Michael Reuben
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Metropolis (Blu-ray)
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis has multiple stories. There’s the literal narrative, which is very much a product of its time and can now, at long last, be followed in its entirety (or most of it). There’s the cinematic imagery, which is so original and provocative that it inspired filmmakers even during the many decades when Metropolis itself was chopped and fragmentary; direct descendants include films both major (Star Wars, Blade Runner, The Fifth Element) and minor (e.g., the early Tom Hanks vehicle Joe Versus the Volcano). And then there’s the saga of Metropolis’ creation, loss and gradual recovery, an entirely separate drama with its own colorful cast that no one would believe if a writer dreamed it up.
Studio: Kino Lorber Films
Rated: NR
Film Length: 148 minutes
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
HD Encoding: 1080p
HD Codec: AVC
Audio: DTS-HD MA 5.1; PCM 2.0
Subtitles: English
MSRP: $39.95
Disc Format: 1 50GB
Package: Keepcase with lenticular slipcover (side-inserted)
Theatrical Release Date: January 10, 1927 (Berlin)
Blu-ray Release Date: Nov. 23, 2010
The Feature:
Metropolis is a massive city of the future. It towers into the clouds connected by roadways on multiple levels and aircraft in continuous flight. It’s powered by huge machines serviced by thousands of workers who toil and live underground, working back-breaking ten-hour shifts. The wealthy and privileged live in light and air above. The master of Metropolis is Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel), whose office occupies the top of the New Tower of Babel, the city’s tallest skyscraper.
The sons of the wealthy enjoy a recreational area called the Eternal Gardens, which is a sort of cross between a 19th Century theme park and a high-end brothel. One day, as Fredersen’s only son, Freder (Gustav Fröhlich), is passing time in the Eternal Gardens, he encounters a beautiful intruder: Maria (Brigitte Helm), a poor girl, who has brought a group of children to see how the other half lives. Maria and her charges are quickly escorted out, but Freder is entranced. He follows her to the world below, where he find himself in one of the machine rooms. There he witnesses an industrial accident, as the so-called “M-Machine” explodes, killing many workers. (The scene is famous for Freder’s vision of the M-Machine as Moloch, God of Fire, consuming workers in a ritual sacrifice.) Appalled, Freder rushes to his father’s office to report what he’s seen.
Fredersen listens to his son’s report, but he has concerns other than dead workers. First of all, he’s incensed that he’s receiving the news from his son rather than his chief assistant, Josaphat (Theodor Loos), whom he fires on the spot. (Josaphat, knowing that he will now have to join the work force and labor underground, becomes suicidal with despair, but Freder persuades him to take heart, and they agree to meet later at Josaphat’s home.) Second, Fredersen is concerned that his son ventured into the lower depths, and he orders a henchman known as “The Thin Man” (Fritz Rasp) to watch Freder’s every move from now on. And finally, Fredersen is concerned when Grot (Heinrich George), foreman of the Heart Machine, the energy source for Metropolis, brings him diagrams found on the dead workers; similar documents have been turning up elsewhere, and Fredersen suspects a conspiracy.
Father and son now begin to follow separate paths that will intersect with dire consequences. Fredersen visits a scientist named Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) in an antique house in a lower level of the city. Their relationship is complicated. They are old collaborators, and Rotwang’s work has clearly benefitted Fredersen. But they were also romantic rivals for the love of a woman named Hel, who chose the wealthy businessman and died giving birth to Freder. Rotwang has carried a torch all these years, and Fredersen discovers a massive memorial to Hel in Rotwang’s home. Rotwang is furious, but brags to Fredersen that he’s on the verge of his greatest breakthrough: the creation of an entirely mechanical being. Rotwang shows Fredersen the robot, which already moves and responds to commands. (It is probably the film’s single most famous image and an obvious progenitor of C3PO.) Rotwang boasts that shortly the robot will be indistinguishable from a human being.
Having shown his project to Fredersen, Rotwang studies the documents found on the dead workers and identifies them as maps of the ancient catacombs below the city. He leads Fredersen through tunnels to the location identified on the maps, where, unobserved, they witness a meeting of workers. The meeting is addressed by none other than Maria, the young woman who captured Freder’s attention. She preaches about the original Tower of Babel, then tells the workers to be patient, because a “mediator” is coming, who will establish communication, and thereby make peace, between the “head” that rules above ground and the “hands” that work below.
When the meeting concludes, Fredersen instructs Rotwang to give his robot Maria’s form. He wants to use the robot to sabotage the workers’ movement. Rotwang agrees, but he has his own agenda. He’s noticed something in the crowd that Fredersen overlooked: his son, Freder, dressed as a worker.
