Lost Version of Fritz Lang's Metropolis Discovered: A Holy Grail for Film Lovers Found in Argentina

Long believed to be lost forever, several key scenes cut from the original version of Fritz Lang's 1927 silent science fiction masterpiece Metropolis have been discovered in the collection of a film museum in Buenos Aires. While they will need extensive restoration, and indeed may be impossible to restore to their original condition, the newly discovered reels will allow one of the world's great films to be seen in something much closer to its original version.

Metropolis has become one of the most iconic pieces of film ever made. Its story and themes have echoed through movies all the way down to modern classics like Blade Runner. And its visual influences have turned up in everything from Tim Burton's Batman to music videos by Queen and Nine Inch Nails. The film itself has been released any number of times, usually with newly recorded scores including one by Giorgio Moroder.

However, as with so many films that are now treasured as classics, Metropolis was a bomb on its initial release. Lang's original cut is believed to have run 210 minutes long. Even by today's standards, a three and a half hour movie is a difficult thing to distribute. In 1927 it was completely impossible. After a run in Berlin, the film was cut drastically for foreign distribution, especially in the United States. The cuts render large chunks of the film incomprehensible. Only the cut versions were thought to have survived, which meant more than a quarter of the original film was gone forever. Some more recent releases have tried to restore at least some sense of the original story by replacing the missing scenes with still images and title cards that explain what happened in the missing parts.

Thus, news that a copy of the original version had survived, in Argentina of all places, was met with amazed jubilation around the world. The German weekly newspaper Die Zeit reported that Paula Felix-Didier, curator of the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires, had discovered a print and brought it to Germany to be examined and authenticated by film experts. Die Zeit reports that the experts have pronounced that the reels are what Felix-Didier thought - a longer version of Metropolis that includes many, perhaps even all, of the lost scenes.

The print was apparently brought to Argentina in 1928 by a local film distributor and shown in theaters there. Somehow, the reels then ended up in the private collection of a film critic named Manuel Peña Rodríguez, who sold them in the 1960s to Argentina's National Art Fund. From there they went to the Museo del Cine where Felix-Didier and her ex-husband, who was the curator before she took over, eventually realized what they had.

The reels are in bad shape after kicking around Buenos Aires for 80 years, but the simple fact of their existence is astonishing. Metropolis is one of the most important films ever made, even in the butchered version that survived. The prospect of being able to see it as only audiences in Berlin in 1927 (and apparently in Buenos Aires in 1928) had ever seen it is nothing short of miraculous. It's like the cinematic version of being able to go back in time and witness the signing of the Declaration of Indpendence.

The rights to Metropolis are held by the F.W. Murnau Foundation. (Murnau was another great German director of the silent era, best known for Nosferatu.) In 2002, the Foundation released the best version of the film that was possible at the time, with a digitally restored image, the original score and title cards explaining the missing segments. Based on this new discovery, the Director of the Foundation told Die Zeit he feels a "responsibility" to do a new restoration and make the original version of the film available. So, amazing as it sounds, we may soon be able to actually see the original version of Metropolis as Lang intended it.