A few months ago I went to a screening of the 1920 silent horror film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari at local venue the Old Woollen in Farsley. The film is a quintessential piece of German Expressionist cinema from over a century ago and a fascinating insight into celluloid creativity during the era of the Weimar Republic. As fun as it is, with its story of a mad hypnotist inducing a brainwashed somnambulist to commit murders, I wanted to look at an even more quintessential movie from the era, one that most people have come across at some point, the great 1927 science-fiction masterpiece, Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang (1890–1976).
Lang has been cited as one of the most influential of filmmakers of all time, and he is credited with pioneering both the sci-fi genre (Metropolis, Woman in the Moon) and film noir (M). He didn’t shy away from producing epically long films, either, like the 4.5 hour Dr Mabuse the Gambler or the two-part Die Nibelungen based on the epic poem Nibelungenlied, but the one film that captures the zeitgeist of the auteur’s work is undoubtedly Metropolis.
It was written in collaboration with Lang’s wife Thea von Harbou and based on her 1925 novel of the same name. Metropolis is set in a futuristic urban dystopia prefiguring Blade Runner and bringing to mind themes from Orwell and indeed Mary Shelley with its own Frankenstein’s monster in the form of the scientist Rotwang’s iconic robot the Maschinenmensch.
Meanwhile, the film’s aesthetics, with Gothic touches, draw heavily from the Bauhaus, Cubist and Futurist design movements of the time. We see a world of colossal skyscrapers from which a wealthy elite lords it over the down-trodden masses of the underground who toil in abject conditions to keep the machines of the society running.
One day a member of this elite, one Freder Fredersen (Gustav Fröhlich), has an epiphany when presented with what life is like for the poor, by the saintly Maria (Brigitte Helm, who also plays the Maschinenmensch), and the two conspire to change the society and bring about social justice. As such, it can be construed as a rather simplistic morality tale, but there’s no simplicity in the stylisation and brilliant technical effects, which serve to create a remarkable world, both visually beautiful and powerful. Enjoy the theatrical trailer, below, with an excellent soundtrack by Gottfried Huppertz.
