 The Complete Metropolis Metropolis takes place in 2026, when the populace is divided between workers who must live in the dark underground and the rich who enjoy a futuristic city of splendor. The tense balance of these two societies is realized through images that are among the most famous of the 20th century, many of which presage such sci-fi landmarks as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner. Lavish and spectacular, with elaborate sets and modern science fiction style, Metropolis stands today as the crowning achievement of the German silent cinema. Kino International is proud to announce the DVD and long awaited first time ever Blu-ray release of the new restoration of Fritz Lang's 1927 science fiction masterpiece Metropolis, now with 25 minutes of lost footage and the original Gottfried Huppertz score. This new 147-minute version (being released as The Complete Metropolis), opened theatrically in April 2010 earning over $350,000 at the box office, and since it's original restoration, has gone on to earn $1,000,000 in theatrical ticket sales! When it was first screened in Berlin on January 10, 1927, the sci-fi epic ran an estimated 153 minutes. After its premiere engagement, in an effort to maximize the film's commercial potential, the film's distributors (UFA in Germany, Paramount in the U.S.) drastically shortened Metropolis, which had been a major disappointment at the German box office. By the time it debuted in the United States later that year, the film ran approximately 90 minutes (exact running times are difficult to determine because silent films were not always projected at a standardized speed). Metropolis went on to become one of the cornerstones of science fiction cinema foreshadowing Blade Runner and The Matrix to name just a few recent examples. Testament to its enduring popularity, the film has undergone restorations in 1984 and again in 1987. The 2001 restoration combined footage from four archives and ran at a triumphant 124 minutes. And at the time was widely believed that this would be the most complete version of Lang's film that contemporary audiences could ever hope to see. But, in the summer of 2008, the curator of the Buenos Aires Museo del Cine discovered a 16mm dupe negative that was considerably longer than any existing print. It included not merely a few additional snippets, but 25 minutes of "lost" footage (about a fifth of the film) that had not been seen since its 1927 debut in Berlin. The discovery of such a significant amount of material called for yet another restoration, carefully executed by Anke Wilkening of the Murnau Stiftung (Foundation) (the German institution that is the caretaker of virtually all pre 1945 German films), Martin Koerber, Film Department Curator of the Deutche Kinemateque and on the music side, by Frank Stoebel. Regarding the quality of the added footage Ms. Wilkening has said: "The work on the restoration teaches us once more that no restoration is ever definitive... Even if we are allowed for the first time to come as close to the first release as ever before, the new version will still remain an approach. The rediscovered sections which change the film's composition, and at the same time always be recognizable through their damages as those parts that had been lost for 80 years." Storyline: Sometime in the future, the city of Metropolis is home to a Utopian society where its wealthy residents live a carefree life. One of those is Freder Fredersen. One day, he spots a beautiful woman with a group of children, she and the children who quickly disappear. Trying to follow her, he, oblivious to such, is horrified to find an underground world of workers, apparently who run the machinery which keeps the above ground Utopian world functioning. One of the few people above ground who knows about the world below is Freder's father, Joh Fredersen, who is the founder and master of Metropolis. Freder learns that the woman is Maria, who espouses the need to join the "hands" - the workers - to the "head" - those in power above - by a mediator or the "heart". Freder wants to help the plight of the workers in the want for a better life. But when Joh learns of what Maria is espousing and that Freder is joining their cause, Joh, with the assistance of an old colleague and now nemesis named ... Written by Huggo Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Casey Broadwater on November 12, 2010 -- After Fritz Lang's Metropolis premiered in Berlin in 1927, the silent science fiction masterpiece was savagely shortened and re-edited for its American release by playwright Channing Pollock, who cut the film from fourteen reels to seven and, in the process, thoroughly obfuscated the original story. Snippets of the excised material surfaced over the decades, and there have been several incomplete restorations—including, most notably, the Giorgio Moroder-speared reissue in 1982, which clarified plot points but also tinted the film and set it to 1970s pop tunes—but Lang's complete cut was thought to be yet another lost relic of the silent age. That is, until the summer of 2008, when curator Paula Felix-Didier and archivist Fernando Pena found a 16mm safety reduction negative of the uncut Metropolis in the archives of the Museo Del Cine, in Buenos Aires. You might say that this was the film historian equivalent of discovering the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Rosetta Stone. Not only did this print contain almost all of the missing material—minus 8 minutes too damaged to use—but it also served as a narrative blueprint for the multinational restoration team, allowing them to reassemble the entire film to match Lang's intent. More than 25 minutes of footage has been reintegrated into Metropolis, from single shots to whole sub-plots and action sequences. The result is a film that's finally as coherent as its images are iconic. The metropolis of the title is an Art Deco utopia, a skyscraping bourgeoisie dream complete with The Club of Sons, a sporting arena where the elite while away the days with athletic competitions, Yoshiwara, a swanky party palace, and The Eternal Gardens, a kind of artificial biosphere filled with exotic beauties with which to frolic. Ah, the luxuries of leisure! Looming above the