Metropolis

Metropolis



Dir. Fritz Lang

What an ambitious film! I'm going to go ahead and say that of the films I've watched so far for this project, this is easily my favorite to this point. There's so much of what I love going on here. Certainly this film is helped somewhat by the fact that I love science fiction, but even if that wasn't the case I still think there's a breadth of vision here that is so apparent as to be really something impressive. Honestly I'm not even sure what all there is to be said other than "go watch this film" but I'll try and give a bit of my thoughts as the story goes.

So the version that I'm watching is a restored edition that's around two and a half hours long. Apparently this is the most complete version of the film available, with five minutes of footage still lost to time. That said I'm impressed that they recovered thirty minutes of footage over the previous version of the film, and it's so much better for it I think.

The film opens with a wonderfully haunting sequence of hordes of workers marching in lockstep between their shifts. I'm immediately wanting to contrast this with Demille, who had his extras mostly acting as members of a crowd to look at the stars. Here though the extras have their own choreography and really become a big part of the visual language of this film, with their movements reiterating the machinery that they toil alongside.

While the workers live a rough life, we meet one of our main characters, a wealthy young man named Freder Fredersen, idles away in a pleasure garden surrounded by birds and young women for him to flirt with.

Freder is eventually visited by a young woman named Maria, who is caring for a bunch of children from the working levels of the city. She introduces them to Freder, saying that they are his brothers and sisters. Fascinated, Freder follows them back to the working levels where he witnesses a giant machine that is under so much stress that it explodes, injuring/killing several workers. Freder then hallucinates that the machine is really Moloch, and that the workers march into his mouth to be consumed by the machine. It's probably the first sequence of the film where I was truly impressed. Especially for a film from 1927!

Freder, distraught by his vision, goes to visit his father to see if anything can be done to help the workers. His father, Joh Fredersen, is a cold man and also seems to be the person at the head of the city. He feels that the workers are in their rightful place dying to uphold the city, and when his son leaves upset by this, he hires a spy to go keep track of his son's whereabouts. There are a few figures in this movie which are really strange characters (one I'll get to later) but the spy is easily one of the stranger figures to show up. He's got this eyeshadow on that gives him a distinctly hawk-like appearance. Honestly, it's cartoonish in a way but it works within the expressionist style of the film where everything is sort of set in these mythical terms. Freder escapes to the lower levels of the city and trades places with a worker down there. Eventually, he's led to a secret meeting among the workers where the woman from earlier, Maria, preaches a message of hope to them regarding the Tower of Babel. The film cuts away to show this in wonderful detail, with droves upon droves of faceless workers trying to build the tower, only for it to come crashing down on the end, whereupon the workers attack the priests who had set them to laboring in the first place. Unfortunately, Joh Fredersen and a scientist named Rotwang who was in love with his late-wife (Freder's mother, Hel) are eavesdropping and decide that they need to find a way to ruin Maria's reputation among the workers. Rotwang is working on a synthetic human, and the two decide to kidnap Maria and have the machine-man disguised as her to break the trust of the workers.

Freder declares his love for Maria, which she seems to reciprocate, only to be kidnapped shortly thereafter by Rotwang, who sets his plan into motion disguising the machine-man as Maria, and setting it loose upon the city to stir up chaos. Freder, who had seen the machine already attempting to seduce his father, falls into a delirium in which he has visions of the machine doing this really bombastic dance set to the dies irae and dressed up as the Whore of Babylon, sitting atop an urn made to look like the Beast and upheld by statues representing the seven deadly sins, presided over by death... I really have to wonder what the reactions were like for the prop and set designers of this movie when they were asked to come up with these elaborate constructions.

These visions do not seem to actually be happening. That said, the plan that Joh and Rotwang have cooked up does not seem to be working. While Maria had always advocated for a mediator to emerge between the workers and the rich industrialists, Machine Maria advocates that the two groups come to open conflict with one another. Riling the workers up, she has them launch a full attack against the heart machine, the machine that maintains all of Metropolis's basic functions. As the workers tear the machine down, the streets of the city begin to flood. The real Maria, who has escaped from her captivity, begins to help children escape while the workers turn against the Machine Maria, burning her upon a pyre of fallen metal, revealing her to be a machine all along. Surprised, the workers seem to calm down a bit as the real Maria steps up again and proposes that Freder, who's been running around this whole time just trying to point out that this Maria is fake, is claimed to be the prophesied mediator between hand (the workers) and head (the industrialists).

So disagreements about class and gender aside, I still think this film is a wonderful achievement. The blending of religious, sci-fi, and expressionist imagery really lends the film an identity all its own that I think is most closely echoed in Brazil by Terry Gilliam. There are so many other little details in this movie that my recap is leaving out, but I think in terms of just a huge achievement of filmic technique, Metropolis stands head and shoulders above its contemporaries.