[url]http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100602/REVIEWS08/100609989[/url]

Metropolis [2010 Restoration] (1927)
BY ROGER EBERT / June 2, 2010 
 
Cast & CreditsFredersen Alfred Abel
Freder Gustav Frohlich
Rotwang Rudolf Klein-Rogge 
The Thin Man Fritz Rasp
Georgy Erwin Biswanger
Maria/Robot Brigitte Helm

Kino presents a film directed by Fritz Lang. Written by Lang and Thea von Harbou. Running time: 154 minutes. No MPAA 
. 


The opening shots of the restored “Metropolis” are so crisp and clear they come as a jolt. This mistreated masterpiece has been seen until now mostly in battered prints missing footage that was, we now learn, essential. Because of a 16mm print discovered in 2008 in Buenos Aires, it stands before us as more or less the film that Fritz Lang originally made in 1927. It is, says expert David Bordwell, “one of the great sacred monsters of the cinema.”
Lang tells of a towering city of the future. Above ground, it has spires and towers, elevated highways, an Olympian stadium and Pleasure Gardens. Below the surface is a workers' city where the clocks show 10 hours to squeeze out more work time, the workers live in tenement housing and work consists of unrelenting service to a machine. This vision of plutocracy vs. labor would have been powerful in an era when the assembly line had been introduced on a large scale and Marx had encouraged class warfare.
Lang created one of the unforgettable original places in the cinema. “Metropolis” fixed for countless later films the image of a futuristic city as a hell of material progress and human despair. From this film, in various ways, descended not only “Dark City'' but “Blade Runner,'' “The Fifth Element,'' “Alphaville,'' “Escape From L.A.,'' “Gattaca'' and Batman's Gotham City. The laboratory of its evil genius, Rotwang, created the visual look of mad scientists for decades to come, especially after it was so closely mirrored in “Bride of Frankenstein'' (1935). The device of the “false Maria,'' the robot who looks like a human being, inspired the Replicants of “Blade Runner.'' Even Rotwang's artificial hand was given homage in “Dr. Strangelove.''
The missing footage restored in this version comes to about 30 minutes, bringing the total running time to about 150 minutes. Bordwell, informed by the chief restorer, Martin Koerber of the German Cinematheque, observes that while the cuts simplified “Metropolis” into a science-fiction film, the restoration emphasizes subplots involving mistaken identities. We all remember the “two Marias”: the good, saintly human and her malevolent robot copy, both played by Brigitte Helm. We now learn that the hero, Freder, also changes places with the worker Georgy, in an attempt to identify with the working class. Freder's father, Fredersen, is the ruler of Metropolis.
The purpose of the tall, cadaverous Thin Man, assigned by Freder's father to follow him, is also made more clear. And we learn more about the relationship between Fredersen and the mad scientist Rotwang, and Rotwang's love for the ruler's late wife. This woman, named Hel, was lost in the shorter version for the simplistic reason that her name on the pedestal of a sculpture resembled “Hell,” and distributors feared audiences would misunderstand.

'Metropolis' employed vast sets, thousands of extras and astonishing special effects to create its two worlds. Lang's film is the summit of German Expressionism, with its combination of stylized sets, dramatic camera angles, bold shadows and frankly artificial theatrics.
The production itself made even Stanley Kubrick's mania for control look benign. According to Patrick McGilligan's book Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast, the extras were hurled into violent mob scenes, made to stand for hours in cold water and handled more like props than human beings. The heroine was made to jump from high places, and when she was burned at a stake, Lang used real flames. The irony was that Lang's directorial style was not unlike the approach of the villain in his film.
The good Maria, always bathed in light, seems to be the caretaker of the worker's children — all of them, it sometimes appears. After Maria glimpses the idyllic life of the surface, she becomes a revolutionary firebrand and stirs up the workers. Rotwang, instructed by Fredersen, captures this Maria, and transfers her face to the robot. Now the workers, still following Maria, can be fooled and controlled by the false Maria.
Lang's story is broad, to put it mildly. Do not seek here for psychological insights. The storytelling is mostly visual. Lang avoided as many intertitles as possible, and depends on images of startling originality. Consider the first glimpse of the underground power plant, with workers straining to move heavy dial hands back and forth. What they're doing makes no logical sense, but visually the connection is obvious: They are controlled like hands on a clock. When the machinery explodes, Freder has a vision in which the machinery turns into an obscene, devouring monster.
Other dramatic visual sequences: a chase scene in the darkened catacombs, with the real Maria pursued by Rotwang (the beam of his light acts like a club to bludgeon her). The image of the Tower of Babel as Maria addresses the workers. Their faces, arrayed in darkness from the top to the bottom of the screen. The doors in Rotwang's house, opening and closing on their own. The lascivious dance of the false Maria, as the workers look on, the screen filled with large, wet, staring eyeballs. The flood of the lower city and the undulating arms of the children flocking to Maria to be saved.

