Metropolis Saved

One of my fondest movie memories involves my father and a classic silent film. That film was "Metropolis" the Fritz Lang classic about the working class and the wealthy and how they need to start getting along to make the world a better place. It has become a science fiction classic with images that have become ingrained in our culture. If I were to show you, right now, a still from the movie with the famous female robot you would likely recognize it.

The movie that we were going to see was supposedly a dazzling new print with some forgotten scenes and a new rock and roll score. The band Queen had already made "Metropolis" cool again a couple of years before when they used scenes from the movie for their video for the song "Radio Ga Ga." Now Freddy Mercury, Queen's lead singer, was performing a song for the soundtrack. The soundtrack was a list of everyone who was cool during the mid-80s. Bonnie Tyler had a tune. Billy Squier had a tune. Adam Ant had a tune. These were all huge names at the time.

The movie was silent, but that intrigued me all the more. I had seen the scenes in the Queen video. I was entranced by the movie poster which featured the iconic golden robot. I also had a fondness for silent movies. I had not seen too many of them, but I loved the idea of telling a story in images and not having to record dialogue. Myself and a few friends had been toying with an old home movie camera and thought about doing our own silent films. I asked my father if we could see it.

The movie was only playing at one theater downtown. This was the Fine Arts theater, which no longer exists, sadly. It was right on Michigan Avenue, as I recall. It was to be a whole day. My brother got dragged along on a day when we were all off from school. We took the train downtown. It was winter, I remember, and we were bundled up. We walked into this old theater in downtown Chicago and into the theater showing the movie. Then, as the lights went down and the movie started, with its synthesizer soundtrack, I was completely captivated.

It turned out the infamous missing footage had not been restored. The story of how "Metropolis" became a flawed classic film is as legendary as the film itself. Lang created a very long movie with some very epic themes for its day. This was in the early days of cinema. Many movie theaters kept a very strict 90-minute policy on movies and it movies ran long, they just trimmed the movie. Lang's movie was well over that time limit and soon after it was finished it was taken out of the master filmmaker's hands and chopped into pieces.

Unfortunately this left the narrative confusing. Large chunks of the plot were just removed. Key players in the drama just vanished from the screen and were never seen again. Since films and film stock was not thought of as art or important at the time, most of the pieces that were cut were just destroyed. Those that were not destroyed outright at the time were destroyed by time itself as the old film stock was not meant to last forever.

So, this new version of "Metropolis" had some stills from missing scenes and a fancy new rock score. However, the narrative was still not complete. The reasons behind the mad scientist Rotwang (one of the first mad scientists on screen) were still murky. Things still didn't feel quite right.

However, despite this, Lang's movie became a classic. It was a hit. The sweeping cityscapes he created with the flying machines, cars and elevated train systems made the futuristic Metropolis of the movie seem like an amazing thing. He used techniques that would set the tone for special effects for years. His images were breathtaking, dazzling, the epitome of what a movie could be for its time.

However, last year, something amazing happened. In a long forgotten vault in Buenos Aires, film canisters were found. Inside them was a treasure to any fan of movies and movie history. Inside were scenes missing from "Metropolis." The film was damaged, yes, and some of it damaged beyond repair, but enough of it was there that it could be restored. This was going to create a version of "Metropolis" as close as it was ever going to be to Lang's original vision. The discovery set the film work abuzz.

The film has now been restored. This past week, on a chilly and snowy night at an open-air venue in Berlin, the movie was shown. An entire orchestra, sheltered from the cold, behind the screen, played the original score that was meant to be played for the movie. Although the rights to the movie in order for it to be streamed over the Internet were murky, but one site did stream the movie as it played from the plaza.

It was a strange effect. The camera looked at least half a block from the huge screen. Yet, despite the fact your feet were not freezing and you could not feel the snow falling, it really sort of felt like you were standing there, in the plaza, watching this amazing thing. If you used the HD feed and made it full-screen sized, you could see the film. The title cards were in German, but Lang's images made that something that didn't matter. As I watched, I realized I had seen this movie so often, I had no need for the titles.

First off, even though the camera feed was far from the best way to watch this film, you could tell the print of this film was amazing. It was clear, the images as crisp as they could possibly be without being fresh from the film studio. The orchestral music added to the entire thing, providing, for the first time, a true and accurate score to this film.

The missing film added to the story. Characters that simply vanished from copies of the movie before now had their stories rounded out. Holes in the plot were filmed. The entire movie became even more epic than had been thought. An entire character emerged from the movie that had been relegated to small a small role before. In short, this "Metropolis" was an entirely new movie and it was remarkable.

Fans of film and film history were justified in their hopes and excitement. At some point, of course, this film will come to the United States. I do hope it plays on screens in various cities before it inevitably goes to DVD. A major piece of cultural history has been rescued and, by a miracle, restored to as close to its original vision as we will likely ever get.

If you are a fan of movies and that doesn't make your heart leap and send shivers up and down your spine in anticipation, then I don't know what will. I guess I won't have to save you a seat next to me when it finally plays on a screen in Chicago.