User:Andrzejbanas/Metropolis

Metropolis is a 1927 German expressionist film in the science-fiction genre directed by Fritz Lang. Produced in Germany during a stable period of the Weimar Republic, Metropolis is set in a futuristic urban dystopia and makes use of this context to explore a political theme of the day: the social crisis between workers and owners in capitalism. The film was produced in the Babelsberg Studios by Universum Film A.G. (UFA). The most expensive silent film ever made, it cost approximately 5 million Reichsmark.

Metropolis was cut substantially after its German premiere, and much footage was lost over the passage of successive decades. There have been several efforts to restore it, as well as discoveries of previously lost footage. A 2001 reconstruction of Metropolis, shown at the Berlin Film Festival, was inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in that same year. In 2008, a copy of the film 30 minutes longer than any other known surviving copy was located in Argentina. After a long period of restoration in Germany, the restored film was shown publicly for the first time simultaneously at Berlin and Frankfurt on February 12, 2010. The event of the Friedrichstadtpalast was shown live on a screen at the Brandenburg Gate as well as on TV on ARTE.

Plot summary
The film is set in the massive, sprawling futuristic mega-city Metropolis, whose society is divided into two classes: one of planners and management, who live high above the Earth in luxurious skyscrapers; and one of workers, who live and toil underground. The city was founded, built, and is run by the autocratic Joh Fredersen.

Like all the other sons of the managers of Metropolis, Fredersen's son Freder lives a life of luxury in the theatres and stadiums of the skyscraper buildings. One day, as he is playing in the Eternal Gardens, he notices that a beautiful girl has appeared with many children of the workers. She is quickly shooed away, but Freder becomes infatuated with her and follows her down to the workers' underworld. There, he experiences firsthand the horrors of the workers' life, and is disgusted when he sees an enormous machine, known as the M-Machine, violently explode and kill dozens of workers. In the smoke, Freder envisions the M-Machine as Moloch, a monstrous deity to which the hapless workers are sacrificed.

Disgusted, Freder returns to the New Tower of Babel, a massive skyscraper owned by his father. There, he confronts his father and starts crying about the accident at the M-Machine, but Fredersen is more annoyed about hearing about the accident from his son and not from his clerk Josephat. Grot, foreman of the Heart Machine, informs him of papers resembling plans or maps, which have been found in the dead workers' pockets. Again, because he had not heard the news from Josephat first, Fredersen fires him, and also charges his spy, a slim man, to keep an eye on his son.

Freder keeps Josephat from committing suicide and hires him to help with his quest to help the workers. Freder descends to the worker's underworld again and meets someone named Georgy 11811, who works a machine that directs electrical power to the enormous series of elevators in the New Tower of Babel. Freder persuades Georgy to exchange clothes with him, go to Freder's apartment, and let Freder work at the machine. Georgy, who finds large blocks of money in the pocket of Freder's clothing, goes to Yoshiwara, the city's red-light district. While Georgy enjoys a night of wild and passionate partying, Freder works at the machine until he becomes delirious, having visions of being crucified to the factory clock.

Fredersen, wondering about the papers found, decides to consult the scientist Rotwang, his old collaborator, who lives in an old house contained in the lower levels of the city. The two were friends but then became rivals over the love of a woman. Rotwang loved a girl named Hel but when he introduced her to his friend, Hel abandoned him to marry the much more wealthy and powerful Fredersen. Hel died giving birth to Freder, leaving both Rotwang and Fredersen heartbroken and loathing themselves and each other. While Fredersen has moved on, the scientist's love for Hel and his hatred to Fredersen remain as strong as ever. Rotwang introduces Fredersen to a machine-man he has constructed and which he intends to give the image of Hel and marry her.

When Fredersen seeks Rotwang's counsel about the papers, Rotwang explains that they are maps to the 2,000-year old catacombs that are deep under the lowest levels of the worker's city. The two decide to go exploring the catacombs and climb down a tunnel. From a gap in the rocks, they observe the workers gathering in a cathedral hewn from the rock. There, the beautiful Maria appears and begins preaching to the workers (among them the disguised Freder) about the Tower of Babel and about how they must wait for the coming Mediator and also that the heart must be mediator between the mind (the planners) and the hands (the workers).

At the end of the sermon, Fredersen turns away and begins thinking, while Rotwang notices one worker staying behind, and talking to Maria, revealing himself as Fredersen's son and telling her that he realizes that he is the Mediator that they have been waiting for. Fredersen instructs Rotwang to give the machine-man the image of Maria to then sow distrust between her and the workers. Rotwang agrees but has ulterior motives, intending to use the machine-man to ruin Fredersen's life. While Fredersen returns to his offices, Rotwang captures Maria and imprisons her in his house. There, he performs experiments on her and transforms the machine-man to look exactly like Maria. He then instructs it, by any means that does not hurt Rotwang or herself, to destroy Fredersen's city and murder his son.

