Are we sleeping? Do we need a wake up call? Good stories call out our common conscience. If a major goal of democracy is to give everyone a gun, then a major goal of storytelling must be to prevent us from pulling the trigger. The preservation and protection of personal liberties could not be of greater importance in the minds of the great storytellers. The films in this series have that in common.
It is high time that Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times” (1936) be fit into our massive blog on Humanity and the Machine. It is not technically science fiction, as most of the films in this series are, but neither is Geoffrey Reggio’s “Quatsi Trilogy” which opened the series and yet it informs us so richly about our future.
Contextually, Chaplin’s “Modern Times” presents us with a romance between two optimistic homeless persons. Ideologically it pays respect to the poor and working classes during the height of the industrial era. As a piece of research into what makes humans laugh, “Modern Times” conducts us through a prolonged, elaborate and ingenious series of gags accomplished by a combination of rigged sets, split second choreography and virtuosic variations on the mechanization of humans.
I have pitted guns and movies against each other in this series more than once. “Modern Times” gives us a chance to compare the two very similar looking machines that produce them. Compare any state of the art factory assembly line, making say weapons of the WW I era, with the one in the movie set that manufactures laughs in Chaplin’s blockbuster movie. Both depend on a huge collective of workers. Both were made for a profit. It could be argued that Charlie Chaplin’s factory has produced something of much greater and lasting value for the benefit of more people than any other factory of its time.
As for the argument that movies are fantasy and not accurate when compared to the real world, even though it premiered almost seventy years ago, “Modern Times” managed to foresee the two-way screen that enables Big Brother to eavesdrop on law-abiding citizens. “The Matrix (1999), reminds those who have taken on the questionable karma of invading the privacy of the masses, that they too are being watched at all times, no doubt from all angles.
Surveillance may be a dandy method for catching criminals but it sets up the environment for a war on thought. Another fine science fiction film that delves into this subject and would deserve to be included in this series, if it wasn’t already discussed in these pages a few years back, is “Fahrenheit 451” (1966). As if we were actually paying attention, the French New Wave prophet Francois Truffaut brought Isaac Asimov’s science fiction classic to the screen to provided us with advanced warning on the totalitarian wet dream that is well on its way to becoming the norm in America today.
Storytellers by nature are prophets. Could our best contemporary ones be on par with the old world prophets of scripture? Hardly. Those great oracles in the scriptures have had a long time for their prophecies to be adulterated by hypocrites. Their words have been being cooped by power brokers for thousands upon thousands of years. The modern day prophets haven’t been recognized yet.
There is an amusingly prophetic sequence in “Modern Times” where we were warned about this recent very grave and disastrous privacy violation imposed on Americans by our government. The Little Tramp is not a tramp yet but a factory worker. The first act of Modern Times deals with the events that lead up to his homelessness. His trouble begins when he clocks out for lunch two minutes early, ducks into the washroom and leans back on a washbasin for a cigarette break.
“Hey you! What are you doing there? shouts the boss,
The startled worker almost falls in the sink scissoring his legs twice in the air before his feet return to the floor.
Get back to work?”
From an enormous screen that moments ago was only a wall, a hard nosed executive frowns down on the little, blue-bibbed man.
Charlie drops his smoke and scurries back to the jangling noise and repetitive stress of the factory assembly line.
So many Americans seem to have skipped the shock response altogether and rushed back to their business without question.
The alien integrated society where Korbin Dallas lives and loves is a total privacy-invaded State. His government forces him to undertake service or be marginalized. This is the identical arrangement placed upon Rick Deckard in “Blade Runner,” and also Sam Lowry in “Brazil.” Since their governments can’t inspire the protagonist to serve their interests, they leave them no other alternative.
The great prophetic science fiction writers of our times infiltrate our minds, with the help of movie machines, for our collective enlightenment. They are warning us about other kinds of machines that are invented to infiltrate our minds for the purpose of our collective enslavement.
It is sometimes best to dispel the oppressive overtones of serious subjects with a little humor before performing an autopsy on them with the tools of storytelling. Levity is the great gift of directors Charlie Chaplin and Terry Gilliam, and never more so than in their movies about man and the machine. With all the other titles in this series having been dramas, commenting on “Brazil” and “Modern Times” and “The Fifth Element” (1997) have brought welcome relief, sort of.