After leaving his father’s office, Freder returned underground and exchanged places and clothes with worker No. 11811, whose name is Georgy (Erwin Biswanger). The Thin Man mistook Georgy for Freder and followed him to the wild nightlife of Yoshiwara, where Georgy strayed after discovering wads of cash in the pockets of Freder’s clothing. Meanwhile, Freder remained at Georgy’s post, tasting firsthand the harsh life governed by the rigors of the ten-hour clock and service to the machines. After the shift change, fellow workers brought Freder to the meeting in the catacombs to hear Maria speak. Freder is overcome with love and devotion, and when Maria sees him, she decides that Freder is the long-awaited mediator. They embrace and agree to meet the next day. But Rotwang is waiting in the shadows. He abducts Maria so that he can give her form to his robot. He plans to instruct the robot to destroy Fredersen’s great city and kill his son.
For the remainder of the film, the plans of the four principals – Freder, Maria, Fredersen and Rotwang – work themselves out in conflict with each other, leading to a near cataclysm that almost destroys Metropolis. The latter half of the film relies on sophisticated cross-cutting among subplots, and this was one aspect that suffered severely when the film lost significant sequences that both set up the individual plots and are crucial to the story’s dramatic rhythms. The film begins and ends with the famous epigram written by Lang’s wife and scriptwriter, Thea von Harbou: “The mediator between head and hands must be the heart!” At the time of the film’s release, Lang claimed he didn’t take the sentiment seriously, but late in life he acknowledged that perhaps he should have, because fans of the film continued to comment favorably on precisely that element. (Ironically, Harbou’s “heart” would lead her to join the Nazis, after divorcing Lang.)
A notable (and influential) aspect of Metropolis is its fusion of old and new. The characters may live in a city of the future, but they worship in a cathedral whose iconography could not be more medieval. A monk warns of the coming apocalypse, and statues personify death surrounded by the seven deadly sins depicted in minute detail. (These will later come to life for Freder in a terrifying hallucination.) When Rotwang attempts to flee with the real Maria in tow, he does so in a way that unmistakably evokes Lon Chaney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, complete with ringing bell. Ever since Metropolis, filmmakers have worked variations on this formula to ground their future visions in something recognizable. (Think, for example, of the priestly garments in which Ridley Scott dressed Dr. Tyrell.)
The film is also very much of its time, eerily so. In another of its famous images, row after row of exhausted and identically clothed workers march in lock step out of the elevator from the factory, while a fresh group marches past them, also in lock step, to begin the next shift. When the gate slams shut, it is impossible not to be reminded of the concentration camps that would be constructed little more than a decade later. It’s not by accident (though for all the wrong reasons) that Hitler admired Metropolis and asked Lang to be the official filmmaker for the Third Reich. Lang declined and fled to Paris and ultimately to America.
Metropolis was released in January 1927, after significant shooting delays and cost overruns. In that sense, Lang was the James Cameron of his day, but Metropolis didn’t have the happy ending of Titanic or Avatar. Neither critics nor viewers were enthusiastic, and the German studio, UFA, withdrew the film after four months. That was the last time anyone saw Lang’s original 153-minute cut (or so it was thought at the time).
UFA’s American distribution partner, Paramount, hired a now-forgotten playwright, Channing Pollock, to rescript the film using the existing footage. The result ran just over 90 minutes, and all three negatives of Metropolis (one at Paramount and two at UFA) were cut to conform to Pollock’s new script. The trims were discarded. As far as everyone knew, Lang’s version was gone. The Pollock version – or, as it came to be known, the “Paramount negative”– became the standard version of Metropolis.
In 1984, film composer Giorgio Moroder released a re-cut 87-minute version of the film. Moroder re-edited various scenes, tinted sequences with vivid washes of color and rescored the entire film with pop singers and synthesizers. I remember seeing that version in a theater. It was great to see some of Metropolis’ signature images on a big screen in 35mm (as opposed to the washed-out class room presentations I’d seen earlier in 16mm), but the whole enterprise felt . . . wrong.
For the film’s 75th anniversary in 2002, the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation undertook a four-year project to reconstruct the film digitally using the Paramount negative and all other available sources. The result ran 123 minutes and used text inserts (sometimes accompanied by still images) to describe sequences that were still missing. I saw that version at Film Forum in New York City, and it was like seeing the film for the first time. Kino released that version on DVD and was preparing it for release on Blu-ray, when the unimaginable happened – a copy of a near-complete version suddenly appeared.
An Argentinian distributor had been among those to see Lang’s original cut in 1927. He liked what he saw and bought a copy to bring back to his native land. After passing through various hands, that copy ended up in a government archive. Unfortunately, the archive had neither the facilities nor the funds for safe storage of highly flammable nitrate stock. At some point in the 1970s, all such sources were transferred to 16mm: poorly, amateurishly and with severe cropping. But in 2008, the curator of the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires announced that she had located this version of Metropolis, and that it contained numerous sequences long thought to be permanently lost.
