© 2012 William Ahearn
The inspiration for “Metropolis” arrived through a vision of the New York City skyline when Fritz Lang and Erich Pommer sailed to the US in 1925, as Lang has stated in numerous interviews over the years. Or so the story goes. “Metropolis” had been in the planning stages since the wrap on “Die Nibelungen” and Thea von Harbou had already completed the script long before the ship sailed.
Fritz Lang’s reputation for being a dictatorial director had been firmly established by the time “Metropolis” went into production and in the course of shooting the film, Lang’s usual demanding style would rise to the level of outright abuse – some would say sadism – in the pursuit of his dream. Patrick McGilligan whose take on the appreciation of Lang’s films is muted, goes after every bad story in Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast with gusto and those stories are numerous. Life and limb of the actors and the safety of children were risked making this film – a not so rare event in the days of the silent film – and whether that sort of behavior was justified is debatable. What isn’t debatable is that “Metropolis” is one of the most recognized films ever made and its influence is still being felt over a century later.
Pretty amazing considering that the film flopped when it was released and this becomes even more interesting when it’s considered that nearly a fifth of the film has been missing since just after the Berlin premier in 1927. Paramount Pictures that had invested in UFA to keep the German studio solvent decided US audiences wouldn’t sit through the whole film and hired a film editor to make cuts and playwright Channing Pollock to rewrite the story and the intertitles. Channing’s version cut about 25 minutes out of the film with Channing saying that the film “was symbolism run such riot that people who saw it couldn’t tell what it was all about” and “I have given it my meaning.” There was also a version edited for a UK release and then UFA cut its version using the Paramount version as a guide meaning that there were three versions of the film floating around that varied in length and content.
Running down all the films that “Metropolis” has inspired in one way or another would be an endless task. In the 1980s, “Metropolis” seemed to be everywhere showing up in music videos by Queen and directed by David Mallet (Radio Ga Ga), as inspiring David Fincher’s video for Madonna (Express Yourself), and probably others, and in a version scored by Giorgio Moroder (trailer here), as well as Ridley Scott’s famous Apple Macintosh commercial (here).
In the summer of 2008, according to The New York Times, the curator of the Buenos Aires Museo del Cine found a 16mm dupe of “Metropolis” that had been donated to the museum by a collector in 1970. That dupe contained the scenes that Paramount had cut.
And now a true copy of the film exists (minus a few frames and a scene or two) and it is still simplistic in its politics, a bit clearer in story line and still awe-inspiring in its production that introduced a special effects process that would be used for decades. What becomes clear is that “Metropolis” is far more than a “mad scientist” movie as the previous distributed cut seemed to suggest.
“‘Metropolis,’” wrote Luis Buñuel in Madrid’s La Gaceta Literaria, “is not one film, ‘Metropolis’ is two films joined by the belly, but with divergent, indeed extremely antagonistic, spiritual needs. Those who consider the cinema as a discreet teller of tales will suffer profound disillusion with ‘Metropolis.’ What it tells is trivial, pretentious, pedantic, hackneyed romanticism. But if we put before the story the plastic-photogenic basis of the film, then ‘Metropolis’ will come up to any standards, will overwhelm us as the most marvelous picture book imaginable.”
Luis Buñuel’s review is probably the most succinct appraisal of the film even if the antagonisms extend far beyond the “spiritual needs.” The film seems to be at war with itself on any number of fronts and usually Thea von Harbou gets the blame. To his credit, Lang never blamed von Harbou and told Peter Bogdanovich – decades after the fact – that “The main thesis was Mrs von Harbou’s, but I am at least fifty per cent responsible because I did it. I was not so politically minded in those days as I am now. You cannot make a social-conscious picture in which you say that the intermediary between the hand and the brain is the heart – I mean that’s a fairytale – definitely. But I was interested in machines . . .”
It is in this film that’s Lang’s eclecticism gets the better of him and as a result it has inspired scores of theories as to what style the film was done in and what it all means. Add to that von Harbou rifling through all sorts of inspirations from the Bible to HG Wells and concocting a scenario that goes in too many directions.
Once again, the idea of Lang and expressionism enters the criticism surrounding this film and Frederick Ott believes “‘Metropolis’ survives as a great document of German expressionism, a work which is, in many respects, more characteristic of the movement than its famous predecessor, ‘The Cabinet of Dr Caligari’.” Lotte Eisner in The Haunted Screen recognizes expressionist styling, in “Metropolis” writing “To describe the mass of inhabitants in the underground towns in ‘Metropolis’ Lang used Expressionistic stylization to great effect.” In Fritz Lang, Eisner reiterates her previous statement about “Metropolis,” and notes “The wheels turning within wheels and the thudding of the pistons constitute a fusion of surrealist-expressionism vision with the technological achievements of the avant-garde” and “[Lang’s vision of the skyline] is the encounter of Expressionism and Surrealism.”