Rotwang demonstrates the machine-man's abilities to Fredersen by dressing it up as an erotic dancer at the Yoshiwara, where it drives the sons of the owners into homicidal fits of sexual jealousy. The body count is enormous; meanwhile, the machine-man also visits the workers' city and encourages the workers to rebel. They storm out of the workers' city in a full-scale riot and destroy the Heart Machine, the city's power generator. This results in a complete hydraulic breakdown. The city's reservoirs overflow and flood the workers' city to the brim, and seemingly drown the children of the workers. In fact, the children were saved by the real Maria and Freder in a heroic rescue.

When the workers realize what they have done, and that they have killed their children, they blame Maria. Under Grot's leadership, they dash to the upper city and run through the streets, chasing the real Maria, rather than the machine-man. They run into Yoshiwara and meet the owners' sons, led by the machine-man. In the ensuing confusion, the machine-man is tied to a stake and is burned to death.

Meanwhile, the real Maria is chased by Rotwang, who takes her for the machine-man and now wants to give her the likeness of Hel after all. In a climactic scene, Fredersen watches in horror as Freder and Rotwang fight on the cathedral's roof. Rotwang falls to his death, and Freder and Maria return to the street and unite Fredersen and Grot, thus ending the brutality of the city.

Cast
The film stars Alfred Abel as Joh Fredersen, the leader of the city, Gustav Fröhlich as his son Freder, who tries to mediate between the elite and the workers, Brigitte Helm as both the pure-at-heart teacher Maria and the debased machine-version of her, and Rudolf Klein-Rogge as the mad scientist Rotwang. Heinrich George appears as Grot, Foreman of the Heart Machine.

The film ranks as one of the films with most extras:
 * 750 "bit players"
 * 26,000 male extras
 * 11,000 female extras
 * 750 child extras

Development

 * In October 1924, producer Erich Pommer and director Fritz Lang visited the visited Los Angeles. After the stabilization of the Reichsmark in 1924, the German film market


 * McGilligan
 * Metropolis was officially announced after at the Berlin premiere of Die Nibelungen in January 1924.

Architecture and visual effects
Metropolis features special effects and set designs that still impress modern audiences with their visual impact – the film contains cinematic and thematic links to German Expressionism, though the architecture as portrayed in the film appears based on contemporary Modernism and Art Deco. The latter, a brand-new style in Europe at the time, had not reached mass production yet and was considered an emblem of the bourgeois class, and similarly associated with the ruling class in the film.

Rotwang's Art Deco laboratory with its lights and industrial machinery is a forerunner of the Streamline Moderne style, highly influential on the look of Frankenstein-style laboratories of "mad scientists" in pop culture. When applied to science fiction, this style is sometimes called Raygun Gothic.

The effects expert, Eugen Schüfftan, created innovative visual displays widely acclaimed in following years. Among the effects used are miniatures of the city, a camera on a swing, and most notably, the so-called Schüfftan process, in which mirrors are used to "place" actors inside miniature sets. This new technique was seen again just two years later in Alfred Hitchcock's film Blackmail (1929).

The Maschinenmensch, the robot character played by Brigitte Helm, was created by Walter Schulze-Mittendorff. A chance discovery of a sample of "plastic wood" (a pliable substance designed as wood-filler) allowed him to sculpt the costume like a suit of armour over a plaster cast of the actress. Spraypainted a mix of silver and bronze, it helped create some of the most memorable moments on film. Helm suffered greatly during the filming of these scenes wearing this rigid and uncomfortable costume, which cut and bruised her, but Fritz Lang insisted on her playing the part, even if nobody would know it was her.

The referenced passage describes Brigitte Helm's extreme discomfort in being fitted for and wearing the costume. The same source (Chapter 6) describes dangerous stunts that Helm was compelled to perform by Lang, including the running over roof, hanging from bell, and burning in fire. Walter Schulze-Mittendorff (also 'Mittendorf'), the sculptor, is still the owner of the copyrights for the Maschinenmensch – Robotdesign.