As has already been widely reported, the title of this Blu-ray, The Complete Metropolis, is a misnomer, because the film isn’t quite “complete”. There are two short sequences that could not be recovered from the Buenos Aires master. And viewers should be prepared, because the 25 minutes of footage that were recovered are of such poor quality that the chief restorationist for the 2002 version pronounced them the worst pieces of film he’d ever encountered. Still, the discovery of the Buenos Aires master filled major gaps in the story and, perhaps more importantly, definitively resolved questions about the order of shots and the choice of edits. Despite considerable variance in quality, even after digital restoration, and the obvious cropping of the Buenos Aires footage, Metropolis now exists in a form that is far closer to complete than anyone could ever have hoped.
Video:
It is difficult to offer a uniform evaluation of the Blu-ray image, because there are so many different sources. Even the footage from the 2002 restoration shows numerous variations, even within scenes. However, using the earlier Kino DVD as a comparison for those elements it shares with the Blu-ray, the increase in clarity and resolution is immediately obvious. Images on the Blu-ray gain a sense of depth and perspective that the DVD simply cannot match, and these are essential for Lang’s spacious compositions. The Blu-ray appears to be brighter than the DVD, but I don’t think this indicates a difference in black levels so much as the ability of Blu-ray to better distinguish between different shades of gray and therefore provide a superior rendering of the interplay of light and shadow. Details of sets, costume and performances are all much easier to see and appreciate on the Blu-ray.
Wherever the material from the Buenos Aires master has been cut in, the report is less favorable. There’s no dancing around the point – the footage looks awful. At best, it’s soft and blurry. At worst, it’s soft, blurry and appears to have a smeary coat of grease. Black bars at the top, left and right indicate where image was cropped in the transfer to 16mm, and it is often obvious that relevant picture information is missing. Still, there is enough on display to complete the narrative, restore the editing rhythms and allow the alternating storylines to unfold as Lang intended.
The disc does not contain a detailed list of the newly added footage, but one can be found at Kino’s [COLOR= #0000ff]website[/COLOR]. By way of example, the following is an image from a newly restored scene featuring The Thin Man:
Audio:
The original 1927 score by Gottfried Huppertz has been newly recorded for this edition, and it sounds terrific in DTS lossless. Huppertz’ scoring notes were an invaluable aid to the 2002 restoration efforts, and they indicate the care with which the composer matched his music cues to the action on screen. The score has been recorded at a level that complements but never overwhelms the images, and it’s a pleasure to hear. For two-channel purists, there is a PCM stereo track.
Special Features:
The special features are unique to this Blu-ray edition. Not included are any of the special features from the 2002 version DVD. This is unfortunate, because at least the restoration featurette remains relevant to a full understanding of how this “complete” version of the film came to exist. The work that preceded the 2008 discovery of the Buenos Aires master is essential to the quality of the current version of Metropolis, and it deserves greater attention than it receives on this disc.
“Voyage to Metropolis” (HD) (54:42). This comprehensive documentary traces the history of the film from its conception and production through its most recent restoration. The only significant gap is the 2002 restoration. It’s an informative and entertaining work, but it’s hardly exhaustive. The 2002 version DVD featured a separate documentary containing significant material that is not included here.
Interview with Paula Felix-Didier of the Museo del Cine, Buenos Aires (SD; 1.78:1, enhanced for 16:9) (9:31). In the “Voyage” documentary, Felix-Didier speaks in Spanish, but here she speaks in English, providing a detailed account of the history of the Buenos Aires version and its discovery. She was interviewed in May 2010.
Trailer (HD) (2:01). The trailer is for the restoration.
In Conclusion:
I’ve seen Metropolis many times, but I’ve only seen this version once, and I no longer feel like I know the film well. Even after watching the 2002 version, where the missing material was described in text, having it play on screen is a different experience. Lang’s elaborate cross-cutting makes each storyline resonate within the others, and they play off each other in unexpected ways. It’ll take time to reevaluate and reabsorb this complex and original work. It’s almost like getting a new film – and a great one.
Equipment used for this review:
Panasonic BDP-BD50 Blu-ray player (DTS-HD MA decoded internally and output as analog)
Samsung HL-T7288W DLP display (connected via HDMI)
Lexicon MC-8 connected via 5.1 passthrough
Sunfire Cinema Grand amplifier
Monitor Audio floor-standing fronts and MA FX-2 rears
Boston Accoustics VR-MC center
SVS SB12-Plus sub
