Metropolis (Fritz Lang Germany 1927) - multiple editions

Metropolis is possibly the most heavily restored and studied narrative feature film in existence. Its canonical status derives from a convergence of a number of factors which, together, encapsulate and crystallise the themes, issues and approaches that developed as the formal study of cinema emerged in the late twentieth century. These are, in brief:

1. 1. The film is probably the most widely known example of what has gone down in the history books as a cultural golden age of German cinema - the Weimar or 'expressionist' period in the 1920s - and one of the few to have been distributed widely outside Germany, including the United States. It has been seen both as an industrial and technological triumph (the Schüfftan effect and so on), and as a complex aesthetic symbol of the modernist age and all that follows. Siegfried Kracauer characterised Metropolis as a film in which 'Souls were manipulated [both visually and in terms of a psychological metaphor] so as to create the impression that millions of feet were marching over city streets and along highways' (272).

2. 2. Metropolis is considered one of the defining statements of the personal vision of its director. Fritz Lang was one of the first filmmakers to have been promoted actively as a cultural icon in his own right. The consistency of the themes and issues explored in both his German and Hollywood films (fate, the motivation of criminals, the dehumanising influence of communications technologies and so on) was identified by the Cahiers du Cinéma critics in the 1950s and many that followed, resulting in the celebration of Lang as the classic example of an auteur - the creative genius who triumphs over the capitalist philistinism of the Western film industry.

3. 3. Metropolis is considered one of the cornerstones of dystopian sf, and one of the pivotal bodies of twentieth-century fiction comprising a broad sweep from E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops (1909) to The Terminator (Cameron US/UK 1984).

4. 4. Metropolis has gone through multiple editions and restorations, culminating in the dramatic rediscovery of missing footage in a museum in Argentina in 2008. As is dramatically and lucidly discussed in the excellent feature-length documentary Die Reise nach Metropolis, included as an extra on the BD of the most recent restoration (and which justifies the purchase price alone), this created a classic 'lost film' legend, encompassing cuts made almost immediately after the premiere, the camera negative being confiscated by the Soviets at the end of the Second World War and subsequently repatriated to Germany, the intensely controversial Giorgio Moroder restoration of 1984, the use of digital technology to facelift the movie for the first time in 2001, and finally the discovery in Buenos Aires. Combined with the cultural kudos of its director and the spin of restoring the personal vision of an individual genius deriving therefrom, the ongoing restoration saga has ensured that Metropolis has remained in the public eye.

The film's tortuous archival history presents scholars and students both with a big problem...