Metropolis, 80 years on

2007 makes 80 years since the premiere of Fritz Lang's epic of science fiction futurism, Metropolis.

Metropolis marks a sort of intersection: It came out of the cauldron of interwar Germany, launched an entire genre of film, and was one of the last great silent pictures, released on the cusp of the "talkie" age which began in earnest with The Jazz Singer later in the same year.

That futurism can contain so much medievalism may be a measure of the irresistible and sometimes fatal pull on the German imagination of the Dark Ages. In the same film, we see both a remarkably prescient projection of a videophone, and a Grim Reaper and skeletal chorus right out of a Black Death-era manuscript. The evocation of the Middle Ages in this brave new world is one of the features that makes Metropolis so compelling, though one wonders if it wasn’t so much a clever juxtaposition as the product of a mentality so fixated on the Gothic that even a film set in 2026 ends up playing out Medieval fantasies.

Metropolis itself is New York City circa 1924 -- when Lang first saw New York for himself -- only bigger and taller and with a few more architecturally audacious edifices here and there. That remains arguably the most striking and familiar image from the film: the Metropolis cityscape, with the skyscraping towers so fantastically high that the ground is almost forgotten, the ant-like traffic bustling in every direction and on multiple levels, and the planes buzzing not far above the higher tiers of traffic.

On the petty but pesky matter of Metropolis’ planes. The tiny biplanes and prop planes in the film were soon to be museum pieces even in 1927, and aircraft evolution had been so fast and furious in that time, it beggars belief that anyone of the time would envision planes a century hence as being exactly like whatever was current. A small point, admittedly, but these things do, as they say, take one out of the movie.

The film does avoid some of the usual pitfalls of futuristic science fiction, especially the unfortunate tendency to outfit the characters in tinfoil jumpsuits and metallic beehive wigs. The costuming, as the aircraft and automobiles, is mainly typical of the time the film was made: slacks and shirts, neckties, suit jackets, hair short and parted on the sides, etc. In fact, only two decades away from the 2026 setting for the film, it seems there was either shrewdness or at least dumb luck in those costuming and props decisions, as the difference between 1927 and 2026 is liable to be less than the difference between 2026 and a 1920s filmmaker's vision of 2026.

It is duly noted that Metropolis is a specimen of German cinematic expressionism, and perhaps that should dull one’s criticisms, but "expressionism" shouldn’t become an excuse for every flaw in the work.

The "plight of the workers" gimmicks particularly are cartoonish, as in the opening scene of the subterranean workers changing shifts, trudging unnaturally slowly and in mechanical lock step, as a signal to us benighted viewers that these are some decidedly non-unionized working conditions. Some silly stunts are tolerable in the name of expressionism. But even the miserable slaves who built Egypt’s pyramids were presumably permitted to trudge in their own gaits. And at that, if the laborers must walk unnaturally to make a point of their enslavement, why not have them walk faster rather than at a snail’s pace which no self-respecting slave-overseer would abide? It’s ridiculous and unnecessary direction and diminishes the film.

And that points to a bigger problem with the film. Why, in this advanced, mechanized future world, are human beings necessary for such menial tasks as mechanically turning dials? In a world in which so much else has been automated – even programmable androids invented -- one might imagine that the task of turning dials would have been sorted out as well. But that of course would have undermined the point of the film, which was to comment on the plight of labor and some class apartheid.

Being a silent film, Metropolis tends toward the hammier school of acting -- overwrought expressions and gestures, etc. -- but that’s a forgivable and indeed charming feature of the era, when such visual embellishments compensated for the silence.

As Maria, Brigette Helm is frankly a little boring. But as "Machine-Maria" -- the android given Maria’s characteristics by its mad scientist inventor, Rotwang -- she’s positively possessed, at times wild and at other times coldly manipulative, with a sinister smirk and an exuberant nihilism. Her Machine-Maria performance ranks with the very best in silent film. Incidentally, Helm’s look is one that seems to have appealed quite specifically to Germans of the era.

Alfred Abel plays Metropolis’ master, Joh Fredersen, and can be something of a show-stealer. More subtle for the most part than typical silent-era actors, and conveys the sort of control and cynicism that one might imagine in a master of this future city of 60 million.

