She's Baaaack! 'Metropolis' Revived

It's interesting timing that the newly restored print of Fritz Lang's Metropolis would show up just as the dust and tear gas from the G20 has begun to clear in Toronto. Coincidence, surely, but as old Carl Jung might say on a particularly dyspeptic day, "Are there really any coincidences, anymore?"

Vancouver's Pacific Cinematheque is showing the new restoration of the film, with 25 minutes of previously lost footage reinstalled. The story of the missing footage is epic in itself, with two different prints of the film (one discovered in Argentina and the other in New Zealand), both supposedly struck from the same master, showing up within a few years of each other. The version that Fritz Lang showed in Berlin in 1927 ran for 153 minutes. This new version clocks in at 147 minutes.

The reaction at The Berlin Film Festival this past spring was ecstatic, and the film is still something to behold, even if the newly restored footage occasionally looks like someone ran over it with a brillo pad. The Giorgio Moroder score of the 1980s also has been excised and the original symphonic score from composer Gottfried Huppertz, complete with Wagnerian-style leitmotifs, is given full swagger. This truly is a film that deserves to be seen on the big screen.

I haven't seen Metropolis since George Rosenberg's film history class at Simon Fraser University in the late '80s, and had forgotten a great deal of its complexities. Metropolis's impact is ridiculously widespread, from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner to Madonna music videos, a great many filmmakers have directly lifted from its iconic sweeping scope. But Fritz Lang claimed to despise the film, calling it a fairy tale. His wife Thea von Harbou (who penned the script) joined the Nazi party, and Metropolis seemed to exert some strange fascination for the Nazis.

Invited by Josef Goebbels to visit Nazi high command, Lang was supposedly informed that Hitler loved Metropolis and remarked of its maker: "Here is a man who can give us great Nazi films!" The art direction, architectural heft and grandiosity of the images long precede the likes of Leni Riefenstahl and architect Albert Speer, but you can definitely see the influences. They practically jump out and smack you in the face, most especially in the film's opening scenes where golden Aryan boys stage athletic events.

Reality blurred into fantasy

How much of the film's genesis is real or apocryphal is difficult to determine, as the director was infamous for embroidering his own past. Even the Hitler story has been called into question. Whether this, or Lang's story about witnessing the New York City skyline from a boat and being inspired to create a city of the future where "forces were driven to exploit each other and thus living in perpetual anxiety..." is true or fantastical, matters little.

The film has gone on to become that most rarified of creatures, a genuine masterpiece. Catholic insistence on the duality of women, treatise on the futility of revenge, or Brothers Grimm-like critique of voracious all-consuming machine culture, there are plenty of ideas to go around. You can interpret the film however you'd like and Lord knows, many a film student has, and will continue to do so. All of the factoids, the behind-the-scenes tales of Lang's sado-sexual proclivities, the murder of his first wife, his fascistic directorial style -- it all forms a weird seething subterranean level to a film that is still a supreme example of the soaring heights of German Expressionism.

It was interesting to see Metropolis again, not only in the light of the new scenes, but more importantly in tandem with the current happenings in the real world. The fact that the film still somehow pertains to the world in which we live, with the same ideas, the same conflicts acted out in the streets of other major metropolises around the world, is curious indeed.

In the film's opening scene, the pampered spawn of mighty capitalists play sex games in a simulated garden of Eden. Their frivolity and leisure is supported by a vast subterranean world of starving zombified workers, who toil and suffer far from the eyes of the privileged few. Sound familiar? It could very well be neo-liberalism with a Germanic twist.

Boy meets girl

Things kick off when the son of the city's creator, a golden-haired boy named Freder, witnesses a young woman named Maria, surrounded by crowds of raggedy kids, enter the garden and declaim that the rich and the poor are all brothers. Even as she is booted out the door and back to the gutter, Freder is hooked hard. He falls down the rabbit hole and discovers the true nature of the city. Meanwhile, the saintly Maria lectures the workers on the need for patience and civility in presenting their cause to the men in power.

The political and social critique inherent in the film is little more than finger-painted ideology. It is the images, replete with symbolic power, that continue to enthrall. The film roars especially into life with the creation of Maria's evil robot doppelgänger. Created by mad scientist Rotwang as a testament to his dead love Hel, who just happened to be the wife of Uber-capitalist Joh Fredersen and the mother of young Freder. Hel, who died giving birth, is immortalized as a giant stone head. Could you get more Freudian if you tried? Keep in mind that Lang himself hailed from Freud's hometown of Vienna and was already deeply influenced by the Freudian theory, long before he became a filmmaker.

The twisted bits get stranger still, given that Hel, in Norse mythology is the daughter of Loki, who presides over the dead and the place that bears her name. "Go to Hel" originally meant exactly that. The newly minted version of Metropolis is thick with this type of detail. The reinsertion of extended sequences devoted to hitherto minor characters such as the sinister Thin Man give a sense of breadth and scope. But the central plot centers around Rotwang's plan to bring about the simultaneous destruction of the city, its rulers and ruled, all through one fell female form. Bring in the Fembot, or, as she is formally known the Maschinenmensch.

Eve as snake woman

It's interesting that of all of iconic the images in the film, the female robot stands supreme as the most iconic. She is many things -- a whore of Babylon, a source of sexual destruction, a bringer of violent revolution, and a pleasure-mad demon in deco disguise. It is any wonder that she still commands attention. The scene of saintly Maria's transformation into metal temptress is riveting. As the sparks fly and the new being opens her eyes, only to slit one into a leering wink, your hair may stand on end. She is sex juju personified and she wastes little time in bring about the destruction of the city, by inciting the workers to riot, and causing a ruckus of violence and murderous jealousy amongst the rich and wealthy.

Like Eve, who also ushered us into original sin, she is more a vehicle of ideas than a genuine fully-fleshed character. But lordy! She makes being bad look really good. In the film's infamous dance sequence, she rises from a pedestal supported on the shoulders of burly black men, resembling a cobra in feminine form, all slinky legs and neck cocked like she is about to strike. This bad robot still exerts a pull even eight decades after she first made an entrance.

As the action ramps up to more furious levels, the workers riot, flood the city, and the entire place comes crashing down. When the two populations (the poor and the rich) meet in the street, only the ritual sacrifice of the bad robot woman, by burning her at the stake, no less, brings about a moment of reconciliation. If only it were quite that simple in Toronto. But as Fritz Lang well knew, the spectacle is all that remains, long after the smoke has cleared and the two sides dispersed.