Luc Besson’s eleventh movie is an futuristic western adventure comedy with plenty of serious matters addressed. Korbin’s celestial hook-up begins in a cultural melting pot, divisively classed and pressed against the glass of heavy surveillance, suspended between aggressive, armed police and roving, ruthless gangs.
The lone wolf of tonight’s final frontier mystic chuckler is played by box office Buddha Bruce Willis. He falls for a sexy Supreme Being, Leeloo, a Manga-inspired orange crush Venus. Leeloo makes her entrance into the heart of space commando Korbin Dallas as a teenaged test tube Messiah in a state of the art genetic tech womb. From that cutting edge birth canal, twenty year old Mila Jovavich was rocketed into the universe of international movie stardom as well and “The Fifth Element” became the most financially successful French film of all time.
In contrast to the rest of the films in the series, one of the splendid enjoyments of watching “The Fifth Element” is how cute everything looks. Unlike the gloom that permeates the majority of the films in this series, the elemental character of Besson’s “Fifth” is imbued with candy gloss, glitter and pop.
Stewardesses on the ship to Flostun Paradise, wear cuddly shifts, topped in 1960’s inspired wigs and pillbox lids. Each one of them is a bonafide babe. They act in such a mechanically pre-programmed manner sometimes, you wonder if they’re dolls.
The virtual and the real swap places multiple ways in “The Fifth Element.” Good guys are hard to tell from crooks. Korbin encounters shape-shifting desperadoes and ubiquitous police posses, prowling for outlaws. Everywhere there’s cops and hoods fighting for turf.
I have intentionally put off, until now, discussing “The Fifth Element” because of its sheer silliness. But its overstatements are appropriate for the futuristic, slapstick, twitching hybrid that it turns out to be.
At the mid-point and onward, the role of Ruby Rod flips the proceedings into hilarious camped-out excess, courtesy of the hysterical Chris Tucker. Playing the part of a high-strung, omnisexual MC, he flaunts a voracious but vapid vivacity on the media mainstream, diddling the chicks like a rooster, oozing with greed for the phony next thrill, treating his fawning public like they make him ill. With a hollow hairstyle that resembles a loofah, Tucker goes about seducing every boy and girl on the ship, cavorting in a fabulous wardrobe by Jean Paul Gautier. My laughter generally goes uncontrollable at this point. Ruby’s hollowness is only surpassed by his shallowness.
For this segment, one might regard “The Fifth Element” as trivial compared to others in this series. I consider it serious science fiction, like “Modern Times”, just the same and just as prophetic. Even though its tone is calculated for laughs the subject and it’s treatment comments sincerely on some existential dead ends we find ourselves in today in the name of progress.
Time and again, the warning from the prophets seems to be about how technology can be used either for destruction or service. It all depends on the motive of the operator. In placing this assumption at the core of the story, “The Fifth Element” is updating a message from Fritz Lange’s “Metropolis” (1927). “The mediator between the head and the hands is the heart.” Fritz Lange later regretted his decision to flash this slogan both at the beginning and end of his story. He renounced the movie later as fairy tale oddly enough. It surprised me to find this out because I never thought of “Metropolis” as anything but a fairy tale. Ironic that, while Fritz Lange was evidently uncomfortable with it, what he achieved with that one fairy tale became a hallmark for every successive generation of prophetic film makers to follow.
His warnings are taken up again brilliantly in “District 9” (2009) which will surface this summer to round out this series on man and the machine, but we won’t conclude, either, without projecting “Metropolis” back up on screen once again.
With the marriage of motion pictures and telecomunications, we’ve stumbled upon a globally unifying storytelling device. This is an opportunity we cannot afford to pass up. I call upon the filmmaker’s of the world to tell stories that make us want to be our best and to wish the best to our fellow human beings.
Enlightened storytellers from all walks of life and every culture with motion pictures have been delving into the deepest and most complex subjects imaginable for over a century. It appears that storytelling and cinema stand to contribute more, by far, toward the survival of the human race, than anyone would have guessed when it was invented.
