City of the Future

MetropolisDirected by Fritz Lang A Kino release Opens Friday at Ritz Five

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Calling Metropolis a masterpiece does it a disservice. Though Fritz Lang was in his mid-30s when the film premiered, it still feels like a young man’s movie, full of urgent romanticism and ideas developed only as far as they hold the author’s interest. With its deco-futurist design (including Edgar Ulmer’s operatic sets), Metropolis has long been enshrined as a visual chef-d’oeuvre, its images plundered by everyone from Ridley Scott to the Wachowski Brothers. But Lang and his co-scenarist and wife Thea von Harbou’s vision encompassed far more than a dystopian view of a mechanized future, or a battle of man against machine. As originally conceived and shown, the story reached back to the Tower of Babel, and fundamentally concerned humankind’s struggle against itself, the city’s towering heights and Stygian depths the product of a society alienated from itself. As the intertitles remind us with almost comic frequency, “The mediator between Head and Hands must be the Heart!”

No one will ever see Metropolis as Lang originally completed it, and, indeed, few saw it in 1927. Originally running in the neighborhood of two and a half hours, the movie was received poorly in Berlin and Nuremberg, and cut from 12 reels to seven for its American release. Even the German negative was re-cut along similar lines, the original destroyed. The movie's images have survived, but often as raw material -- witness the truncated version cobbled together in the '80s by synth-pop impressario Giorgio Moroder, who contrived a new soundtrack featuring the sounds of Queen and Billy Squier. It's hard to think of another so highly regarded film that has been so bastardized in the name of preservation.

But better late than never. Seventy-five years after its premiere, Metropolis has been given new life by a comprehensive restoration which brings the film startlingly into the present. Far from an exhumed artifact, this Metropolis feels like it was made yesterday. Though this version, combining all the existing elements and using text intertitles to represent missing sections, still represents just under 80 percent of the film's original length, it is, barring a miracle, as close as we will ever get -- and, indeed, as close as anyone who didn't see the film in those precious first few weeks has ever gotten. While sizeable sequences, including a lengthy visit to the pleasure palaces of Yoshiwara, remain lost, the film's overreaching scope is clearer than ever -- more than a parable, it's clear Lang had in mind an overarching social saga, a futurist recasting of Balzac.

Rather than concentrating only on leaders -- the mega-industrialist Joh Fredersen, his sentimental populist son Freder, the mad scientist Rotwang, the rebel leader Maria -- this Metropolis has time for ordinary men as well: Joh Fredersen's yes-man Josaphat, whose firing sends him plummeting "into the depths" of the workers' society; the faceless Worker 11811, who abuses Freder's generosity and goes on a libertine bender.

Most importantly, while other versions have attempted to impose order on Lang's clash of contradictory ideals, the restored Metropolis lays them out in all their Babelling confusion. Condemned and acclaimed from both ends of the political spectrum, Metropolis has been claimed over the years by socialists and Fascists alike, the former latching on to its depiction of workers revolting against an alienating capitalist autocracy, the latter focusing on its culmination in chaotic, self-destructive mob rule, and the eventual re-imposition of order through the tacit acceptance of charismatic leaders. Indeed, the latter aspect seems particularly strong, recalling the terror of the mob which suffuses Lang's M. But not for nothing does the movie's epigram exalt sentiment over all other forces -- the film's ideology is deliberately, even pointedly, incoherent, a reflection of the trouble head and hands get into when not guided by the heart. Attempts to impose logic on the thunder of Lang's tympanic breast-beating rob the movie of its melodramatic energy. Who knew Lang had so much in common with Griffith?

The use of Gottfried Huppertz's original score is critical in this respect, as is the painstaking restoration which brings out every looming shadow. Moments in Gustav Frölich's performance as the excitable Freder still provoke a chuckle here and there among the imaginatively limited, but it's surprisingly easy to allow yourself to be swept along by the movie's histrionic tide. That is, of course, when you're not merely gaping at the splendor of its visions, which have rarely been equalled, let alone surpassed, in the intervening three quarters of a century. The movie closes on a note of promise in the wake of cataclysm, the mere insinuation of a better world to come. It's either a mark of Lang's genius or a condemnation of humanity's progess -- or both -- that such promise is as unfulfilled in the world at large as it is on the screen.

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City of the Future

Metropolis

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