LFM Review: The Complete Metropolis

By Jennifer Baldwin. With almost 30 minutes of lost footage restored, The Complete METROPOLIS is a true cinematic event.

For anybody who read the news two years ago that a nearly complete 16mm negative of METROPOLIS was discovered in Buenos Aires (including 30 minutes of additional footage previously thought lost forever), the anticipation and excitement has been building for when the film would finally be restored and we could all see Fritz Lang’s original cut of his masterpiece for the first time since its Berlin premiere in 1927.

The time has now come. After a premiere in Berlin earlier this year and a North American premiere in Los Angeles this past April, the film is finally being screened in theaters across the U.S. and Canada – all leading up to the DVD release of the Complete METROPOLIS in November 2010.

The tale of METROPOLIS – originally panned by critics and disliked by audiences on its initial release in Germany, and later mutilated by international distributors, who turned the film into a diluted Frankenstein story (a quarter of Lang’s original film was thought lost for decades, one of the ultimate “lost masterpieces” of the silent era) – is a tale well known to classic movie fans and silent cinema enthusiasts. This latest chapter in the film’s life only enhances its mystique and mystery. Almost 40 minutes of this landmark film was lost for nearly a century only to be found hidden away in a Buenos Aires museum in 2008. What was found in Argentina is now the most complete version to date. The print was deemed nearly complete because of the way it matched up to the original Gottfried Huppertz score (the only complete document still in existence from the 1927 premiere). With almost 30 minutes of film time restored, this newest version of METROPOLIS is the closest we might ever come to seeing the film the way Fritz Lang intended.

I was fortunate enough to attend a screening of the Complete METROPOLIS at the Detroit Film Theater earlier this month. It was one of the best movie experiences I’ve had in a long while, thrilling and impressive, making me fall in love with METROPOLIS all over again.

Frankly I was blown away, both by the impact of the film and the historic momentousness of the occasion. Even before this new footage was discovered, METROPOLIS was a masterful film, one of my favorites not only of the silent era, but of all time (I am a Sci-Fi/Fantasy geek). But with the new footage, METROPOLIS is now truly epic. The added material gives the film a better pacing and flow, fleshing out supporting characters and subplots and making the overall plot more coherent. Even more to my surprise, however, is how the new footage highlighted and enhanced certain themes, including the themes of friendship, loyalty, and cooperation – and there was a decidedly more pronounced Christian subtext. Not only is the film better paced, but it’s richer in meaning thanks to the new footage.

To take one example, in the second act of the film, Freder (Gustav Frohlich), the son of Metropolis’s master and architect, Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel), has become ill. He lies in bed having fever dreams, while at the same time the demonic android doppelganger of the movie’s heroine, Maria (Brigitte Helm) – called the False Maria to distinguish her from the real Maria – is busy cavorting and bewitching the rich men of Metropolis at the hedonistic Yoshiwara nightclub. In previous versions of the film, this sequence consisted of intercutting between the False Maria’s seductive dance at the club and Freder sitting up in his bed, looking straight at the camera and apparently having a vision or a dream of the False Maria’s dance.

But with the new footage, the scene takes on a religious, apocalyptic bent, where we see Freder’s fevered vision is not just of the False Maria’s dance but of a monk introduced earlier in the film who preaches against the “Whore of Babylon” and the coming apocalypse. There is a shot of the monk (actually the character of the Thin Man appearing like a monk to Freder) as well as a shot of an illuminated page from the Bible, illustrated with the Whore of Babylon – an illustration that matches exactly the image of the False Maria on her pedestal at the Yoshiwara club. The parallel between the False Maria and the Whore of Babylon is made visually explicit and powerfully so. The entire sequence is also a callback to an earlier scene in a gothic cathedral in which Freder first sees the monk preaching (unfortunately this scene is still missing, even from the Buenos Aires footage, but we can get a sense of what the monk looked like from his later “appearance” as the Thin Man in Freder’s vision).

Another example of how the new footage enhances the film comes during the film’s climax. As the workers’ city is flooded, Freder, the real Maria, and Freder’s friend/assistant Josaphat all try to lead the workers’ children out of the city to safety. Before the lost footage was discovered, the sequence wasn’t very long and consisted of Freder and Josaphat finding Maria and the children and then the three adults leading the children on a frantic run from the flooding city. After a few shots of the group running and finding a staircase, the sequence ends happily with the children getting out of the workers’ city and being taken to the Club of the Sons in the upper city of Metropolis. There are a few brief moments of tension but there’s never really any doubt that Freder and Maria won’t rescue the children.

With the new footage added, this sequence takes on the frenzied pace and fist-clenched tension of a great action sequence, with Freder and Josaphat dangerously climbing up the staircase and struggling to break through a grate that is blocking the children from escaping. Lang cuts back and forth from Freder and Josaphat climbing and pushing their way to the top of the staircase to Maria and the children down below as the water rises higher and higher. The fate of the children and Maria is now in jeopardy, the stakes are higher, and the film’s pace is significantly quickened. This extended sequence – along with an even more extended sequence later with the workers mob – gives the finale of METROPOLIS a much more explosive, better paced conclusion. It’s a proper climax to a film that is epic in length and scope.

There are also new scenes which flesh out the characters of Georgy/Worker 11811 (Erwin Binswanger), the Thin Man (Fritz Rasp), and Josaphat (Theodor Loos). It is in these scenes that the themes of friendship and loyalty are more pronounced.

The Yoshiwara club and the subject of hedonism are established earlier in the film as well, when Georgy the worker goes to the club instead of going to Freder’s apartment as he had promised.

And finally, there is a powerful scene between Joh Fredersen and Rotwang the mad inventor where we learn that the motivation for Rotwang’s hatred of Fredersen is that they both loved the same woman: Fredersen’s wife.

In attempting to explain these new scenes to you with words, I find that my words and descriptions are truly inadequate. Previous versions of METROPOLIS have tried to substitute the missing scenes by using intertitles that explain the missing action, but frankly, it is not the same as seeing the visuals firsthand. No review or write-up can capture the power of the actual image and no intertitle description of the action or plot can match the effect of seeing that action play out on film. Even a still photograph of a scene doesn’t compare to viewing the actual scene itself.

Cinema is not just images and photographs but time and duration (i.e., pacing). Cinema is not just mise-en-scene (what fills up the shot) but montage (how the shots are put together and their length). This is why the reediting and mutilation of the film by Paramount in 1927 was such a tragedy. Not only was Lang’s artistic vision tampered with, but audiences for 83 years have had to fall in love with a film that was incomplete and jumbled, the precision of its editing destroyed. Even once we knew what was missing and read descriptions of the missing footage, it wasn’t the same as seeing it for ourselves. Now, with nearly 30 minutes restored, film lovers and METROPOLIS fans can finally see what we’ve only read about before. We can finally feel the true weight and epic scope of the film. We can finally see METROPOLIS as it was meant to be seen.

And yet we still do not have all the footage from the 1927 Berlin premiere original — six minutes remain missing. Despite this newest version of METROPOLIS being billed as “The Complete” version, it is still not truly complete. And so even though the film is closer to the original run-time than ever before, there are still those missing six minutes. That means there is still more to be discovered, more to search for, perhaps (we can only hope) more still to come in the continuing saga that is METROPOLIS. For now, for the first time in 83 years, we have a film that is so close to the original version it feels like the Berlin premiere in 1927 all over again.

If you want to see this landmark film on the big screen (and really, why wouldn’t you? It’s the perfect film for a big screen experience) then check out this list of upcoming playdates to see if The Complete METROPOLIS is coming to a theater near you!

Posted on June 28th, 2010 at 10:08am.