In my opinion the film we are about to watch represents the current high water mark in the steady flood of films that attempt to shine a light on our relationship with the machine. No other cinematic extravaganza since “The Matrix (1999),” that I’ve watched anyway, has transferred more indelible impressions into my brain. This movie had passed through wide release and gone to home video before I bothered to watch it. Let’s just say, I hope there are more Sci-Fi epics this good just waiting to be discovered.
In “District 9”, (2009) by Neill Blomkamp, a gigantic alien refugee barge is marooned in the sky above Johannesburg. Its occupants erect slums in its shadow. Setting the story on earth in the present day, rather than some zone of the future, makes the action unfold with foreboding immediacy and uncanny familiarity. I’ve watched it three times and walked away with my nervous system flushed and brain left twitching with after image, clear into the next day. It is not always an easy ride, but “District 9” sails along with novelty and surprise and while there is no visual in the film so impressive as that alien gallion in the sky, it is drama of a human scale on which the story relies.
District 9’s dilemma does not focus on an apocalypse, like so many science fiction films. One could say it is about “race,” based on where it takes place. Fear, prejudice, savagery and rebellion and enlightenment all flash across the protagonist’s face. On the flip side, we discover some capacity for compassion, as well, residing underneath the Prawn’s rigidly engineered carapace. In contrast to the love story told to us in “Blade Runner,” the climax in “District 9’s comes when aliens and humans cooperate to save, not the human race, but the aliens.
At the heart of this story, refugees just want to go home. Anyone can relate to that? Right? Not one person in the audience does at first. Believe me, these are very strange creature/machines, communicating with creepy, insect-like hisses and clickings. These “Prawn,” as they are known, walk on hind legs, like us, but are disgusting to look at and barbaric and kinky besides. Come be a spectator at white South African Alien Relocation Chief Wikus Van de Merwe’s life while it turns into a sheer nightmare. His one hope of deliverance comes by embracing his enemy, from the inside out.
There’s a fair amount of shocking, visceral sensation in “District 9” but, as with the best of this genre, the worst is left to imagination. It also classifies as a horror flick, like Ridley Scott’s second sci-fi masterwork, “Alien,”
“District 9” earns high marks for the way its production design and editorial style elevate the action. Another recent film with a fascination for “reality television” is Ralph Fiennes’ fine first feature “Coriolanus” (2010) which has the added distinction of being a daring Shakespeare adaptation.
Both movies seem to not only comment on our appetite for news but on ways the news machine can be used to either inflame or sooth. In “District 9” we are hustled into the center of the action with a hypnotic mix of television newscasts, surveillance clips from the relocation front, and frequent, documentary sidebar hindsight, slipped in amid the grittier footage, an official story is carefully being floated in, from cool-headed spokespersons, located in offices or studios a safe distance away. Truth here is nothing but an amalgam of facts compiled from a compendium of DV tracks, examining some earthshaking acts, beneath which we are all still reeling, wrestling with and hoping not to let ever happen again.
Besides the immediacy with which the storytellers are able to invest this tale, “District 9” also manages to make us emotionally relate to two of the strangest strangers in motion pictures. Ironically, the Prawn named Christian and his bright little curious offspring give Wikus a dose of much needed humility. Through those three, hopefully we relate to all displaced folk everywhere and their quest for home and family.
“Metropolis” (1927) has been celebrated, desecrated, lost and found, but continues to grow in renown through nearly nine decades. I’ll wager I’ve mentioned this title times nine if I’ve mentioned her once. Most of what I’ve referred to is how so many subsequent science-fiction filmmakers have quoted aspects of director Fritz Lang’s visual style, a style which he attributed to his first view of New York City steaming into New York Harbor.
What impresses me first, in watching “Metropolis” this time, is how rudimentary some of the acting is, but at the same time, how effectively those actions communicate the character’s mood even today. Lang was by no means the first filmmaker to exploit how pantomime stands in for the human voice in silent film. Any good actor’s job is to employ novel ways to hold the attention of the audience all the way to the back of the auditorium.
Not all of the people that would watch his film would be able to read the intertitles, understand the language they’re written in, or fully comprehend the futuristic setting. So he directed his actors to project emotions with overstated body language and mask-like faces as if they were live on stage playing to a huge house. As motion pictures evolved, a more naturalistic acting style was tailored to the intimacy of motion picture screens.