Among Metropolis’ anachronisms is its quite sincere invocation of Christianity. The film is filled with Christian allusions and symbolism, and not for purposes of irony, scorn, or villanization, as would tend to be the case in any nonreligious film of the past several decades. When the hero Freder, son of Joh Fredersen, finds himself in the laboring bowels of the city and witnesses a worker die in service to one of the machines, his point of reference is the human sacrifice culture of Molechism condemned in the Old Testament, and he envisions the factory scene as a stylized Biblical one of ancient Ammonites throwing themselves to the furnace as sacrifices to Molech. It takes some considerable familiarity with the Bible, not to mention an assumption of audience acquaintance with Scripture, to instinctively allude to such a thing as Molechism.

The heroine is named Maria, and is a rapturous John the Baptist-figure/Social Gospel preacher/labor organizer who calls subversive meetings in the catacombs below the city, festooned with crosses. Maria recounts the Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel, but appropriates it as a class struggle "legend". In the passed-over Biblical account, the man-as-god thinking behind the tower was a blasphemous affront to God, whereas in Maria’s legend, the problem with the tower is the conscription of dumb labor to build it and the lack of understanding between that labor and the designers.

Maria points the people to their messiah, or to use the film’s preferred term, "mediator", who happens to be the son of Metropolis’ lord. Only son, at that. And in case we missed anything, this mediator’s head is illuminated as in a medieval icon. He is supposed to be the "heart" that allows the "head" and the "hands" to communicate, which is evidently very important and which, we are given to know from the first frames of the picture, is the moral of the story.

There’s also a cathedral, Scripture passages, the fulfillment of Revelation prophesies, even a burning at the stake, etc., with characteristically Teutonic Medieval embellishments. Christianity comes in many forms, and Metropolis’ Christianity is more along the lines of what was called "Social Gospel", quite Biblically literate, and more accommodative than radical. A Continental Social Democrat’s Christianity, which itself is becoming a bit anachronistic today even in Europe.

The unionist economics of the film is blessedly outmoded today, dated and almost other-worldly, like a debate on women’s suffrage. Speaking of the womenfolk, the workforce of 2026 Metropolis is uniformly male, which, like that ancient biplane and prop plane, was not long for this world even when the film was made. We learn that there are women in Metropolis’ laboring class, and children, but they apparently keep to their housing.

The time of the film’s making must be of some significance. 1927 precedes by a couple years our dating for the Great Depression, when this kind of Marx-inspired art would become even more typical. But Germany is another case. It’s sometimes said that Germany was the first country into the depression and the first out of it, and by 1927, while to the west of Germany were boom-times and happy days, Germany was already an economic basket case, thanks especially to the war, the post-war carving-up of valuable German territory, and Germany’s ruinous Reparations burden. So no doubt all that gave the film some currency and import, as a generation drowning in economic depression is liable to go for a movie that shows economics as some cruel machine, complete with a villain and scapegoat at the controls.

Like so much leftish advocacy art, Metropolis manages to miss the pending cataclysm that was gathering all around it in interwar Germany, and imagines instead some dystopia that would never materialize, in this case a caste system slavery. Not only did the coming slide toward fascism and war elude the filmmakers, but Lang’s then-wife and his Metropolis co-writer would later become quite an enthusiastic Nazi herself, which probably wasn’t much of a stretch. Maybe 1927 was still too early for the specter of fascism and the next global conflagration to have appeared to anyone, although Mussolini had established his Fascist government in Italy some five years earlier.

As politics and as science fiction futurism, Metropolis was no prophet. And as storytelling, it’s less compelling than some of Lang’s other work, like the Dr. Mabuse films. It is as art that Metropolis is magic. So many scenes, like the one in which the diabolical scientist Rotwang merges Maria with his android "Machine-Man" in his fantastical laboratory, with music at least as inspired as the concept itself, are as close to perfection as can be found in any silent film. So many touches, like setting Rotwang’s space-age lab in an ancient hovel in the shadows of Metropolis’ towers, are the stuff of truly great stories.

Metropolis is a tour de force, and legitimately the landmark cinematic achievement which its advocates claim it to be. Just don’t mind the quirks.

(The Murnau Foundation has done an exquisite job of making Metropolis presentable in its old age, being as faithful to the partly-lost original as possible, and adding a brilliant rendering of the original orchestral score by Gottfried Huppertz. The Murnau restoration is distributed in North America by Kino.)