Metropolis (1927)

Directed by Fritz Lang.
Starring Alfred Abel and Gustav Fröhlich.

In a Nutshell: The societal crisis between workers and owners of a capitalist dystopia.

A film that has not just changed our vision of our future, but the future itself through art, literature, culture, feeding into our perception of contemporary problems in a futuristic lens. It is a film of audacious visuals and grandiose ideas, one of the strongest survivors of silent cinema (and one of the most extravagant, equaled only by Intolerance and Greed). Eighty-three years later it has returned in as definitive a restoration as there may ever be (twenty-five additional minutes), and as powerful as ever. Metropolis concerns the struggle of class warfare, antiquated slightly by a proletarian impulse. The haves rule in sky-lofted paradise while the have-nots toil beneath the city. The privileged Freder (Gustav Fröhlich), son of an autocrat, falls in love with Maria (Brigitte Helm), an angelic beacon through the working-class smog. Witnessing an industrial accident propels Freder to defy his father and lead the workers in a revolution. Impeding his success is a mad scientist’s creation, a robot double for Maria, intent on sabotaging the workers from within.

For all of Fritz Lang’s gloriously baroque expressionism and narrative absurdity, its conceptualization of social strife with the growing industrialization feels ageless. Both classes are hive-mind forces of destruction, united only by spiritual idealism, not equality. It is a message even Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels could embrace, championing the dissolve of political bourgeoisie for reform of the labor force. Lang himself expressed dissatisfaction in later years, but the thematic power he brought to these ideas is unmistakable. Garnished with the very finest German Expressionism, Lang turns buildings into heaven-piercing castles and the city’s machinery into an electric monster, insatiable in its appetite for worker blood. The deco of Rotwang’s (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) lab has birthed nearly every mad scientist lair since.

Metropolis’ is a message film, one that is far too starry-eyed for our post-Marx society. Even with its newfound footage, not every narrative gap is bridged. But no matter. Few films can boast the literary and pictorial heights Lang brought to the medium. It is broad, occasionally over-explicit spectacle, but also buoyed by the unfiltered ideology that insulates Lang’s futuristic universe. There are hardly better examples that explore the capabilities film can be used to reflect our own struggles and shape our perceptions of tomorrow. I urge you all to see Metropolis in newly remastered glory, a landmark achievement in its final triumphant form.