Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" is one of my all-time favorite films and is one of the most inventive, thrilling and interesting movies of the silent era--or any era for that matter. On its original release it had been severely cut to a mere 63 minutes, but as any recent version will tell you before the start a nearly complete copy of the original cut was found in Buenos Aires in 2008 from which an almost complete restoration was constructed. There are still two missing scenes and some of the footage is in poor quality, but the running time now is 144 minutes creating a grand, sweeping narrative and one of the most unusual sci-fi films made.
The story is somewhat complex and difficult to explain. Metropolis is a huge, advanced city of the future where wealthy elites play, prosper, think and generally live a life of leisure and decadence. Their city is a shining beacon of knowledge and futuristic exploration where learning and sexual frivolity consume the time of its inhabitants. But beneath this technological wonderland are great machines which keep it alive. There, thousands of workers toil in misery, mechanized in movement like these great generators, working long hours doing difficult work to keep the machines functioning.
Freder, son of the leader of Metropolis and a member of the bourgeoisie, falls in love with the lovely Maria who is a schoolteacher of children of the underground city and a part-time prophet. Chasing her down into the depths he is disillusioned by the world he finds and decides to give up his life to help in their struggle. In one of her sermons in the catacombs Maria predicts that a mediator must come to break down the walls of the workers and the elites--the Mediator is Freder.
At the same time the Inventor has been working on creating an automaton--a "New Man"--in the likeness of his dead lover who was also the wife of the head of the Metropolis, Joh Frederson, and the mother of Freder. He sees Maria who bears striking resemblance to his lover, Hel, and kidnaps her to steal her image for the robot. Seeing Freder's love for her, jealousy and anger at Joh drive him to create something destructive and evil. He decides to use this machine to destroy Joh's precious Metropolis.
What he creates is a monster in the guise of a beautiful woman. Using her Dance of Death, her hips and eyes drive the wealthy man's sexual appetites to an extreme. She unleashed the Seven Deadly Sins unto the world and watches as the beautiful city above tears itself apart. Down below she incites revolution until all of Metropolis is chaos. It is then up to Freder, his friend Josaphat and Maria to bring order to a world that seems ready to shatter.
If that seems confusing it's because it is. The film certainly needs its near two and half hour running time to properly tell its story and I am not at all sure how it had managed to be told in an hour. Despite its length, though, this film is brisk, exhilarating and always engaging. The massive sets, startling imagery, powerful music and dramatic themes all culminate into a timeless piece of artistic achievement.
When first watching this it seems that it is a Marxist-sympathizing film. To be sure, the class struggle is evident and we do hope for a better life for the workers. Freder is our hero and he renounces his bourgeois lifestyle to help those who can't help themselves. The Capitalists above are stern-faced and unflinching, living in a gilded world which sits precariously atop the sweat of the masses. Time and again there is a theme of barbarism is this world of luxury: the Heart-Machine in the city below at one point becomes the gaping mouth of an Aztec god who swallows the workers of the factory, the catacombs have expressionistic crosses and hovels with are entirely out of place with the rest of the sets, the use of drums, the Dance of Death being performed atop the backs of half-naked black men, the final scene in which the robot is burned at the stake--all of these examples reveal Lang's mistrust of human nature and the facade of advancement.
It becomes clear later that this is not pro-Marxist, but is rather a centrist film. Others may disagree with me on this point, but notice the way Lang explores this "New Man," as well as the way he focuses on the mob at the end of the film. To the first point, this robot was to be the way of the future, a Nietzsche superman if you like. Instead it does nothing but bring destruction wherever it goes and that is its purpose. To the latter, the masses are a mindless being who are lead by a false prophet. They do not question what they are told and had it not been for the work of Maria and Freder the youth of the workers would have perished.
Instead Lang makes the Mediator the hero of the story. Freder is someone from both worlds who was prophesied to bring peace to the two extremes, which of course he does. Lang is mesmerized by technology, and so too is the audience who watches it, but he recognizes that humans are stagnant in their primitive ways of being. For him, technology has developed past the scope of human nature. His distopian world world is frightening, awe-inspiring, and fully realized. It is a work of the utmost beauty and a major influence on the entire medium of film.
4/4
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