Guest Co-Hosts: Ranjit Sandhu, Federico BertoliniSci Fi July launches with a titan of cinematic futurism: Metropolis (1927), Fritz Lang’s visually stunning epic set the blueprint for dystopian science fiction, blending Gothic horror, political allegory, and machine-age spectacle. Co-written with Thea von Harbou, the film envisions a divided city of soaring towers and subterranean toil, where Freder--the privileged son of master planner Joh Fredersen--awakens to injustice through his encounter with the spiritual leader of the working class, Maria.
Mike is joined by Ranjit Sandhu and Federico Bertolini to discuss the many versions of the film, its fraught production, the complex legacy of Lang and von Harbou, and why Rotwang's lab never goes out of style. From Giger to Gaga, Metropolis casts a long, haunting shadow.
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Buy Metropolis by Thomas Elsaesser
Buy Fritz Lang: Nature of the Beast, A Biograph by Patrick McGilligan
Buy Metropolis on Blu-Ray
Buy Osamu Tezuka's Metropolis on Blu-Ray
Buy Giorgio Moroder's Metropolis on Blu-Ray
Read Metropolis: An Historical and Political Analysis by Ann J. Drummond
Read Aitam Bar-Sagi, The Film Music Museum: “Metropolis” around the World
Read The Human Drift by King Camp Gillette
Watch a video about Taylorism
Buy German Film Architecture 1918-1933 ed. by Nadejda Bartels
Watch the BBC2/PBS version
Watch a lecture about Metropolis by Professor Leigh Morrisey
Read Michael Organ's Metropolis website
Watch Aitam Bar-Sagi, Metropolis (1927) - the three Negatives
Watch Aitam Bar-Sagi, Metropolis (1927) - the three negatives Nr. 2
Multiple negatives were common in the silent days — and early talkie days, too — partly because nitrate negatives were so fragile that they would not be able to withstand running through the printer enough times to make sufficient prints. So prints for different territories were made from different negatives. When negatives got damaged, replacements were pulled from cans of spares (alternative takes that had never been shown before, that were kept on file just in case). Or, if all else failed, they were pulled from copy negatives or even dupes.
Watch the Australian nitrate print dating from April 1928 (one of five)
Australia probably received only a single print, and this was it, and the distributor abridged it prior to releasing it. The video transfer was made at about 17fps. This is very similar to the edition shown in the US from August 1927 until the end of its run in probably the early 1930’s, except that it was printed from a different negative, of course. Michael Organ uploaded this.
Watch the first half of the June 1928 New Zealand nitrate
Watch a counterfeit copy of Metropolis
Watch another one
Music:
"Metropolis" - Kraftwerk
Watch:
PART ONE: I have to eat some of my words. I was convinced that the Metropolis shoot was a mere three months at most, not the 310 working days and 60 working nights that the studio claimed in its press release. I was only half-right.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.neugraphic.com/metropolis/metropolis-chronology.html
The production was indeed about 310 days spread over 15 or 17 months, but not all those were shooting days. There couldn’t have been more than about 40 shooting days altogether, with lengthy down time between scenes. The editing crew had plenty of leisure time to put together a preliminary assembly between filming days, and Fritz had plenty of time to do a rough cut and fine cut, scene by scene, as production proceeded. The final film was ready at least as early as November 1926.
For these past few years, I had been wondering why all the sets, or nearly all of them, seem to have been built on the same studio stage. My tentative conclusion was that each studio stage was identical. Well, it begins to look as though nearly all the sets were indeed built on the same studio stage. A very small crew would build a set, a process that would take days or weeks or even a month, then a scene or two would be taken over just a few days, and then the set would be struck. A few weeks or a month later another set was ready, and another scene or two would be taken over just a few days, and then that set would be struck. The process continued for 15 months or so, and that is why the production was so protracted. Ufa rented a further stage at Efa and the Moloch Machine was shot in the Zeppelin hall in Staaken. The paternoster elevators were at Ufa HQ. Apparently all Ufa productions were done in the same way, and that explains why Fritz never improvised. How could he? A single improvisation would kill continuity everywhere. He had to get everything on paper first. That is why we shall never find unit stills of unused scenes. There were no unused scenes. Everything in the script was shot pretty much as scripted, and every scene that was shot was included in the final film.
So now we know how and why the cast and crew worked on other films during 1925 and 1926: When Metropolis was on hiatus for a few weeks while a new set was being constructed, the cast and crew could be scheduled for scenes in other films.
PART TWO: Also, I just discovered three mini-lectures by Dr. Leigh Morrisey. This is the best one:
ReplyDeletehttps://youtu.be/M7Eh4pxKwfY
Every shot in the film can and should be analysed the way Dr. Morrisey analyses the visuals.
The next two are not as insightful, but they’re still worth watching:
https://youtu.be/SJOyD7lv6Ak
https://youtu.be/LBrG5qSSxdI
Another exceptional video is from someone who calls himself The Dark Side Press:
https://youtu.be/K1Wq9tcCVO4
We never got to chat about the prospectus for a real Metropolis that inspired the movie Metropolis:
https://rjbuffalo.com/images/Metropolis/The_Human_Drift.pdf
The movie exaggerated (not by much) the working conditions in Germany at the time, based on the principle of “rationalization,” a perversion of Taylorism, which you can learn about here:
https://youtu.be/vNfy_AHG-MU
The sermon on the Tower of Babel dropped the biblical moral and substituted a moral taken from Elton Mayo, about whom you can learn here:
https://youtu.be/TIx5xovXDyc
The movie was very much agitprop in favor of Mayo’s ideas, in favor of peaceful compromise between capital and labor, rather than the more common negotiation by gunfire and bombs. By far the best analysis of Metropolis is by Ann J. Drummond (I would love to reach her but I can’t find her contact info):
https://theses.gla.ac.uk/76665/1/10948158.pdf
PART THREE: The movie cannot be covered in a mere two and a half hours. The simplistic fairy tale is told with a wealth of cultural referents, mythological motifs, including the legend of the Golem, and playful use and misuse of occult symbols and patterns, together with satire that I find quite amusing. For me, Fritz Rasp (Slim, or The Thin Man) is the comical highlight of the movie.
ReplyDeleteFor those who have not seen the movie, please avoid the ubiquitous counterfeit editions, many of which are unwatchable and senseless. The latest restoration, available on Blu-ray from Eureka and Kino, is the one to watch.
Ranjit