Metropolis (1927)
In a towering future city split between a pampered elite above and an enslaved workforce below, the industrialist's son falls for a workers' prophet preaching reconciliation, while a mad inventor's robot double of her is unleashed to incite revolt instead.
Butchered on its original American release and pieced back together only in fragments for decades, Metropolis has had one of the strangest afterlives of any silent film — a nearly complete print, missing for eighty years, turned up in a Buenos Aires archive in 2008, restoring some twenty-five minutes historians had known only from stills and censorship records.
Background
Fritz Lang directed Metropolis for the German studio UFA on one of the largest budgets of the silent era, and its vision of a vertically divided future city, with a wealthy elite above and a laboring underclass below, became a visual touchstone for science fiction that followed. The film’s American release was heavily cut, and for decades most surviving prints preserved only a shortened version of Lang’s original vision.
What to watch for
In 2008 a nearly complete 16mm print was discovered in a film archive in Buenos Aires, restoring roughly twenty-five minutes of footage that had previously been known only from surviving stills and censorship records, and that footage was incorporated into a major restoration. Watch for the elaborate special effects, including the Schüfftan process used to combine miniature sets with live actors, and for the robot double built to incite the workers, an image that has been echoed in science fiction ever since. The film is preserved in UNESCO’s Memory of the World register.