In Shell Shock Cinema, Anton Kaes makes the case that “The style here has affinities to the post-expressionist art movement known as Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity, whose embrace of machines and mundane objects was a reaction against expressionist subjectivity.” Kaes also notes “‘Metropolis’ echoes expressionism’s plea for the restoration of humanistic values. Their own skeptical attitude vis-à-vis expressionism notwithstanding, in ‘Metropolis’ Lang and von Harbou do not shy away from employing narrative and visual tropes from expressionist theatre to articulate dissatisfaction with modernity.”
Andreas Huyssen – a founding editor of New German Critique – wrote in his essay The Vamp and the Machine: Technology and Sexuality in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis: “In my view, however, it is not enough to locate the film within the parameters of Neue Sachlichkeit [New Objectivity] only. The simple fact that stylistically ‘Metropolis’ has usually been regarded as an expressionist film may give us a clue. And, indeed, if one calls expressionism’s attitude toward technology to mind, one begins to see that the film [vacillates] between two opposing views of modern technology which were both part of Weimar culture.”
Add to this mélange suggestions of Art Deco and what results is a heaping pile of cream of confusion. Huyssen and Kaes seeing “Metropolis” as part of the New Objectivity is interesting since Lang usually isn’t usually considered part of that movement until “M.” And Eisner seeing Expressionism without “ecstatic distortions or oblique angles” seems contradictory to her own beliefs. If you go through Lang’s films in order, his use of Expressionism seems clear and it’s used humorously in both Dr Mabuse films and “Der müde Tod,” and in “Metropolis” it is only used in the underground city and seems to represent the doomed, unlike the optimistic futuristic visions of the above-ground city. One could say that Lang is using, as Huyssen points out in his essay, “attitudes of genre” and that assignment and its meaning becomes clear and when the use of the imagery is sorted out, it’s obvious that “Metropolis” is not an expressionistic film as Ott believes but a film that uses Expressionism in specific places for specific reasons. As Kaes notes “Lang’s choreography of the masses in ‘Metropolis’ follows the conventions of the expressionist theater of his time.”
This is classic Lang since he used the notion of contrast in “Four Around A Woman” and it reappears in “Der müd Tode” and “Dr Mabuse, der Spiegler,” among others. The video clip shows how it is used in “Metropolis” and note the use of the music – that Lang commissioned – in the depressed atmosphere underneath the city and the joyous, optimistic tones when used above ground and this sets the mood for the schizoid visuals. Whatever names one wants to use for the two styles isn’t as important as recognizing that at least two styles exist in opposition to one another and, typically, Lang doesn’t take sides in this fight although Thea von Harbou’s script could be seen as more humanist than Lang’s film. It has been argued that the father exhibits guilt in this film – a rarity for Lang – and I see it more as regret and the desire to set things straight. Conflicts between sons and fathers is – according to at least one author – a common theme in Weimar era films and whether the father’s actions are motivated by guilt seems more a case of personal interpretation than any specific information in the film.
“What remains remarkable about “Metropolis,” writes Elsaesser in Metropolis, “is once again its power to compress this [dialectic of modernity] – made up of so many contradictory motifs and themes – into one story-line.” What everyone seems to be getting at and that Buñuel articulated so well is that two films or stories unreel at the same time almost in spite of each other. The plot is humanistic – and may or may not be expressionism (or any number of other isms) and utterly littered with religious and other literary references – and exists in the darkness while the obsession with technology and the optimistic future surround it, it is heading in a completely different direction. While the plot plays out to its trivial resolution (if that can be considered a resolution), the background, the visual story, continues. It’s as if the environment of the film is more central to the film than the plot, and carries the real message of the film. And that may explain how it has survived all these years and to grasp just how brilliant a filmmaker Fritz Lang was in those days long gone when he could produce what he wanted and with “Metropolis” he created a masterpiece that no one can explain in any lucid way and that defies conventional criticism.
Produced by Erich Pommer for UFA. Directed by Fritz Lang. Written by Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou. Cinematography by Karl Freund, Günther Rittau, and Walter Ruttmann. Art Direction by Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut, and Karl Vollbrecht. Music by Gottfried Huppertz. Starring Alfred Abel, Brigitte Helm, Gustav Fröhlich and Rudolf Klein-Rogge, among others.