Metropolis 1927

The story

Metropolis is a city of the future, ruled from the New Tower of Babel by Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel). The rich live high up among pleasure gardens. The workers live underground and tend the machines.

His son Freder (Gustav Fröhlich) sees Maria (Brigitte Helm), a young woman from the workers' city, and follows her down. He watches a machine explode and sees it as Moloch swallowing men. In the catacombs Maria preaches patience: a mediator will come.

Fredersen turns to the inventor Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), once his rival for Hel, who died giving birth to Freder. Rotwang has built a machine in human form. Fredersen wants it given Maria's face, to discredit her. Rotwang agrees, and means to destroy him with it. The false Maria talks the workers into smashing the machines, and their own city floods with their children in it. Freder and the real Maria save the children, the mob burns the robot at the stake, and Rotwang falls from the cathedral roof. Freder joins his father's hand to the foreman's, under the film's motto: the mediator between head and hands must be the heart.

Seventeen months of shooting

The script was by Thea von Harbou, Lang's wife, who wrote the novel alongside it. (Klein-Rogge was her previous husband.) Lang liked to say that the idea came to him at the sight of New York by night, in October 1924. A Berlin trade paper had reported the script nearly finished that June. New York gave him the look.

Shooting ran from 22 May 1925 to 30 October 1926 at Ufa's studios in and near Berlin. Karl Freund and Günther Rittau photographed it, and Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut and Karl Vollbrecht designed the city. Ufa had budgeted 1.5 million Reichsmarks. It spent about 5 million by most accounts, 6 or 7 by some: more than any German film before it. The producer, Erich Pommer, left Ufa before it was finished. Counts of the extras run from 27,000 to more than 35,000.

Lang was not gentle. For the flood, Helm and, by most accounts, some 500 children from Berlin's poorest districts worked for fourteen days in cold water. Helm, who played both Marias and the robot, had never been in a film.

Mirrors, models and a robot

The effects, Lang said, were all made in the camera. The best known is the process named after the cameraman Eugen Schüfftan. A mirror at 45 degrees to the lens reflects a miniature placed to one side. Part of the silvering is scraped off, and through the gap the camera sees actors on a full-size set. The stadium is a real running track under a painted model.

The street traffic is stop motion: model cars moved a little between exposures. For the Tower of Babel, 1,000 men with shaved heads were filmed six times on one strip of film, to make 6,000.

The robot, the Maschinenmensch, was a costume. The sculptor Walter Schulze-Mittendorff took a plaster cast of Helm and built armour on it from a new wood filler, sprayed with silver-bronze lacquer. Its change into Maria was made by exposing the same film again and again: first the robot, then each ring of light. The original has not survived.

Cut, lost and found

The film opened at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo in Berlin on 10 January 1927: 4,189 metres, about two and a half hours, with an orchestral score by Gottfried Huppertz. Most critics admired the pictures and not the story, and the public stayed away. H. G. Wells, who will have seen a shortened export version, wrote in the New York Times:

I have recently seen the silliest film. I do not believe it would be possible to make one sillier.

H. G. Wells, The New York Times, 17 April 1927

The cutting began before the premiere. Ufa was in debt to Paramount and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which had lent it four million dollars in December 1925 under the Parufamet agreement. For America, Paramount had the playwright Channing Pollock take out about a quarter of the film and rewrite the titles. Hel went, and with her Rotwang's reason for building a robot in a woman's shape. In Berlin the full version ran for four months without success. Ufa then released its own cut, 3,241 metres, in August 1927. No complete negative survived.

For eighty years every version was a short one, including Giorgio Moroder's of 1984, tinted and set to pop songs. A restoration shown in Berlin in 2001 went onto UNESCO's Memory of the World register. A quarter was still missing.

It turned up in Buenos Aires. An Argentine distributor, Adolfo Z. Wilson, had bought a print in Berlin in January 1927, before the cuts. It passed to a collector and then to the Museo del Cine, and in the 1970s was copied onto 16 mm stock, scratches and all. In 2008 Fernando Martín Peña and the museum's director, Paula Félix-Didier, found the cans. About 25 minutes went back in, and the restoration was first shown in Berlin on 12 February 2010. Two short scenes were too damaged to use.

The handshake, and after

Nothing in Metropolis changes at the end: master and foreman shake hands. In 1947 the critic Siegfried Kracauer read that ending as a foretaste of Nazi rule. Lang rejected the charge, but he later called the moral a fairy tale, and said the thesis was von Harbou's and half the blame his.

The two divorced in April 1933. Lang's story was that Goebbels offered him the top job in German film and that he left for Paris the same evening. His passport shows him going in and out of Germany for months, and biographers date his final departure to the end of July. He died in California in 1976. Von Harbou stayed, wrote for the Third Reich's cinema and joined the Nazi party, in 1940 according to filmportal.de.

Why it matters

It drew the city of the future. Towers, canyon streets and traffic stacked in layers: the Cinémathèque française calls it the archetype, and Blade Runner (1982) is among the films regularly named as its heirs.

Its robot started a line. The same archive calls it the cinema's first android, and C-3PO of Star Wars (1977) its most famous descendant. Queen used the film's footage in the video for "Radio Ga Ga" (1984), and David Fincher rebuilt the city for Madonna's "Express Yourself" (1989).

It is the classic case of a film lost and found. It took four restorations, from 1972 to 2010, to get this close to what Berlin saw in 1927.