Lang’s approach to directing actors was emblematic of the German cinema of his time. I wonder if the gaudy Expressionists weren’t always deliberately playing to the least educated viewer. I’d grant extra credit to any storyteller that tunes in, not just to his or her own immediate peer group, but audience members that exist in the cultural eddies. Consider the utterly diverse group of folks that have seen this film since it was first made.
Let’s aim our prism now into the heart of this film. What makes “Metropolis” more popular today than when it was first released, and more popular this year than last? Allusions to the apocalypse and the whore of Babylon aside, I don’t know how much has been written about Fritz Lang and his co-writer lifting their structure from Judeo/Christian scriptures, but few have wondered, out loud at least. I think it may be the key to why the footage has been spliced no less then five different ways, producing five distinct editions with as many different running times. Makes no difference whether Lang just lucked out, or knew what he was doing, the storyline in “Metropolis” reads like the book of Moses. Wise storytellers down through the ages all agree. You stand a better chance with your audience when you base your tale on a popular one from the good book. Interestingly enough, Fritz was raised a Catholic by a Jewish mother.
The handshake at the conclusion of Lang’s dystopian deliverance saga, is probably the best explanation for the controversy. The exceedingly tidy ending of “Metropolis” attracted the greatest amount of criticism during the first run and still does to this day. It was as if Moses and Ramses II hugged each other at the end of “The Ten Commandments.”
The second most paradoxical twist of this film’s fate was the lame excuse American sensors produced in order to impose a trim on the import. It was trumped up from a trivial detail, namely that Freder’s deceased mother’s name was “Hel.”
Helen, Helga, Hilda, Hilary Olga, and such all share their roots. Hel, is still a common name in Europe. Hell, it wouldn’t be a problem at all except, way back then, apparently not enough women in America were named Hel-somethingorother to help us understand. It would prove too much for Americans to associate that ancient root with anything but the devil’s wicked plan. Underneath all this “Metropolis” was penalized for fumbling with scripture. The masterpiece was circumcised before it ever played in America. Three different negatives went on to be snipped away at until the original eventually vanished altogether.
The colorful history of “Metropolis” includes a fascinating foray into the realm of film preservation and restoration. Fans of the subject are treated to a rich cache of support materials in the 2010 release from Kino/Lorber entitled, “The Complete Metropolis.” Not only will you be able to watch the newly restored, authorized edition that most nearly replicates the one screened in Berlin at its premiere in 1927. In the same package there is an enticing documentary “Voyage to Metropolis” on the state-of-the-art transfer process that it went through after being considered lost for 80 years. The last uncut negative of Lang’s “Metropolis” was thought to have been destroyed.
The account of how the forgotten print was found in a film archive in Buenos Aires in 2008 plays better than fiction. It’s a compelling excavation into the discovery of lost treasure. One of the greatest achievements in the silent film era was brought back from the abyss. Ironically, that cinematic resurrection becomes one of the all-time greatest achievements in film preservation.
The reception of “Metropolis” was paradoxical from the start, having been savaged by the intelligentsia for its sentimentality and congratulated for ushering in massive technological breakthroughs to the motion picture arts. Astoundingly, Fritz Lang famously pronounced “Metropolis” a disappointment as well as an embarrassment. What should really have embarrassed him is the fact that he placed half the blame on his former wife and collaborator. I wonder if he was really blaming the Nazi party, for liking it. His wife became a Nazi sympathizer, a fact which was attributed as the cause of their breakup. Lang’s private life would make the subject of an interesting movie of its own. If anybody will put up the funds, I’ll write a treatment.
I referred to Lang’s denunciation of his most famous film once before, a couple of posts back. Pronouncing it a “fairytale” was the flimsy criticism he supplied. The filmmaking is so skillful and the directing so audacious I don’t believe Lang could have regretted “Metropolis.” Perhaps he said so under duress, allowing some wrong voice to influence him for a time. I read another quote in which he called it his greatest movie. All arguments aside, I’ll bet not one of his detractors ever contributed more to our culture, with all their best works combined, than Lang did with this one heartfelt workingman’s blues.
I don’t mean “Metropolis” should never be picked on, but getting us all to agree to what’s bogus and what’s not is another thing. Whatever its shortcomings the film remains important enough, to enough folks, to keep gaining popularity and garnering more praise, year after year.