Much of what we see in “Metropolis'' doesn't exist, except in visual trickery. The special effects were the work of Eugene Schufftan, who later worked in Hollywood as the cinematographer of “Lilith'' and “The Hustler.'' According to Magill's Survey of Cinema, his photographic system “allowed people and miniature sets to be combined in a single shot, through the use of mirrors, rather than laboratory work.'' Other effects were created in the camera by cinematographer Karl Freund.
The result was astonishing for its time. Without all of the digital tricks of today, “Metropolis'' fills the imagination. Today, the effects look like effects, but that's their appeal. Looking at the original “King Kong,” I find that its effects, primitive by modern standards, gain a certain weird effectiveness. Because they look odd and unworldly compared to the slick, utterly convincing effects that are now possible, they're more evocative: The effects in modern movies are done so well that we seem to be looking at real things, which is not quite the same kind of fun.
The restoration is not pristine. Some shots retain the scratches picked up by the original 35mm print from which the 16mm Buenos Aires copy was made; these are insignificant compared to the rediscovered footage they represent. There are still a few gaps, but because the original screenplay exists, they're filled in by title cards. In general, this is a “Metropolis” we have never seen, both in length and quality.
Although Lang saw his movie as anti-authoritarian, the Nazis liked it enough to offer him control of their film industry (he fled to the United States instead). Some of the visual ideas in “Metropolis'' seem echoed in Leni Riefenstahl's pro-Hitler “Triumph of the Will'' (1935) — where, of course, they have lost their irony.
“Metropolis'' does what many great films do, creating a time, place and characters so striking that they become part of our arsenal of images for imagining the world. Lang filmed for nearly a year, driven by obsession, often cruel to his colleagues, a perfectionist madman, and the result is one of those films without which many others cannot be fully appreciated.

Note: Some of the restored footage shows small black bands at the top and left side, marking missing real estate. Expert projectionist Steve Kraus says this image area was lost due to shortcuts taken either in making the 16mm negative or quite possibly years earlier when the 35mm print they worked from was made.

This article is based in part on my 1998 Great Movies essay. .



[url]http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20000101/CRITICALDEBATE/40310106[/url]
Metropolis (1926) 


"Nothing like Metropolis…has ever been seen on the screen… It is a technical marvel with feet of clay, a picture as soulless as the manufactured woman of its story… It is hardly a film to be judged by its narrative for despite the fantastic nature of the story, it is…unconvincing, lacking in suspense and…extravagantly theatric."
-- Mordaunt Hall, The New York Times (March 7, 1927), anthologized in the book, The New York Times Film Reviews 1913-1970 (1971)

"One of the last examples of the imaginative -- but often monstrous -- grandeur of the Golden Period of the German film, Metropolis is a spectacular example of Expressionist design (grouped human beings are used architecturally), with moments of almost incredible beauty and power…absurd ineptitudes…and oddities that defy analysis. It's a wonderful, stupefying folly."
-- Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies (1992)

"It was [a] precise, cinematic care that enabled Lang to avoid the dead ends of Expressionism… The social argument of Metropolis is simpleminded, but the dynamic images of crowd behavior amid an urban labyrinth are still frightening."
-- David Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of Film (1994)

"…Lang's film dramatized the condition of workers bound to the machine and warned of future discontent and revolution. The love story shows how the 'heart' can mediate between the 'head' and the 'hand,' but Lang…[is] unable to conceive of the workers as anything but hands, downtrodden masses, or frenzied rioters, easily manipulated, already robots except for their physical limitations."
-- Morris Dickstein, collected in the National Society of Film Critics collection, Foreign Affairs (1991)

"The movie has a plot that defies common sense, but its very discontinuity is a strength. It makes Metropolis hallucinatory--a nightmare without the reassurance of a steadying story line. Few films have ever been more visually exhilarating."
-- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times (no date) 
.

The Full 'Metropolis' / THE NEW YORK TIMES
[url]http://www.nytimes.com (May 4, 2010)[/url]

 "The cumulative result is a version of "Metropolis" whose tone and focus have been changed. "It's no longer a science-fiction film," said Martin Koerber, a German film archivist and historian who supervised the latest restoration and the earlier one in 2001. "The balance of the story has been given back. It's now a film that encompasses many genres, an epic about conflicts that are ages old."

 



[url]http://www.kino.com/metropolis/news.html#news[/url]

The Complete Metropolis / TIME OUT NY
[url]http://newyork.timeout.com/[/url]

"So...what's new? A whopping 25 minutes has been inserted back in, some of which merely add texture (a snippet of a woman being tarted up in the pleasuredome-ish Club of the Sons) and some that flesh out Lang's more elaborate sequences, such as the climactic flood in the workers' subterranean lair. But the revelations are indeed stunning..."

 

'Metropolis' Now / THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
[url]http://online.wsj.com/article/[/url]

"Few films have been so enjoyed by generations of film buffs and pored over by scholars. Few films, too, have had such a fraught history or existed in so many versions. Now, 83 years after its Berlin premiere, "Metropolis" can finally be seen as Lang originally intended it."

