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The discovery in a Buenos Aires archive of over twenty-five minutes of lost footage from Fritz Lang's Metropolis has been labeled the biggest find in recent film history. Unseen since the film's original 1927 premiere, the footage accounts for nearly a fifth of the entire picture. Led by the F.W. Murnau Foundation, the restoration incorporated the unearthed footage into the existing film, finally putting into place subplots, characters, and events that had been mysteries for ages. Lang's futuristic super-production is an anxiety dream of urban dystopia expressed as science fiction. Set in the year 2026, Metropolis envisions a repressive techno-oligarchy in which soaring Art Deco towers and overhead freeways mock an underclass of techno slaves ruled by a “supertrustee” (Alfred Abel), who lives with his collaborators in the paradisiacal nightclub of Yoshiwara. Lang even posits a virtual woman, an evil doppelganger cloned from the people's hero and spokeswoman Maria (Brigitte Helm), as another principal force in this exquisite ballet of machines and men.

Copresented with the Goethe-Institut San Francisco