angular cityscape is the New Tower of Babel, from which Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel), the founder and fascist ruler of Metropolis, keeps watch over his creation. Joh has literally built his empire on the backs of the working class, dull-eyed drones who slave away in subterranean factories beneath the city. His son, Freder (Gustav Frölich), becomes obsessed with these have-nots and sneaks into the dystopian underworld, where he witnesses an enormous industrial machine explode, killing a score of workers in the process. Freder is struck by a vision of the machine as Moloch—the Old Testament's all-devouring god of sacrifice—and, forsaking his wealth, trades places with one of the plebes to experience firsthand how the other half live. The workers are this close to violent revolt, but their anger is temporarily assuaged when Maria (Brigitte Helm), a wide-eyed prophetess, foretells the coming of a "mediator" who will bring peace and balance by bridging the class divide. I wonder who that might be! "The mediator between Head and Hands must be the Heart," is the film's mantra, then, and while this is a too-cozy thesis divided by antithesis equals synthesis statement—a vast oversimplification that offers no real solutions to Europe's post-war economic imbalances—it does startlingly prefigure, thematically anyway, the ideological crisis that would soon shake the world during WWII. The subterranean proles—the Hands—like the sailors on Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, are primed for a Red revolution. Joh, on the far right end of the spectrum, is the fascist dictator, the Head, the Hitler-esque ruler running the nation-state. Democracy would seem to be the Heart in this analogy, but Metropolis stops well short of showing what "mediating" would actually look like. The closest we get is a begrudging handshake between Joh and Grot (Heinrich George), the foreman of the workers. Not that it really matters. Lang always expressed dissatisfaction with the film's rather simplistic philosophical premise—scripted by his then-wife and co-writer Thea von Harbou, who would soon become a staunch Nazi supporter—but the tale he tells within this vaguely Hegelian, class-conflict framework is gripping, especially now that it's been fully restored. The Thin Man, Joh's creepy personal spy, is sent on nefarious, never-before-seen errands. There's more to the love story between Freder and Maria. The escape from the flooded underworld is shown with clearer continuity, and there are new scenes of near-naked excess at Yoshiwara that would've been edgy even by pre-Hays Code standards. The most satisfying addition, though, is the fleshed out rivalry between Joh and Rotwang (Rudolph Klein-Rogge), the prototypical mad scientist who creates a female Machine-Man in Maria's likeness, intending it first as a replacement for the woman Joh stole from him—and who later died giving birth to Freder—and then using the robot in an attempt to "sow discord" and destroy Metropolis. The iconic android, also played by the 17-year-old Brigitte Helm, is a cold, sexpot inversion of Maria's purity who winks lasciviously, walks with a wanton swagger, and does a burlesque striptease at Yoshiwara that ends in carnage as the patrons are driven into a frenzied orgy of violence. With its allegorical underpinnings and budget of over 5 million Reichsmarks—making it the most expensive movie of its time—Metropolis can inevitably be compared to Avatar, the latest spectacle-over-story extravaganza, but this undervalues Lang's film, which is the progenitor of all sci-fi epics that followed it. You can see its influence most clearly in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, which borrows the urban architecture of Metropolis and re-fashions the Machine-Man into the concept of "replicants." Traces of the film's DNA can be found in Star Wars, Dark City, and The Matrix, and its visual language—electricity and laboratories, technology run rampant— directly inspired the "raygun Gothic" style of 1950s B-movies. And yet Lang doesn't limit himself to futurism; Metropolis, in the director's own words, is a "battle between modern science and occultism, the science of the middle ages." The film is steeped in ominous religious imagery. In a fever dream, Freder is crucified to a clock. The false-Maria rises on the back of the seven-headed Beast from The Revelation of St. John. Pentagrams adorn Rotwang's workspace and, in a particularly chilling moment, the Seven Sins—personified—come to life, along with Death himself, swinging a scythe directly at the camera. Throughout, Lang employs then-groundbreaking visual effects, using mirrors, miniatures, matting, double exposures and other forms of distinctly filmic, in-camera trickery to bring his nightmare dystopia to life. While his best, most cohesive film was yet to come—1931's M—Metropolis presents the director as a mad scientist and shaman, a cinematic visionary. It's hard to overstate the influence of Metropolis, not only on sci-fi films and cinema in general, but also on architecture, urban planning, and industrial design. Visually, the film has always been a masterpiece, even if—in its truncated form—it never made much narrative sense. Well, finally, thanks to the fortuitous discovery of 25-minutes of missing footage and the efforts of the restoration team, it does make sense, and the additions confirm and redouble the film's standing as one of the greatest science fiction films of all time. That Metropolis—an 83-year-old film—is so stunning on Blu-ray is just visual icing on the comprehensive cake. For cineastes, sci-fi fans, and silent film collectors, this is a must-see, must-own release. Highly recommended! Cast Notes: Alfred Abel (Joh Fredersen), Gustav Fröhlich (Freder, Joh Fredersen's son), Rudolf Klein-Rogge (C. A. Rotwang, the inventor), Fritz Rasp (The Thin Man), Theodor Loos (Josaphat), Erwin Biswanger (11811 - Georgy), Heinrich George (Grot, the guardian of the Heart Machine), Brigitte Helm (The Creative Man / The Machine Man / Death / The Seven Deadly Sins / Maria). IMDb Rating (07/25/14): 8.4/10 from 84,706 users Top 250: #106 IMDb Rating (12/13/10): 8.4/10 from 41,480 users Top 250: #95
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