing real estate. Expert projectionist
Steve Kraus says this image area was lost due to shortcuts taken either in
making the 16mm negative or quite possibly years earlier when the 35mm print
they worked from was made.
This article is based in part on my 1998 Great Movies essay.
Cast
Brigitte Helm as Maria
Alfred Abel as Joh Fredersen
Gustav Froehlich as Freder
Rudolf Klein-Rogge as Rotwang
Heinrich George as Grot
Directed by
Fritz Lang
Written by
Fritz Lang
Thea von Harbou
Drama, Foreign, Science Fiction
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