Release
On January 10, 1927, a 153 minute version of the film premiered in Berlin with moderate success. Before it was shown outside Germany, however, the film was cut and re-edited, changing many key elements. American and foreign theatre managers were generally unwilling to allow more than ninety minutes to a feature in their program, during a period when film attendance figures were high. Metropolis suffered as the original version was thought to be too long. Many theatres projected the film at the standard sound film speed of around 24 frames per second, rather than the standard silent film speed of 16 frames per second, at which the film was made. This affected the rhythm and pace of the original film. As a result of these changes, few people outside of Berlin saw Metropolis as Fritz Lang originally intended; the version shown to European and American audiences in 1928 was disjointed and illogical in parts. In the United States, the movie was shown in a version edited by the American playwright Channing Pollock, who almost completely obscured the original plot, which was considered too controversial by the American distributors; the Pollock version is considerably shortened. In Germany, a version similar to Pollock's was shown on August 5, 1927.

As a result of the edited versions, the original premiere cut eventually disappeared and a quarter of the original film was long believed to be lost forever. In 2001, a new 75th anniversary restoration, commissioned by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung, was screened at the Berlin International Film Festival. This version, with a running time of 124 minutes, restored the original story line using stills and intertitles to bridge missing footage. It also added a soundtrack using the orchestral score originally composed by Gottfried Huppertz to go with the film. This restoration received the National Society of Film Critics Heritage Award for Restoration 2002. In June 2008, a copy of the original film was discovered in an archive of the Museum of Cinema in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Twenty to twenty-five minutes of lost footage could be added to the 2001 reconstruction, filling most of the gaps. It was believed this was a copy made of a print owned by a private collector, who brought the original cut to the country in 1928.

Despite the film's later reputation, some contemporary critics panned it. The New York Times critic Mourdant Hall called it a "technical marvel with feet of clay". The Times went on the next month to publish a lengthy review by H. G. Wells who accused it of "foolishness, cliché, platitude, and muddlement about mechanical progress and progress in general." He faulted Metropolis for its premise that automation created drudgery rather than relieving it, wondered who was buying the machines' output if not the workers, and found parts of the story derivative of Shelley's Frankenstein, Karel Čapek's robot stories, and his own The Sleeper Awakes. Joseph Goebbels was impressed however and took the film's message to heart. In a speech of 1928 he noted: "The political bourgeoisie is about to leave the stage of history. In its place advance the oppressed producers of the head and hand, the forces of Labour, to begin their historical mission".

The film is part of the 2010 Fantasia Film Festival and is scored by Canadian silent film composer Gabriel Thibaudeau.

Influences
The film was written by Lang and his wife Thea von Harbou. The two wrote the screenplay in 1924, and published a novelization in 1926, before the film was released. Lang was influenced by the Soviet science fiction film Aelita by Yakov Protazanov (1924), which was an adaptation of a novel by Alexei Tolstoy. The plot of Aelita included a revolution taking place on the planet Mars. However, Metropolis advocates non-violent collaboration rather than the Marxist ideal of "class struggle".

Fritz Lang later expressed dissatisfaction with the film. In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich (available in Who The Devil Made It...), he expressed his reservations. The main thesis was Mrs. Von Harbou's, but I am at least 50 percent responsible because I did it. I was not so politically minded in those days as I am now. You cannot make a social-conscious picture in which you say that the intermediary between the hand and the brain is the heart. I mean, that's a fairy tale — definitely. But I was very interested in machines. Anyway, I didn't like the picture — thought it was silly and stupid — then, when I saw the astronauts: what else are they but part of a machine? It's very hard to talk about pictures— should I say now that I like Metropolis because something I have seen in my imagination comes true, when I detested it after it was finished? In his profile for Lang featured in the same book, which prefaces the interview, Bogdanovich suggested that Lang's distaste for his own film also stemmed from the Nazi Party's fascination with the film. Von Harbou became a passionate member of the Nazi Party in 1933. They divorced the following year.

The artist Paul Citroen, and more particularly, one of his collages titled "Metropolis" (1923), also had an influence.

Restorations and re-releases
Several restored versions (all of them missing varying amounts of footage) were released in the 1980s and 1990s, running for 90 minutes.

In 1984, a new restoration and edit of the film was compiled by Giorgio Moroder, a music producer who specialized in pop-rock soundtracks for motion pictures. Moroder’s version of the film introduced a new contemporary pop music soundtrack for the film. Although it restored a number of previously missing scenes and plot details from the original release, his version of the film runs to only 80 minutes in length, although this is mainly due to the original intertitles being replaced with subtitles, and being run at 24 frame/s. The “Moroder version” of Metropolis sparked heated debate among film buffs and fans, with outspoken critics and supporters of the film falling into equal camps. Even though the Moroder version was nominated at The 1985 Razzie Awards for Worst Original Score and Worst Original Song (with Freddie Mercury), there have even been petitions to get his cut alongside the uncut version for future home video releases.

