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Metropolis is packing them in eighty years later. Last night I saw the latest restoration at the SIFF Cinema with Denys and [livejournal.com profile] holyoutlaw and there literally wasn't an empty seat in the house. A huge box office failure in 1927, Metropolis has become one of the most popular and influential silent films of all time, and based on the response of the crowd last night it hasn't lost any of its power to excite and inspire.

The new restoration, incorporating footage from an almost complete 16mm print found in Argentina in 2008, is as close as most of us have come to seeing the original cut of the film, which after its premiere in Berlin in 1927 was hacked down by both the American studio Paramount and separately by the German studio Ufa. The restored footage can't, of course, fix the sophomoric Big Important Themes and Symbols of the movie, but what's fascinating about this long cut is how much more textured and layered and structured the story is. The 2001 restoration was a revelation in bringing out the story of Joh Fredersen and Rotwang's love for the same woman, Hel, which gave a psychosexual underpinning to the class conflict at the heart of the story. Now this aspect of the story is fleshed out even further, and we see that Rotwang has not only invented the artificial human, the Machine Man, to replace his lost beloved, but that when he gives the Machine Man the face of Maria in order to destroy Hel's son by Fredersen, Freder, he himself comes to confuse the real Maria with Hel. Through all this the monstrous Rotwang, a predecessor of many filmic mad scientists including Dr. Strangelove, becomes a more sympathetic, more human character.



This version also restores two threads that were still mostly missing from the 2001 restoration, involving the worker Georgy 11811, who for a brief time gets to live in Freder's shoes in upper class paradise, and Josaphat, an employee of Joh Fredersen who gets fired and is rescued by Freder from a life in the working class underworld. Both of these threads flesh out Freder's growing compassion for his brothers in the oppressed lower classes, and the bonds of loyalty and love he forges with the oppressed. They also take us deeper into the pleasure world of the Yoshiwara district, where the upper class parties and riots to oblivion like it's Weimar Germany in the '20s.

Beyond the narrative elements, however, this new version, which appears to have been substantially re-edited as well, reveals how much Lang is communicating with sheer rhythm -- a fact that was underscored by the percussion-heavy live accompaniment by the Alloy Orchestra last night. Lang overtly structures the movie as a musical piece, dividing it into sections called Prelude, Intermezzo, and Furioso. The rhythm of the movie builds and builds until the final sections brings all the threads together in a frantic crescendo that moves upward in space as well as pace until it plummets finally back to earth. The orchestration of images is incredible, and that's something that had disappeared in the old truncations of the film. Even on the level of ham-handed thematics, there is careful layering and counterpointing going on, as when the workers learn that their children have not been drowned in the underground warrens after all just as Joh Fredersen discovers his own child teetering on the precipice of destruction above.

Well, it actually made me curious to see earlier versions again to see what all has been changed. I can watch the 2001 restoration on the DVD I have, but it would be fun to see the Moroder version again to be reminded how it played in the years before even that level of restoration had been reached. Metropolis has always been a problematic movie because of its dumb politics and banal preaching, but seeing it in its original form is a revelation. Deeply flawed, but a work of monumental achievement, if only structurally and visually. See it on a big screen if you can. It still works as eye candy after 80 years.
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