Firstly, Fritz Lang is my favorite director in the whole wide world. Indeed, until two years ago, I used to always carry around a book, Lotte Eisner’s Fritz Lang, that contained details, notes, and images about the movies he made in Germany, France, and America (this invaluable book was lost on the train between Seattle and Portland). Lang’s M is one of the greatest movies ever made, and his series of noir movies (You Only Live Once, The Woman in the Window, The Big Heat) can never exhaust my fascination. However, Metropolis, the grandfather of science-fiction cinema and one of Lang’s most famous works, has never moved me in any way. I watched it once many years ago, and that was enough.
Somewhere I read that Jean-Luc Godard once said that a movie is a documentary of an actor. This is the only value I ever found in the long and convoluted Metropolis: It’s a documentary about actors who have been dead for a very long time (the film was completed in 1927). With M, which Lang made not long after Metropolis, I do not have this feeling—all of these people on the screen are now dead. The film’s story, acting, and direction are still engaging. I can easily get lost in the world of M, but feel very much outside of the unbelievable city, the ugly towers, the clumsy class conflicts, and the robot woman-drama in Metropolis. SIFF Cinema, Thurs–Fri 7:30 pm, Sat 1 pm, Sun–Wed 7:30 pm.
Yes, Charles, but how did this new version, which developed supporting characters and added new subplots missing from the earlier versions, differ for you? This is a major piece of cinema archeology and the changes directly relate to the problems you have with the version watched “once many years ago.” How did these additions affect the way you saw the film this time? You did watch the restored version for this review, right?
Yeah, and KING LEAR is a docudrama about people who never existed.
I saw a somewhat similar version about 10 years ago at the Paramount. Maybe a few still inserts but the thing was almost 3 hrs long. Lots of stuff Lang rightfully removed (same with the nearly 4 hr Frau Im Mond that played a couple of years later). I particularly remember (no mean feat at my age) Freder jumping down levels of a parking lot for what seemed like 10 minutes. The release version known previously (that I had seen many times before including the Moroder version) is far superior because Lang edited for the audience’s responses and it really is obvious what needs to go if you actually watch it in a theater with other people. This “original premiere director’s release” is horsheshit only for completists which is in itself a sickness of the material culture. You can skip this with a clear conscience.
Silent film acting is quite different from sound film acting, so it doesn’t compare well to modern acting. The stand-out is Brigitte Helm, who conveyed a great deal of meaning and emotion in both her main guises (Maria and the Man-Machine). Gustav Fröhlich is very good, but somewhat more limited by silent film acting conventions than Helm. Heinrich George is very good too, with a hint of comic relief to his mannerisms. Alfred Abel is good, but harder to judge since his role didn’t demand as much range of expression. Rudolf Klein-Rogge is excellent, and helped define the image of a mad scientist. The other performances are solid too, but not large enough to judge individually.
The directing is excellent, the script is fairly good, the Brigitte Helm is excellent and several other performances are notable, and the artistic design and special effects are outstanding. As a work of art, the film is excellent. As a work of entertainment, the script holds the film back somewhat, but it’s still very good.
I saw the film accompanied by a live performance of an original score by Alloy Orchestra. It’s always a treat to see a silent film with live music, but this score and performance was outstanding.
Alloy Orchestra is a trio: one keyboardist and two percussionists. In addition to regular drums, assorted other percussion (tubular bells, triangles, horseshoes, a heavy coil spring, rain stick, gongs, and so forth), they had a piece of sheet metal that they played with a bow, a clarinet (played by one of them at times), and an accordion (played by the other at times). But it’s not the instrumentation that made the score amazing, it was the performance.
The score included several themes, most used more than once when scenes in the film fit a particular theme. Sometimes the score provided sound effects synchronized to the action on screen. The most-used theme, if I remember correctly, was a march with heavy percussion, somewhat reminiscent in tone to some Einstürzende Neubauten music, though more melodic. Other scenes were more conventionally orchestral. It was wonderful as accompaniment to the film, and probably would have stood well on its own.
In fact, the cut version was edited without the participation of Fritz Lang, who decried the cuts made to the film and to his vision. The new restored version, which is the closest ever to the version that played on opening night in Berlin (and for six months after that), is significantly different from the previous restoration because the new scenes fill out characters that are introduced but then disappear from the previous versions of the film. It makes more sense, and it moves better.