Enno Patalas made an exhaustive attempt to restore the movie in 1986. This restoration was the most accurate for its time, thanks to the script and the musical score that had been discovered. The basis of Patalas' work was a copy in the Museum of Modern Art's collection.

The American copyright had lapsed in 1953, which eventually led to a proliferation of versions being released on video. Along with other foreign-made works, the film's U.S. copyright was restored in 1998. but the constitutionality of this copyright extension was challenged in Golan v. Gonzales and as Golan v. Holder it was ruled that "In the United States, that body of law includes the bedrock principle that works in the public domain remain in the public domain. Removing works from the public domain violated Plaintiffs’ vested First Amendment interests." The case is currently on appeal.

F.W. Murnau Foundation (which now owns the film's copyright where applicable) and Kino International (now the film's American distributor) released a digitally restored version of 3378 metres (which equals a running time of 124 minutes at 24 f.p.s.) in 2002, supervised by Martin Koerber. It included the original music score and title cards describing the action in the missing sequences. Lost clips were gleaned from museums and archives around the world, and computers were used to digitally clean each frame and repair minor defects. The original score was re-recorded with an orchestral ensemble. Many scenes had still not been recovered at that point and were considered lost. Among the missing scenes are the adventures of 11811, a worker who trades places with Freder; the Thin Man spying on Josephat; Maria's incarceration; Rotwang's gloating and her subsequent escape; and scenes which establish the longstanding rivalry between Johann Fredersen and Rotwang.

Most silent films were shot at speeds of between 16 and 20 frames per second, but the digitally restored version with soundtrack plays at the speed of 25 frames per second (equaling a running time of 118 minutes), which is the standard speed of PAL video (the US DVD is a conversion from PAL to NTSC). This speed often makes the action look unnaturally fast. A documentary on the Kino DVD edition states that Metropolis may have been filmed at 25 frames per second, but this is disputed. There have been reports stating that the world premiere of Metropolis was shown at 24 frame/s, but these, too, are unconfirmed. In the 1970s, the BBC prepared a version with electronic sound that ran at 18 frames per second and consequently had much more realistic-looking movement. Since there is no concrete evidence of Fritz Lang's wishes on this subject, it continues to be hotly debated within the silent film community.

Rediscovery
On July 1, 2008, film experts in Berlin announced that a 16 mm reduction negative of the original premiere cut of the film, including almost all of the lost scenes, had been discovered in the archives of the Museo del Cine (film museum) in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The find was authenticated by film experts working for Die Zeit. Passed around since 1928 from film distributor to private collector to an art foundation, the Metropolis copy arrived at the Museo del Cine, where it stayed undiscovered in their archives. After hearing an anecdote by the cinema club manager—who years before had been surprised by the length when this copy was screened—the museum's curator and the director of the film department of the Museum of Latin American Art reviewed the film and discovered the missing scenes. The print was in poor condition and required considerable restoration before it was re-premiered in February 2010.

In 2005 Wollongong-based historian and politician Michael Organ examined a print of the film located in the National Film Archive of New Zealand. It had been thought that it was the same cut as the Australian version but Organ discovered that it contained missing scenes not seen in the cut versions of the film. After hearing of the discovery of the Argentine print of the film and the restoration project which was currently under way Organ contacted the German restorers about his find. The New Zealand print was found to contain 11 missing scenes and included seconds of footage which were missing from the Argentine print and also footage which could be used to restore damaged sections of the Argentine print. It is believed that the editor in charge of editing the New Zealand print for some unknown reason excised different scenes than that of the Australian print keeping scenes missing from other versions intact. It is believed that the Australian, New Zealand and Argentine prints were all scored from the same master. The newly discovered footage was used in the restoration project.

The rights holders of Metropolis, the F.W. Murnau Stiftung, later confirmed that the newly discovered footage completes the missing footage except for a few missing frames. Although the new footage was in a "deplorable" condition, they announced in February 2009 that they had begun restoration work on the rediscovered film and had the "ambitious target" for the restoration to be completed by early 2010. The restored original version was shown 83 years after its premiere on January 10, 1927, which also was in Berlin, for the occasion of the 60th Berlinale, on February 12, 2010, at the Friedrichstadtpalast in Berlin, at the Alte Oper in Frankfurt, as well as on TV on ARTE HD and as a public viewing at the Brandenburg Gate. Only a few scenes of about eight minutes overall (thus giving the film a running time of 145 minutes), were not included in the new cut, because they were too badly damaged to repair or still missing. Instead, the film goes black for the original duration of the missing footage. In case of important scenes, an intertitle with a different typeface explains the content of the missing footage. This includes a monk at the cathedral predicting the apocalypse to Freder as well as a fight between Fredersen and Rotwang which enables Maria to flee.

