Metropolis: The one that started it all

Metropolis!

City of light and spectacle... and of darkness and doom!

Perhaps the first actual science fiction motion picture! One of the earliest mega-budget films! A marvel of cutting-edge special effects technology! An ageless parable that is as relevant today as it was in 1926!

A masterpiece that, like the Sphynx, exists only in its vandalized and incomplete form today!

This motion picture has an incredibly rich history in itself... yet, with its tortured past and highly-debated presentation, it remains as one of the most influential movies of all time. Certainly the format of science fiction films and novels owes much to this pioneer effort.

The Prototype

In 1924, when filmmaker Fritz Lang asked his wife, Thea von Harbou, to write a story for him that would be the basis for his next film, science fiction films essentially did not exist. Other than shorts like Edison's Frankenstein and Melies' A Trip to the Moon, sci-fi concepts had not yet been rendered seriously on film.

However, the concepts inherent in Metropolis—the mega-city, the class struggle and inequalities between haves and have-nots, the demands of automation, and the threat of technology run amok—were already common and highly-debated themes in science fiction literature, and major concerns in a world entering the second century of the Industrial Revolution. Lang and Harbou's message—"The mediator between the hands and the head must be the heart!"—is an almost over-simplified plea to emphasize humanity over industrialization, lest we allow industrialization to crush humanity utterly.

In its execution, Metropolis became the template for science fiction movies. Its heavy use of allegory and symbolic representation became the standard visual tool of sci-fi. Its equally stylized representation of technology, symbolized by baroque machinery, flashing light shows, intricate controls and incomprehensible displays, have become the artistic backdrop required of all sci-fi. And its depiction of the city of the future, complete with hyper-modern fashions, flying craft, monstrous buildings, and endless highways clogged with futuristic vehicles, are among the universal elements of motion pictures.

Metropolis showed us the horror of technology run amok, destroying buildings and people, wrecking lives and societies. It presented the idea that our machines could someday rise up and destroy us, if we were not careful and considerate about how they were used.

And let's not forget its robot: Futura, or Parody, the beautifully-rendered art-deco sculpture (worn by the same actress that portrayed the robot in human form) that inspired robots for the rest of the century. Though not the first robot in depiction, it is undeniably the most elegant, certainly became the most famous, and was regularly used as the single image that represented the film on movie posters and art.

Metropolis pioneered the extensive use of special effects to make its city come to life. Visual processes were invented for the movie, such as glass-painting and split-screen photography, that are still in use today. The use of miniatures, stop-motion photography, and hand-animated scenes, were also used liberally, requiring one of the largest budgets of any film of the day.

Metropolis' music was also on a grand scale, an orchestral score complete with themes for individual characters, story themes, and even parts of the city. The powerful, strongly Germanic score served as the inspiration for the first sci-fi serials like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, who took their music directly from German operatic compositions. That tradition is still popular today with sweeping sci-fi epics.

The Fall

For all of this, unfortunately, the audiences and critics did not "get" Metropolis when it was released... it was too unlike anything they had previously experienced. The resulting poor showings bankrupted UFA film studio, which had sunk a huge sum of money into the production, even while sharing the costs with an American film studio. After a pathetically short opening, the Americans decided to trim the film and emphasize the spectacle over the substance.

Rotgang and the robot: With a central character removed from the butchered script, the brilliant but tortured inventor becomes the prototypical Mad Scientist, and the robot's female appearance becomes confusing and pointless.

Subsequent edits castrated the film, removing many scenes, completely excising characters from the film (including Hel, the late wife of Joh Frederson, a central character that fuelled the conflict between Frederson and Rotgang the inventor), and rewriting caption cards, until over half the film was gone and the story was a simplistic hash. As the removal of Hel also removed the central motivation for the actions of Rotgang, leaving his actions and attitudes ambiguous at best, and unbalanced at worst, they ultimately resulted in another hackneyed sci-fi plot device: The wild-eyed Mad Scientist. Further edits were done by other studios and movie houses, to remove scenes deigned too racy or controversial for its audiences. After all this work, the movie became a disjointed mess, and audiences, if anything, got even less from it than in its original version.

But before any more repair (or damage) could be done to it, World War II struck a painful blow: Allied bombing leveled UFA Studios, destroying the original negatives of the movie. As the copies of the movie outside of Germany were the already heavily edited copies, the result was the loss of the film as a complete work.

Subsequent showings of Metropolis, to date, have been from existing film stocks, none of which were complete, and many of which were in serious disrepair. Further, none of them presented the complete original story, and critics generally panned what was left of the movie as a beautiful work with a script of no value.

The Restoration

Fortunately, the original novel survived intact, and by the sixties, was enjoying popularity as a re-released book. The wealth of material in the novel, the many characters and complex themes, and the clearly coherent storyline, inspired buffs who realized how much of the original film work was clearly missing, and the classic film was rediscovered.

In the seventies, serious efforts were undertaken by multiple studios and film buffs to scour the globe, tracking down every surviving bit of film, and reassembling the movie to as complete its original state as possible. As the years progressed, and film versions or negatives were found with previously-missing scenes, new film edits were introduced to the public, and film restoration efforts began.

As the years progressed, original notes on the film were found or reconstructed from old sources. The original dialog cards were finally discovered, leading to a more accurate translation of the text to clarify major points of the script. Then the original film score was discovered, and re-orchestrated for subsequent release.

In addition, computer-aided film reconstruction was reaching an incredible level of sophistication, allowing some scenes that were all but lost to age and deterioration to be recovered and cleaned up, and other badly-restored film to be rebuilt and clarified.

The Legacy

Today, it is assumed that there are no other hidden caches of film or negatives remaining to be found, and that the latest edit of Metropolis will not be any more complete, nor will it look as good. The latest version has the original score restored to it, as well as clarifying text cards that are more faithful to the original work.

However, the "best it will ever be" milestone has been claimed before, and always, another bit of the original has been found and added to the sum of Metropolis' remains, like finding a bit of bone in a fossil that brings us closer to a complete skeleton. We may never know when the version of Metropolis that we have will have to be considered "the final, definitive copy."

But in the meantime, we can enjoy this cinematic marvel, and finally recognize it as the masterpiece that has inspired generations of film-goers and film-makers, novelists and designers, and anyone who has a concern, or a hope, for the future. Metropolis is the mother of all science fiction films... the direct inspiration for the form and design of movies like Flash Gordon, Star Wars, Blade Runner, 2001, Alien, Logan's Run, Forbidden Planet, and untold hosts of others. Without it, who knows what science fiction cinema would be like today.

Latest News

In July 2008, a copy of what is purported to be the entire original film was discovered to be in the archives of the Museo Del Cine in Buenos Aires, Argentina! The film was immediately flown to Germany, where experts have certified it authentic.

The newly-discovered copy clarifies numerous plot-points, as well as flesh-out the character of Slim (aka Schmael), Joh Frederson's lieutenant/spy. The badly-damaged film will require extensive restoration, much like the efforts that were made on other filmstocks and negatives to produce the version offered by the F.W. Murnau Foundation. Once restoration and integration into the restored version is complete, we might see a fully complete film at last by 2010-2012! (To learn more, visit Kino International's Metropolis web site.)