“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.
Immediately upon their introduction, motion pictures were associated with magic and played along side traditional, theatrical magic performances. An early movie projector prototype was called the “magic lantern.” Now that we’ve been exposed to the technology for a hundred years, the supernatural sheen has worn off, but does that mean that magic has vanished from the movies? I don’t think so.
The invention of motion pictures had nothing to do with conjuring, sorcery or hocus-pocus. Its pioneers were grounded in mechanical engineering, chemistry, the physics of light, etc., but as soon as their ingenious inventions reached the masses magicians began to pump fog into their shadows and investors eagerly backed them.
Let us search for differences later and look at the similarities between magic acts and movies now. Both seem to control time and space, both depend on a strategy or script, both manipulate the attention of crowds. Movies achieve illusions with props, sets and actors. Magic utilizes fetish, ritual space and disembodied spirits. Both are offshoots of the much older art form storytelling.
Cinema is a culture of the lens. It frames for us our deepest fears, highest hopes and most far-flung dreams. Magic is a culture of illusion but juggles the same subjects. Socially speaking, any good story leaps cultural and political divides. Because movies can reach any human who possesses at least one good eye, they provide a virtual common experience for the entire human race.
The origin of the word “blockbuster” in show business parlance describes financial success, the status awarded to a motion picture that breaks box office records, but let us acknowledge how those movies serve to bust through perceptual blocks of the audience at large. When blockbusters like ”Star Wars,” “The Matrix,” “Lord of the Rings,” and “Avatar” seep through global cultural boundaries, they penetrate social, geographical, religious and cultural strongholds, uniting the entire planet through a single story. If that’s not magic, what is?
Hold that thought and now let’s look at how pre-cinema cultures performed works of magic as a form of social medicine. Dr. Dennis Tedlock, renowned writer, teacher and anthropologist, in his essay “The Shaman as Magician,” discusses magic with a Zuni Indian guide. The natives of that remote southwest Indian Pueblo in New Mexico give a name to magic that corresponds to the seeping of something through one surface to another such as when rain oozes through a mud roof.
Notice how the Zuni word for magic describes ordinary process in the ordinary world. The term leaves no room for the uncanny, however, “all of these Zuni tricks, unlike those of stage magicians, have a purpose, a meaning that goes beyond trickery as such,” says Tedlock. He goes on to explain how the Zuni embrace folk magic for the ability to restore curiosity and wonderment in the community and for occasionally triggering spontaneous healing for its members. How could such a human contrivance as “magic” be responsible for physical healing?
Psychologists have proven not all illnesses originate in the physical body. Physical symptoms can be a result of clogged emotions and distorted perceptions. In such cases, health can often be restored through a mix of emotional catharsis, identifying, releasing and changing limiting beliefs. The challenge that shamans and faith healers face, in assisting with cures, is to interrupt the self-imposed limitations of their patients by presenting evidence of unlimited possibilities. I’m inclined to think modern stage and movie tricks soak down through the surface of our imaginations in a similar way to folk magic, and can compel positive changes in our bodies, minds, and spirits as well.
Like most modern film audiences, the Zuni are hip to the illusion and slight of hand of its shamans, but neither do they deny their healing value. Illnesses may not always curable with drugs and surgery, sometimes they’re just controlled with them. Real cures require total responsibility from the patient. A good shaman seeks to inspire total involvement, just as a good filmmaker does.
Many vaudeville and cabaret illusionists were among the first to nurture film in its infancy, but let a professional trickster from France named Georges Jean Méliés be named first magician of motion pictures. He delivered audiences into the modern age mastering motion photography as his modus operandi. Anyone who wishes to travel back in time can meet the master.
He never claimed to be anything but a showman and frowned on any practitioner peddling the paranormal, but that is not to say that Méliés wasn’t serious about casting a spell. He was practiced at the art of shape shifting, among other things, where, in “The Conjurer” (1899), for example, we see a ballerina transform into a cascade of confetti. Then the conjurer himself turns into the ballerina and back again. Finally, he disappears in a cloud of smoke. Poof! Go ahead, try that at home.
Since motion pictures and magic tricks both blend the past, present and future, I’m going to propose that a movie camera is simply a clock with a lens for capturing time on celluloid. The thought first occurred when I learned Méliés was a clockmaker. It makes sense that a man well versed in its measurements would discover how to exploit it. Ironically, Méliés had the time trade in common with two other prominent magicians. Robert Houdin (from whom The Great Houdini took his name) and Houdin’s top rival, John Nevil Maskelyne.
Another interesting intersection took place when Méliés purchased Houdin’s theater in Paris. It was the dawn of the last century. Let that date and address mark the precise coordinate point where live magic performances morphed into motion picture presentations. Here, a clockmaker turned himself into a ghost and, with the advent of a new kind of mass hypnosis, generated the first special effects blockbuster grosses.
Méliés could have lost them entirely when he closed his popular live act and swapped it with a fake, but unprecedented crowds craved the new counterfeit variety and endowed the celluloid master with even greater notoriety.
