DVD Chronicle

Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) has long been hailed as a masterpiece of German Expressionism, indeed of the silent cinema, and it was big news in 2008 when twenty-odd missing minutes of the film were discovered in a Buenos Aires archive. A thorough-going restoration of Metropolis sponsored by the F. W. Murnau Foundation had begun some time earlier, and now the new footage could be added to the project. Last year the restored Metropolis was released theatrically, with a few scratchy and undersized 16mm sequences, and with intertitles to explain those few parts of the story still lost, but in substantially complete form. Now the film has been published on DVD by Kino International, with extras including a documentary on technical aspects of the restoration. It looks beautiful, and it is as interesting and varied a cinema work as ever.

The pleasures Metropolis offers include (toward its end) some genuinely thrilling action sequences, a city flooded and children in need of rescue, a fight to the death amid the gargoyles of a cathedral rooftop. But before these come more intellectual, associative pleasures. The film's brilliant scientist Rotwang fashions a female robot, shiny with malice and modernity, and brings her to life amidst bolts of electric fire; what is he but a version of Mary Shelley's impiously creative Frankenstein? Meanwhile downtrodden proletarians in the subterranean factories of Metropolis, sad toilers at the forge, reach back to the dwarfish Nibelungs of Wagner's Das Rheingold. (In 1924, Fritz Lang had directed two silent Nibelungenlied fantasies.) The operatic-mythic qualities of Metropolis are amplified by Gottfried Huppertz's symphonic score, also restored to the film, which moans and throbs along with the plot in a vaguely Wagnerian or Mahlerish way. For that matter Lang's loving heroine Maria, who rescues the rich man's son Freder from dissipation, is vaguely Wagnerian, or to reach back even further, Goethean: a figure of the Eternal Feminine drawing mankind upward. It was from a richly stocked Germanic imagination that Lang drew inspiration—or, more precisely, that his writing collaborator and wife Thea von Harbou drew inspiration. She would later split from the director when Hitler came to power, staying in Germany (and joining the Nazi Party) while Lang took flight to Hollywood.

Exciting action and cultural allusiveness are there in Metropolis to enjoy, but they are not what makes the film distinctive. Still less important is its sentimental, announced-in-full-caps solution to class antagonisms, "Heart must join mind and hands." What really counts in Metropolis is its visual imagination, the creation of two complete worlds on the screen, one above ground, one below. These are scarcely naturalistic representations. They are emblematic, as fixed and stylized in their way as medieval pictures of the Whore of Babylon in triumph or the Seven Deadly Sins in procession. Both these old images Lang actually inserts into his film, as if to suggest the symbolic mode in which he is working, as if to school us in the right way of seeing and understanding. Lang's above-ground world is devoted to amusement and commerce, the former being depicted in a pleasure-ground, a latter-day Venusberg where the offspring of wealthy families cavort and flirt amid unreal vegetation, in the most fantastic costumes I have ever seen on a movie screen. Commerce, meanwhile, is conveyed in elaborate special-effect shots of the city of the future: planes buzzing about, endlessly repeated skyscraper windows...