One of the Munich Filmmuseum's major archival activities involves the reconstruction of classic German films, often from hundreds of fragments of different origin, in order to create a print that is as close as possible in length, format and language to the original. Enno Patalas has devoted a great deal of time to the reconstruction of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, obtaining footage from archives around the world, but it is an ongoing project. Tonight, he shares with us the process of reconstructing Metropolis, in a film screening combined with an illustrated lecture. Stopping the film to indicate what is missing, he will allow us to experience, to the extent possible, the complete Metropolis.
A forerunner of contemporary science fiction superproductions, Lang's Metropolis was the most costly European film to-date in 1927. Set in the year 2000, it depicts the effects of technological society on workers who live below ground--one level lower than the machines--and who are ruled by a “super-trustee” who lives with his collaborators in the paradisical garden of Yoshiwara. When a young woman offers the workers religious faith in order to withstand their oppressors, a mad scientist is ordered to design a robot in her image to incite the workers to a self-destructive revolt.
Despite an apocalyptic ending which Lang himself deplored as banal, Metropolis remains a masterpiece of film technique. Luis Buñuel called it “a glorious symphony of movement...the rhythmic progression of wheels, of pistons, of hitherto unimagined mechanical shapes,” and critic Richard Combs, writing in Monthly Film Bulletin, concurs: “Metropolis...has survived mainly on the novelty of its special effects and Lang's dynamic counterpoint of a monumental, architectural geometry with a crazed, pathetic ballet of mechanized ant-man in revolt against his Utopian overlords... (T)he film's visuals acquire a splendid abstract poetry of their own....”