silver nitrate notes

Lang's Metropolis and the Lost Reel

17 jun 2009

Fritz Lang and his wife and co-writer Thea von Harbou (1888-1954) shot Metropolis (1927) over seventeen months at UFA, on a budget that nearly bankrupted the studio. What was released in Germany in January 1927 ran 153 minutes. Paramount Pictures, holding the US distribution rights, decided 153 minutes was too long for American audiences and had the film cut to 115 minutes. The German distributor then used the American cut as a template and produced a shorter version for Germany. The original 153-minute cut went into the UFA vault and was lost.

For eighty years, Metropolis existed as a film whose reputation was larger than any surviving print could sustain. Every release between 1927 and 2010 was based on the cut versions. Historians knew from production documents that roughly a quarter of the film was missing. What was missing was anyone's guess.

In 2008, a museum curator in Buenos Aires opened a 16mm reduction copy of Metropolis that had been sitting in the archive of the Museo del Cine for decades. The 16mm copy had been made from an exhibition print imported to Argentina in 1928, before the American cut had propagated. It was scratched, damaged, incomplete, and long. It was the closest thing to the original cut anyone had found. The 2010 restoration, assembled from this print plus fragments from New Zealand and elsewhere, runs 148 minutes. News of the Buenos Aires find is why I am writing this now; I have not yet seen the reconstructed version, which is meant to screen at Berlin in February 2010.

What you can see, in the available version, is that the cinematography of Karl Freund (1890-1969) and Günther Rittau is not what the abbreviated versions had suggested. Freund and Rittau used double exposure, mirror work, and a technique they called the Schüfftan process (named for the special-effects supervisor Eugen Schüfftan) to combine live actors with miniature sets using angled mirrors. The city of Metropolis, which we see in multiple panoramic shots, is a combination of miniature buildings photographed at low angle and live actors in the foreground, married in camera via the Schüfftan process. The technique is the great-grandfather of every optical composite used in Hollywood from 1930 to 1990.

The film's politics are complicated. Von Harbou would later join the Nazi party; Lang would leave Germany the year after Hitler became chancellor. The "mediator between head and hands must be the heart" tagline has been read both as a centrist rejection of Communist class warfare and as a naive call for social reconciliation. I think both readings are partially correct. The cinematography is not complicated. It is one of the great technical achievements of silent cinema.

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sources
[1] Elsaesser, Thomas. Metropolis. BFI Film Classics, 2000.
[2] Minden, Michael and Holger Bachmann (eds.). Fritz Lang's Metropolis: Cinematic Visions of Technology and Fear. Camden House, 2000.
[3] McGilligan, Patrick. Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast. St. Martin's, 1997.
[4] F.W. Murnau-Stiftung, restoration notes for the 2010 reissue.