DVD REVIEW: Metropolis

Metropolis
Director: Fritz Lang
(Madman)
(out of 5)

Made in 1927 this silent masterpiece is rightly seen as one of the most important and influential films ever conceived. It’s part of the ‘big three’: German Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, American D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and Russian Sergi Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin; films that designed the syntax, method and poetry that film-makers today still emulate.

In Metropolis’ case, it’s imaginative visual style and ideas have influenced many films: all dystopian fables, like Blade Runner, Matrix, Logan’s Run and Star Wars, film noir like Naked City, D.O.A. and Scorsese’s Taxi Driver feature the urban environment as a sentient thing, much like Lang’s film.

Every science fiction and traditional horror owes their very existence to the film. The famous robot, the ‘Maschinenmensch’, with it’s iconic look and human qualities has reappeared in the guise of The Terminator and C3PO and is the film’s most lasting image. Much of this is not intentional, but Metropolis is so much a part of the osmosis of film it can’t escape being forever referenced. Once you see it, it’s images never quite leave, they haunt like ghosts. Terry Gilliam, whose Brazil and 12 Monkeys pay homage to Lang’s work, writes in the excellent monogram that comes with the DVD and BD that “it leaves a pretty deep scar”, which is a perfect way of describing the film’s effects.

Being that rare thing, a silent film, it’s visual language is as much a part of the narrative as the title card’s text; the urban landscape massive and menacing with it’s German Expressionist modernist architecture, the ‘masses’ alienated and depersonalized as they move like cattle to the slaughter-house, the chiaroscuro lighting reflecting the dystopian nature of the narrative. The story is Marxist, with class struggle depicted in the contrasting worlds of the ‘managers’ and the workers.

Labour power and labour value eaten vampiriclly by the bourgeois, the film preaches revolution but much to Lang’s latter disgust is thwarted by the addition of a more liberal ideology. Maria, the female protagonist wishing the ‘head’ and ‘hands’ to become joined by the ‘heart’, liberal capitalism to the rescue. Lang, like Eisenstein, uses film to depict political meaning through editing, composition and music, these formalist concerns also creating the emotion and beauty that act like Gilliam’s ’scar’ effect.

Lang fled Nazi Germany (Nazis like Goebbels watched three films a day, Hitler was fond of Walt Disney! Film was great propaganda and they admired Metropolis for it’s vision of a controlled society) to America where he made some of the best films of the 40s and 50s, including The Big Heat, Scarlet Street, Rancho Notorious.

I’ve seen Metropolis many times but this version, subtitled the ‘restored and authorized’, is by far the best, incorporating lost footage found recently in Brazil and a very clean print that just enhances the experience. The BD is just stunning.

Metropolis Trailer

By Kerry Buchanan