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.

Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens

Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens 

directed by F.W. Murnau



Okay so it's not a criterion film, but it's part of another film list I'm working through, the 366 weird movies list found on 366weirdmovies.com. Also I wanted to watch a movie for Halloween that I hadn't seen yet, so I figured this would be a good opportunity for it.

So, going in, I knew that Nosferatu featured a rather marked variation from the standard Holywood vampire. Even Lugosi played a more attractive vampire than Schreck's Orlok, who I always thought looked kind of silly and uncomfortable in his costume. Other than that, though, I only knew of the films legal troubles with the Stoker estate.

Overall, I think Nosferatu is an interesting yarn that really dwells in its atmosphere very well. From the moment the film introduces Hutter's (this film's Jonathan Harker) boss Knock, there's this off-kilter feeling. I remember back in undergrad I watched The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for a Horror-film class that I was in, and I was struck by the highly expressionistic set design of the film. Although Nosferatu came out two years after Caligari, it has a markedly different visual language to it. This isn't a bad thing, although... well I'll get to this later.

The shots that this country gives of the European countryside are just absolutely gorgeous! Unfortunately I couldn't really find any to post here, but there are many shots of mountains, rivers, and fields that just give this stunning view of what're supposed to be the Carpathians I believe.

Once Hutter meets Orlok, I will say that the film differs in a number of ways from Stoker's novel. Where Dracula was charming and polite, Orlok almost immediately tries to drink Hutter's blood. Also, notably, the brides are absent from this film. This isn't really a problem, but it does make Hutter's need to "escape" the castle once Orlok has left a little less clear.

The film differs drastically from the book at the end. The character of Ellen, Hutter's wife, who is sort of a combination of both Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker, seems to know that she needs to sacrifice herself so that Orlok will die in the sunlight. I did initially wonder if there wasn't any other way, but I kind of knew her death was coming toward about the midway point in the movie. I will say, I did notice as the movie went on though that Ellen is really the protagonist of the film. Hutter sets up the initial interaction between Orlok that prompts him to come to Germany, but from there all of the conflict revolves around Ellen and her figuring out how to set up Orlok's death. I'm somewhat uncomfortable with the whole "women dying in horror movies" stock thing, but I guess I'm a little bit more okay with it when it's more of a sacrifice to kill the film's monster. What're other folks thoughts on this?

A few other observations, most of which are minor nitpicky things
-There's a point in the film where an innkeep warns Hutter of a werewolf that prowls at night, and we get a shot of this werewolf and... it's so clearly a Striped Hyena. It's also adorable.
-Orlok at one point carries his coffin through the German town he's bought a house in and it's hilarious to watch. He's sort of awkwardly holding it under his arms and walking like he's trying to sneak around with it. Also, it's very obviously daylight in these shots, and I think we're just supposed to pretend it isn't. Maybe this is one of those things that would've been less apparent on older film.