"Metropolis:" Fritz Lang's 1927 Dystopian Sci Fi Classic, Early Films That Paved The Way

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Last edited Sat Jul 4, 2020, 03:00 PM - Edit history (1)

- Trailer for "Metropolis," German Fritz Lang's silent sci fi masterpiece is almost 100 years old.

BFI, "Metropolis at 90: five early sci-fi films that paved the way for Fritz Lang’s classic." Ninety years after the release of Fritz Lang’s hugely influential sci-fi epic, we look back at Metropolis and the pioneering films that first brought science fiction to life on screen. By Pamela Hutchinson, Jan.10, 2017. - Excerpts:

..The full Metropolis, the version shown in Germany, remains lost, and for decades its reputation as a triumph of cinematic spectacle rested on butchered versions, such as the one that so underwhelmed Wells. Despite that, Giorgio Moroder’s 1984 ‘restoration’ with eye-popping colour-washes and an uptempo pop-rock soundtrack made it a cult classic. The discovery of missing footage in Argentina in 2008, means that we now have a near-complete Metropolis, and it can be seen to its best advantage.
Directed by Lang from a screenplay by his wife Thea von Harbou, Metropolis concerns a nightmarish future city in which the rich and idle live in cosseted luxury, breathing the fresh air at the top of the city while the proletariat toil in the factories and crawl home to slums beneath the earth. The workers begin to organise under the peaceable leadership of a schoolteacher called Maria (Brigitte Helm), so the ruling-class villains have a “man-machine” robot take on her seductive image to lead them astray.

Lang too expressed regrets about the film, mostly the way it sweeps aside its class-consciousness with a call for paternalistic management and its conciliatory motto that “the mediator between the head and hands must be the heart”, a soft-soap conclusion that he called a “fairytale”. Members of the Nazi party, which Von Harbou later joined, were far more enthusiastic.
Metropolis is flawed but not hobbled by its message. Its scope and style are still breathtaking, and – in its restored version – its narrative is thrilling and expertly paced. The grandeur of the looming future-city was inspired by Lang’s first glimpse of New York from the water, although film historians will note the influence of Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914) in the hellish factory...

https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/metropolis-fritz-lang-silent-sci-fi

- Proletariat, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proletariat