Today I found myself thinking about *Metropolis* (1927). It's an unusual
movie that's probably just about as visually striking and thematically
relevant as it was ninety years ago. It's famous among film scholars for
pioneering a number of visual effects that pushed the boundaries of
available technologies, allowing convincing backdrops that were too large
to construct in life size, stunning aerial views of a city of the future
complete with fast-moving vehicles, and glowing rings of electrical current
that appear to pass over the body of one of the film's title characters.
But the reason this still works today is the film's artistic consistency;
it captures the apex of the German Expressionist style explored in titles
like *Nosferatu* and *The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari* and fuses that with a
prevailing strain of Art Deco futurism that was destined to fall apart with
the onset of the Great Depression, and every shot, especially any shot that
employed novel techniques, was executed meticulously to fit this æsthetic.
It works so well I found myself largely unphased by the broad, unsubtle
perdormances of the cast, who performed in a manner that was standard for
the silent film era but can come across as hammy to someone raised on more
contemporary talkies. And then there's the central conflict of the movie,
which has to do with an increasingly radical division between the residents
of a city of the future, whereby a privileged professional-intellectual
class dwells in gleaming towers and lush pleasure gardens above ground
while everyone else toils at constant risk of their life in a fetid, smoggy
subterranean industrial & residential complex. Into the midst of this
turmoil steps the mayor's son, a young man born into the highest social
privilege imaginable but driven by an almost unearthly innocence and
compassion — coupled with a sometimes alarming naïvety — that ultimately
sets him against the excesses of his father's admininistration. Thus we
arrive at the movie's boldly stated thesis: "The mediator between The Head
(the intellectual, academic and professional classes) and the Hands (the
working class) must be the Heart (compassion, ethics, and openness)."
*Metropolis* director and co-writer Fritz Lang, who fled Germany in 1933,
was later to say it was a naïve and ridiculous basis for a film.
If you endeavor to watch *Metropolis* I encourage you to seek out Kino's
"Ultimate Edition" from 2010, as all prior home video releases are missing
substantial (and plot-important) footage that was removed after the film's
Berlin theatrical debut to achieve a more marketable runtime.
