Also this issue:

City of the Future
Restored after 75 years, Metropolis still leads the way.
-Sam Adams

Like Grandfather, Like Son
A detective whose father was executed for murder investigates his stepson for the same crime.
-Cindy Fuchs

After Life
An aging thespian copes with loss in I’m Going Home.
-Sam Adams

September 5-11, 2002

movies

Neo Metro

Restoring Metropolis.

by Sam Adams

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is commonly considered one of the high points of the silent era, and its images have inspired countless filmmakers down through the years. So how on earth did it take 75 years for it to be restored? Martin Koerber, who supervised the restoration for the Munich Film Archive, has a simple answer, if not a satisfying one: “No one really tried.” Lang’s movie, which Paramount ordered slashed from 12 reels to seven, with a new storyline liberally concocted by playwright Channing Pollock, has for years survived in a variety of semi-reconstituted versions, but until now, Koerber says, no one bothered to conduct a comprehensive search for all surviving elements. Describing the bowdlerization of the film’s plot, Koerber says, “What we’ve seen [before] is a kind of Frankenstein movie -- that’s not what the movie is about at all. It’s about all kinds of things, including Biblical myths, astrology and whatever.” Similarly, the innumerable movies exhibited over the years as Metropolis are hybrid monsters cobbled together from leftover parts, smoothing over the gaps left by missing footage by excising plot threads with no end to be tied to.

While this Metropolis boasts little new footage -- over a quarter of the film is, Koerber says, definitively lost -- it restores the structure of Lang's original, using brief intertitles to stand in for the missing sequences. (Some complexity is still sacrificed in editing the sequences down to quickly read titles, but the result is preferable to the lengthier and more deadening approach used in reviving Erich von Stroheim's Greed some years back.) "You cannot bring the images back, because there are no images," Koerber admits. "But you can understand the structure better. You can have an idea what's missing."

As for the restoration of image quality, which yields a picture comparable to what must have been seen in Lang's day, that was achieved by, for the first time, going back to the original camera negative (except for the second reel, where the negative had been destroyed) and using recently developed digital technology to remove decades of cracks, smudges and scratches. "Theoretically, you could have done it any time within the last five years," Koerber says, "but until recently it would have been prohibitively expensive."

Ironically, this most complete version of Metropolis is actually less seamless than some produced over the years, but Koerber has no doubts that showing the story, holes and all, was the right decision. "It's a classic," he says, "and it's so much more obvious now why it's a classic, because it encompasses so much -- all the contradictions."