Metropolis is presented tonight in a gorgeous print taken from a 1927 nitrate release print, with tinting typical of the period. Not a restored print, it is rather very much what viewers outside of Germany would have seen at the time, cuts and all, with English intertitles and even a changed character name.

Lang's futuristic superproduction is urban dystopia expressed as science fiction: set in the year 2000, Metropolis envisions a repressive technoligarchy in which soaring art deco towers and overhead freeways mock an underclass of techno slaves. They are ruled by a "supertrustee" (Alfred Abel) who lives with his collaborators in the paradisiacal garden of Yoshiwara. Lang even posits a virtual woman; cloned from people's hero Maria (Brigitte Helm), she/it is an evil doppelgä;nger for the post–Expressionist future. Luis Buñuel called Metropolis "a glorious symphony of movement...the rhythmic progression of...hitherto unimagined mechanical shapes." But he and others (including Lang himself) lamented the banality of the apocalyptic ending which unites labor and capital thanks to the saintly agitator Maria.