 

First Night: Metropolis (uncut), THE INDEPENDENT, UK
[url]http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/[/url]

"Throw away your Metropolis DVD! The version of Fritz Lang's sci-fi classic seen and admired by the world for nearly a century is far from the epic that the director originally envisioned...But last night, 83 years after its first world premiere, the silent movie was shown just as Lang had intended it...The film now feels suitably epic and tense throughout."

 

Metropolis, mother of sci-fi movies, reborn in Berlin, THE GUARDIAN, UK
[url]http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/[/url]
"Film buffs from around the world have gathered in Berlin to catch the first glimpse of a restored, full-length "director's cut" of the sci-fi epic Metropolis that has not been seen for 83 years." 


[url]http://www.kino.com/metropolis/press.html#press[/url]
Kino International Releases the new restoration of Fritz Lang's Masterpiece: The Complete Metropolis

New York, April 5, 2010 - Kino International is proud to announce the North American release of the new restoration of Fritz Lang's 1927 science fiction masterpiece METROPOLIS, now with 25 minutes of lost footage and the original Gottfried Huppertz score.
This new 147-minute version, being released as THE COMPLETE METROPOLIS, premiered on February 12 at the Berlin Film Festival and will have its first US showing on April 25 at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood, as part of the TCM Classic Film Festival.
The film's national theatrical release will commence on May 7, with a NY premiere at Film Forum, and on April 14, at Laemle's Royal Theater in Los Angeles - followed by runs in all major markets throughout the US and Canada. The DVD and Blu-ray release is set for November of this year.
Seldom has the rediscovery of a cache of lost footage ignited such widespread curiosity as did the announcement, in July 2008, that an essentially complete copy of Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS had been found.

CUTS AND MAJOR RESTORATIONS:
When it was first screened in Berlin on January 10, 1927, the sci-fi epic ran an estimated 153 minutes. After its premiere engagement, in an effort to maximize the film's commercial potential, the film's distributors (Ufa in Germany, Paramount in the U.S.) drastically shortened METROPOLIS, which had been a major disappointment at the German box office.
By the time it debuted in the states latter that year, the film ran approximately 90 minutes (exact running times are difficult to determine because silent films were not always projected at a standardized speed).

METROPOLIS went on to become one of the cornerstones of science fiction cinema foreshadowing BLADE RUNNER and THE MATRIX to name just a few recent examples. Testament to its enduring popularity, the film has undergone numerous restorations in the intervening decades.
In 1984, the film was reissued with additional footage, color tints, and a pop rock score (but with many of its intertitles removed) by music producer Giorgio Moroder. A more archival restoration was completed in 1987, under the direction of Enno Patalas of the Munich Film Archive, in which missing scenes were represented with title cards and still photographs. More recently, the 2001 restoration combined footage from four archives and ran at a triumphant 124 minutes. It was widely believed that this would be the most complete version of Lang's film that contemporary audiences could ever hope to see.
But, in the summer of 2008, the curator of the Buenos Aires Museo del Cine discovered a 16mm dupe negative that was considerably longer than any existing print. It included not merely a few additional snippets, but 25 minutes of "lost" footage, about a fifth of the film, that had not been seen since its Berlin debut. The discovery of such a significant amount of material called for yet another restoration.
This was executed by Anke Wilkening of the Murnau Stiftung (Foundation), the German institution that is the caretaker of virtually all pre 1945 German films, Martin Koerber Film Department Curator of the Deutche Kinemateque and on the music side, by Frank Stoebel.
The result of their work was first seen by the public on February 12 at the 1600 seat Friederichstrasse Palaste, accompanied by a 60-piece orchestra playing the original 1927 score by Huppertz. The public and critical response was ecstatic.
Regarding the quality of the added footage Ms. Wilkening has said:
"The work on the restoration teaches us once more that no restoration is ever definitive," says Wilkening, "Even if we are allowed for the first time to come as close to the first release as ever before, the new version will still remain an approach. The rediscovered sections which change the film's composition, will at the same time always be recognizable through their damages as those parts that had been lost for 80 years."
Further information on THE COMPLETE METROPOLIS and annotations of all recovered scenes - as well as images, clips and theatrical playdates - will be uploaded to the new Metropolis website, which goes live on April 15. The site will be hosted at www.kino.com/metropolis.

Other films currently in release or opening soon through Kino International are: AJAMI, Oscar-nominated for Best Foreign Film from Israel; DOGTOOTH winner of the Best Film Award at the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes 2009, just screened to sold out shows at the New Directors New Films Festivalin New York ; DOUBLE TAKE opening at Film Forum New York on June 2 and WINNEBAGO MAN which opens July 9 at the Sunshine Theatre New York
Kino Lorber is the newly formed company that combines the resources, staffs and libraries of Kino International , Lorber Films, and Alive Mind, bringing together industry leaders Richard Lorber and Donald Krim to create a new leader in independent film distribution