Next month, we’ll delve into specific characters and scenes in “Metropolis” highlighting some passages of brilliance and virtuosity that make this film worthy of long-term study.
At the mid-point of the newly restored edition of “Metropolis,” the transformation of beauty to beast takes place with a series of gorgeously designed and impeccably executed composite shots depicting the world’s first sex drone’s fabrication and release. Born on the silver screen, in a genetic engineering lab circa 2026, this replicant is brought to its feet to the beat of a lavish score by Gottfried Hupperts. Come watch the inaugural motion picture melding of woman and thing and lift your senses to the sights and sounds of some all-time great science fiction scenes.
In his epic dystopia, Fritz Lang contrasts Maria, the human being with Maria the insatiable machine. Appreciate, with me, the filmmaker’s decision to cast the fine-boned ingénue Brigitte Helm for a parable in which she transforms from pale maiden into erotic hardware. Note how, in the progression of scenes in which Helm appears, Lang shrewdly uses her to court one side of our nature and then the other.
The opulent pagan pageant set at the film’s center seems calculated to launch audiences into primal passion. The media’s a bit saturated with sex these days, but try to imagine the effects on the early 20th century audience of this nimble, naked robot fatale. The segment’s aimed to drive you into your most animal core, where you become engine-like as well, programmed to procreate, come heaven or hell. If you fall under her spell, place yourself in that chaos up on screen, a creature of craving, a slave of desire compelled by the biological imperative to dominate the queen.
So this mechanical mistress makes her debut as a high society whore and pussy whips the flock of fortunate sons into a frenzy on the dance floor. The fantastic art direction takes its cues from biblical prophecy, updating the vision in St. John’s Book for the modern day. Note how the baddest babe in Babylon was outfitted for the 21th century. Lang’s android is a corporate mole, robot rapper and psycho-slut rolled in one. The only detail about our 21st Century wonder widget that Fritz Lang got wrong is that she can fit into the palm of our hand.
Meanwhile our reluctant hero’s dad, Joe Frederer, the industrialist sends the sexy thing into the streets impersonating a saint. She’s been programmed to pull the strings of the masses and operate the populace like one of his machines. Never before had the manipulation of a crowd been so blatantly exposed, nor had we been provided with such a prescient preview of unwieldy industrialization tipping the ecological scale.
In the first act, Maria predicts their deliverer will rise up among her fellow poor. The one to whom she refers she calls the “Mediator.” Her words of faith transfix the weary workers assembled in a catacomb beneath the town. After demoralizing hours of repetitive tasks, her beatitudes help them relax. But before long, her appearance is cooped by the machine and she inflames them to engage in a violent uprising.
I saved these thoughts on “Metropolis” for the final posts in this yearlong inquiry into the Man and Machine because its accuracy at envisioning our present day jamb is unsettling. Despite the countless uncanny forecasts we’ve examined in other films in this series, I worry that this one is the most succinct in describing one that we are currently living.
The nearer we come to the 100 year anniversary of this landmark silent film, the more our modern world resembles it. An elite class is living in luxury, ignorant of ecology, insulated from adversity, obsessed with technology, reliant on slavery, or what we now refer to as income inequality and determined to keep it that way. The rest of us are living day to day.
What is perhaps most prescient about Fritz Lang’s forecast is that his metropolitans, rich and poor, will be visited by a Tsunami-like deluge. Pumps will fail and shafts fill up. Everyone is threatened by a nuclear screw-up. At the height of this film we are watching waves of panicked children fleeing their homes. The once vibrant city becomes an exclusion zone.
“Metropolis” proved early on that, with the invention of motion pictures, we are given the opportunity, not only to review the past, but to peer into the future. Alas, almost ninety years later we have barely begun to take it’s lessons to heart. The filmmakers whose movies mimic this film have given us endless additional opportunities to take it apart.
“Metropolis” was not intended to vilify machines. Lang understood they are just ideas born in the imagination, copied from nature, manifest in the physical world, operated under our guidance. If machines were evil we’d have to condemn the movies as well. And if motion pictures, in the world of automated things, indeed prove to be among the greatest ones ever invented, then we may yet still learn to thrive in a world of machines.