Copies of the new version for theatrical display will be published by Transit Film, Munich. Kino will be re-releasing the film in select US theaters over the summer, with a planned DVD and Blu-Ray release following in November. Eureka/Masters of Cinema will be doing the same in the UK and Ireland, with a theatrical release commencing September 10, 2010. In November 2009 Turner Classic Movies announced its first ever Classic Film Festival, which was held in Hollywood on April 22 – April 25, 2010. Included in the festival was the North American premiere of the newly restored version of the film, with an original score performed live by the Alloy Orchestra.

A possible 9.5 mm copy of the movie was found in 2005 in the film archive of Universidad de Chile. The copy was sent to Germany in late 2008 for verification.

The original score
Like many big budget films of the time, the original release of Metropolis had an original musical score meant to be performed by large orchestras accompanying the film in major theatres. The music was composed by Gottfried Huppertz, who had composed the original scores for Lang's Die Nibelungen films in 1924. For Metropolis Huppertz composed a leitmotific orchestral score which included many elements from the music of Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, plus some mild modernism for the city of the workers and the use of the popular Dies Irae for some apocalyptic imagery. His music played a prominent role during the shooting of the film, since during principal photography many scenes were accompanied by him playing the piano to get a certain effect from the actors.

The score was rerecorded for the most recent DVD release of the film with Berndt Heller conducting the Rundfunksinfonieorchester Saarbrücken. It was the first release of the reasonably reconstructed movie accompanied by the music that was originally intended for it. In 2007 the original film score was also played live by the VCS Radio Symphony which accompanied the restored version of the film at Brenden Theatres in Vacaville, CA on August 1 & 2. The score was also produced in a salon orchestration which was performed for the first time in the United States in August, 2007 by The Bijou Orchestra under the direction of Leo Najar as part of a German Expressionist film festival in Bay City, Michigan. The same forces also performed the work at the Traverse City Film Festival in Traverse City, Michigan in August, 2009.

Other soundtracks
There have been many other soundtracks created for Metropolis by different artists, including, but not limited to:
 * 1975 - The BBC version of Metropolis features an electronic score, composed by William Fitzwater and Hugh Davies.
 * 1984 – Giorgio Moroder restored and produced the 80-minute 1984 re-release, which had a pop soundtrack written by Moroder and performed by Moroder, Pat Benatar, Bonnie Tyler, Jon Anderson, Adam Ant, Cycle V, Loverboy, Billy Squier, and Freddie Mercury.
 * 1991 – The Alloy Orchestra formed to create a new original score to Moroder's version of Metropolis.
 * 1994 – Rambo Amadeus, Serbia-based Montenegrin composer. Music was played by Belgrade Philharmonic. The material was released as Metropolis B (Tour de Force).
 * 1998 – Peter Osborne. Synth orchestral / electronic. For JEF/Eureka 139-minute B&W DVD version, released only in UK.
 * 2001 – Jeff Mills. Electronic artist released a new techno score.
 * 2001 – Bernd Schultheis and Sofia's Radio Orchestra. Accompaniment for film festivals in 2001 and shown on German television
 * 2002 - Art Zoyd, a French avant-garde/electronic band released a new score on cd.
 * 2004 – Abel Korzeniowski - released a 40-minute preview of a new score he composed.
 * 2005 – "The New Pollutants" (Benjamin Speed and Tyson Hopprich) released Metropolis Rescore. Performed live for festivals since 2005. excerpts on Youtube
 * 2008 - Avant-garde music project Sinfonia Electronique released 'Music from the Big Machines' as an alternate soundtrack to the film.

Adaptations
Several adaptations have been made of the original Metropolis, including at least two musical theater adaptations (see Metropolis). The 2001 animated film Metropolis, is based on an original manga by Osamu Tezuka (see Metropolis); Tezuka's manga was in fact inspired by a poster for the film, and he never saw the film itself. The anime's story is much closer to the original film than Tezuka's manga, although all three feature similar themes.

In December 2007, producer Thomas Schuehly (Alexander, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen) gained the remake rights to Metropolis.

Musical artist Janelle Monáe is in the process of releasing a concept series in four suites: 2007's Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase), 2010's The ArchAndroid (Suites II and III), and the fourth as-yet-unreleased suite. The music is written from the perspective of an android from the year 2719, banished to the present day who becomes a messiah to current-day androids, inspiring them to break their bonds of slavery. The second album especially received wide critical acclaim. Monáe plans a graphic novel and a series of eighteen videos to coincide with the album series.