Honestly? I made a point of going to see the restored, virtually complete edition of Fritz Lang’s Expressionist science-fiction masterpiece Metropolis at least in part because I saw freaking Clash of the Titans in the theater. It always bothers me when I come across a comics blogger of obvious talent and intelligence who nevertheless limits himself to writing exclusively about new genre releases from mainstream publishers; why should I settle for being that comics blogger’s cinematic equivalent? Iron Man 2 can wait; Iron Maria calls.

I’m glad I went. This thing’s a hoot and a half. After watching its two and a half hours’ worth of dystopian retro-future allegory, I’m at a loss to tell you how many of its seminal images I’d half-remembered from seeing the truncated version back in college versus how many of them had simply been passed down through films and film buffs across the decades like tablets from on high. It strikes me that the achievement of Lang, writer Thea von Harbou, cinematographers Karl Freund, Gunter Rittau, and Walter Ruttman, and a small army of designers and special effects technicians is not at all dissimilar from the mad inventor Rotwang whose mechanical seductress brings the stratified society of the titular city to collapse, or from the ancient builders of Babel whose titanic Tower serves as the movie’s allegory-within-an-allegory. Not that Lang and company’s creation lead to disaster, of course, but simply that they used all the tools at their disposal to bring a product of imagination to life. Metropolis is nothing if not a monument to imagination.

There’s an almost Kirbyesque quality to the images here, a carved-from-the-heavens-themselves feel that gives you a frisson of awe and familiarity when you see the most memorable of the lot. The back-and-forth movement of the workers at their posts. The vision of the factory as a pagan idol devouring human sacrifices. That unforgettably pointless-looking task of frantically moving the hands of the giant dial to and fro. A frightening tableau of the Seven Deadly Sins, with Death at the center, staring the camera down. The unmistakably feminine Machine-Man rising from her pentagram-bedecked slab, her hips swaying erotically. My personal favorite this time: The nightmarish vision of an underground city illuminated solely by gigantic banks of florescent lights in what passes for its sky–as relatable and horrible a vision of a workaday hell as you could likely conceive. It’s the kind of stuff that doesn’t even feel like the countless filmmakers and artists who’ve subsequently referenced it are ripping it off–they seem like transmissions from the collective unconscious. It shows you things you’ve never seen before, even if you’ve seen them a million times.

I think a lot of credit also must be given to the actors. That’s sort of a weird thing to say of silent cinema, where generally speaking we sort of overlook the dated, hammy acting style in favor of the image, or the message, or what Film X says about Weimar Germany or what have you. But Metropolis is at its most alive when the frame is filled with lead actress Brigitte Helm in her dual role as a saintlike activist and her sinister, leering robot doppelganger. In the former role, her fundamental goodness is driven home by the sort of unselfconscious close-ups no one really does of actresses anymore except maybe David Lynch; it’s easier than you’d think to believe that one look at her as she crashes the upper class’s private Garden of Eden with the children of the proletariat is enough to send scion of privilege Freder head over heels and love and cause him to upend his entire heretofore unexamined worldview. But it’s as the robot Maria that she really lights the screen on fire: She’s a winking, grinning, laughing, writhing, clutching, oozing, convulsing parody of female sexuality at its most wanton. Whether she’s vamping it up in pasties for a hilariously horndog audience of aristocrats or going the full Mrs. Carmody and whipping the enraged workers into a killcrazy frenzy, you can’t take your eyes off her–and indeed, the film frequently depicts her audience as nothing but a sea of swaying eyes, riveted on her every wriggle. It’s some for-the-ages stuff.

Gustav Frohlich’s Freder has a tough act to follow in that regard, and he’s more what you might expect if you’ve seen any silent movies, but I think his fits of ecstasy and agony–that’s basically the only two settings he’s got–properly convey that he’s a good soul caught up in a corrupt system and genuinely, if naively, wants to change it. His father, played by Alfred Abel, is far more fascinating a figure than you might expect: He does the steely captain of industry thing, but there’s something sad-eyed about him, as though his inhumane system has seeped into his pores and slowly poisoned him; he looks like a cross between Peter Cushing and Nestor Carbonell.

In terms of the added material, recognizable by its scratchier grain and smaller aperture, the standout stuff is the addition of a pair of subplots. The first involves Georgy, the worker with whom Freder, changes places in order to gain entry into the world of the workers; and the Thin Man, a strikingly lupine spy/enforcer sent by Freder’s father, city honcho Joh Fredersen, to keep Freder under wraps. Though it never really matters much in the grand scheme of things, Georgy’s abandonment of Freder for the lure of the red-light district available to the rich and the Thin Man’s menacing treatment of Freder’s confidant Josaphat add a further look at the decadence of Metropolis’s ruling class and another entry in the film’s series of standout performances via actor Fritz Rasp respectively.

The second added subplot gives an almost Lost-like wrinkle to the partnership-cum-rivalry between Fredersen and Rotwang. When Fredersen visits Rotwang’s lair to suss out his workers’ potential plans for revolt, he stumbles across an eerie shrine to his own late wife Hel. Rotwang believes Fredersen stole her away from him and resents him for siring the son, Freder, whose birth caused Hel’s death; in the end, Maria’s rampage, whatever its allegorical significance in terms of Fredersen’s desire to create an agent provocateur as a pretext for moving against the workers, was really an attempt by Rotwang to double-cross Fredersen and bring the whole city crashing down–revenge writ large. Some of this material was present in the original version, but the Hel statue and its attendant dialogue give it new force. The subplot further drives home the movie’s repeated motif of how the sins of the parents are visited upon the children, from the decadent Club of the Sons where the patriarchs’ spoiled trust-fund babies make sport to the climactic flood that almost wipes out the children of the absent, rioting workers.

That big flood climax gets a lot of added material in the restoration too, and that’s actually a shame; the most striking visual there, that of saintlike activist Maria rallying the children to her as the flood waters surround them, was already present, so most of what you’re getting here is just extra shots that drag out a fairly quotidian action spectacle. It’s not until things get mano a mano again–the workers capture the false Maria and she’s burned at the stake, laughing all the while; Rotwang captures the real Maria and forcers her up the stairs of a cathedral bell tower, where her attempt to escape leads to a run-in with the giant bell far above the ground that I found frightening even today; and Freder and Rotwang duke it out on the roof of the cathedral as his now-repentant father looks on in horror–that the film recaptures its mythopoetic mojo. Even if the ending is infamously idealistic and unrealstic–which it is, eliciting chuckles from pretty much any given audience–it too feels like something told around a campfire rather than whipped up to boost UFA’s bottom line.

And none of this is to say that the film’s self-serious. It takes itself seriously, yes, but it’s also very funny. You have to love the way the Maria-bot ends up being used: “Okay, we’ve created this lifelike simulacrum of our enemy in order to replace her with it and destroy her cause forever–but first, ROBOT STRIPTEASE!” I’d imagine Freder’s insouciance and Mariabot’s vampiness were funny to the audiences of the day just as they are to us. And even though the workers’ characterization as a barely controlled force of nature is unflattering to their half of the Marxist equation just as the upper crust’s characterization as the “Head” is unnecessarily complimentary, it’s still darkly entertaining to watch them rage, revel, and then rend their garments in despair at regular intervals.

You shrug off the slow parts and revel in the grandeur, to the sounds of a score by Gottfried Huppertz that references everything from Dies Irae to the Marseillaise. It’s a big, beautiful, intoxicating movie.

Great job!

This entry was posted on Monday, May 17th, 2010 at 8:55 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.