Global distribution networks grew up exclusively to accommodate Méliés’ fame. His status went viral long before the web, before television or even radio. I’m not overstating when I say, the stalk that morphed into the information age, which links our globe today, sprouted partly from Msr. George Jean Méliés.
Let us examine this feat from the viewpoint of a practitioner of the magic arts. Vanishing into motion pictures, Méliés literally made his body disappear from the stage, leaving behind an immortal double with striking charisma and prodigious powers.
Like those clocks before, Méliés toyed with his audience now. Instead of springs, gears and trip mechanisms, he tinkered with human reasoning, response and reaction. An overflowing auditorium enabled the master to develop considerable finesse. Science and art became partners to help make Méliés a grand success.
The fraction of Méliés films that survive today are a treasure of early motion picture tricks. Effects of Méliés’ devising can be found in films that come afterword, from the early years all the way up to today. “The Wizard of Oz” throws a farmhouse up inside a tornado’s eye. The optical printing technique used for that sequence, can be observed 37 years earlier in Méliés 1902 film “L’homme à la tête de Caoutchouc.”
But it is not only his trickery that is imitated. His elaborate set designs from “Le Voyage Dans la Lune” was lifted for some of the of Hogwarts set in the “Harry Potter” series as well, so Méliés magnetism remains undisputed to this day.
While Méliés the man faded into semi-obscurity even before his life was over, his work has been digested and assimilated by succeeding generations, turning up in films made by the likes of Jean Cocteau, Kenneth Anger, George Lucas and Peter Jackson to name a few.
A disembodied entity, based upon Méliés life, is played by Ben Kingsley in the 2011 3D masterwork “Hugo.” This is an unparalleled achievement in the history of the magic arts. The master managed to have himself resurrected in 3D, in the present day, with the assistance of modern movie wizard Martin Scorcese. Thank you Marty. Long live Msr. George Jean Méliés.
By now, movies have documented the work of magician, wizard, sorcerer, jongleur, Jedi, witch, warlock, and conjurer. We’ve observed them practice with strange mystical attraction in supernatural settings beyond the far horizon.
These all represent literal examples of magic in the movies, but what about the role of the movie maker as modern shaman in the present day? A shaman is a healer, teacher and keeper of medicine in any society with which they identify. Filmmaker as shaman is the next subject examined as the magic in movies series continues in April on openchannelcontent.com.
In his 1958 dark comedy, “The Magician” Ingmar Bergman makes comparisons between his experiences as a movie maker, and the adventures of an itinerant magic troupe from the 1840’s headed by Dr. Albert Emmanuel Vogler. An interesting side note: from about the middle of the 19th century to the turn of the 20th, my family trekked across America’s heartland with their big top show called The Eells Family Circus, replete with snake charmer, contortionist and disappearing act, so Bergman’s movie hits close to home.
Traveling entertainment became popular a few thousand years before the printing press and was an early form of mass media. Storytellers, from acting troupes and solo troubadours to freaks and medicine shows, were prime sources of information and culture for the common folk. In Bergman’s film, Vogler and a handful of collaborators are on a tour of neighboring lands. As the story opens, we encounter magician and crew, down on their luck, working their way home.
On well-worn tracks wanders the enigmatic Vogler and his ragamuffin regiment, calling themselves the “Magnetic Health Theater”. Our magician arrives by carriage to the latest village. His reputation has preceded him. Disturbing reports from the south suggest the stranger may exert an unsavory influence.
A bewigged police chief and monocle-ed coroner interrogate Bergman’s hero on suspicion of skullduggery. Vogler pretends to be mute, while his wife presents herself cross-dressed as his manservant. Vogler provokes a good deal of suspicion by playing games but also avoids having to answer their awkward questions. Bergman, the filmmaker, is demonstrating the importance of silence and obfuscation in spinning a good yarn.
Through their own projections, conscious and unconscious, it seems that everyone becomes part of Vogler’s web. That includes us, the audience, but only for awhile. In act one we are left in the dark. By the time Vogler starts his manipulation in earnest we are allowed to watch behind the screen. In the third act, by showing the audience more than all the other characters but not as much as the magician himself, Bergman manages to bamboozle us once more.
The most magical moment for me is when an itinerant actor, whom Vogler regards with great tenderness and respect, dies in the opening scene and appears quite alive again in the third act, only to die for real this time in Vogler’s arms. The magician manages to fulfill the dead fool’s dying wish by weaving him into his web of illusion.
Bergman, the storyteller, displays a knack for cooking up surprise, so that in this moment, we cannot tell that we are observing a secret. From the outset, the story keeps us off balance making sure our expectations are continuously upended as we watch the game played out. Things only add up after the spell is broken.
Of course the magician’s luck has improved by the end. This is a comedy after all. By the time Bergman’s film is over, his magician is summoned to the court to entertain the King and Queen–an obvious promotion, but we’ll never know the fate of the magician after that. Perhaps he went on to become a movie director in the dawn of cinema. One of Dr.Vogler’s contemporaries was motion pictures’ first great pioneer. I mentioned his name in the last post. He will be the subject up next.
“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.