Metropolis Restoration I

'Metropolis' Now
By A.J. GOLDMANN
Berlin
FEBRUARY 19, 2010

Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" is among the most iconic and influential movies of all time, referenced (and lovingly ripped off) by everyone from Stanley Kubrick to Luc Besson. It depicts not only a fantastical city of elegance and splendor, built on the back of workers who toil underground, but the sexy robot who is engineered by a mad scientist to destroy this new Babylon. Few films have been so enjoyed by generations of film buffs and pored over by scholars. Few films, too, have had such a fraught history or existed in so many versions. Now, 83 years after its Berlin premiere, "Metropolis" can finally be seen as Lang originally intended it. Well, almost.
A restored version that incorporates over 20 minutes of newly discovered footage was screened last Friday at the 60th Berlin International Film Festival. Tickets to the gala, featuring the original score performed by a live symphony orchestra, sold out quickly. But throngs of cinéphiles braved subfreezing temperatures to congregate at Pariser Platz, where the film was beamed onto a screen set up at the Brandenburg Gate.

Since the 1980s, there have been multiple attempts to reconstruct the film using imperfect sources. Until now, the most definitive version was the 124-minute 2001 restoration supervised by the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation. That organization, named for the great movie director, is dedicated to preserving Germany's cinematic heritage and also behind the current restoration.
In 2008 a 16mm negative was found in Buenos Aires that ran nearly half an hour longer than any known "Metropolis" print. Incorporating this new footage, the version screened at the festival runs 147 minutes—just six minutes shy of the running time of the film shown at the Jan. 10, 1927, Berlin premiere.

Those hoping to discover more lascivious outtakes might be disappointed that the restored material mainly makes the narrative less disjointed. While "Metropolis" came under attack for some sexual content, most of the censorship cuts were restored in the '70s and '80s.
At the time of its release, "Metropolis" was one of the most elaborate and expensive films ever made. It nearly bankrupted UFA, the studio that was home to the German film industry during the Weimar Republic. Audiences in 1927 apparently had difficulty with a hyperstylized 2½-hour science-fiction epic whose complex and confusing narrative had strong social and religious undertones. When Paramount acquired the film that same year for U.S. release, it shaved off nearly 40 minutes.

"They turned it into more of a Frankenstein story and softened the film's Christian themes," Martin Koerber, one of the restorers, explained at a news conference the morning of the gala. UFA embraced the American-made cuts that Lang felt mutilated his film. Late in life, the director is reported to have answered a question about "Metropolis" from the author Robert Bloch by asking, "Why are you so interested in a picture that no longer exists?"
For decades, the original cut of "Metropolis" was looked on as a cinematic Holy Grail. The 16mm print found in Argentina appears to have been created from a now-lost 35mm nitrate print that the Argentine film distributor Adolfo Z. Wilson, who saw the movie in Berlin in January 1927, took back with him to Buenos Aires. The 16mm print was acquired by a private collector who donated it in 1992 to the Museo del Cine Pablo C. Ducrós Hicken in Buenos Aires. It remained unwatched in the museum's archives until 2008.

Without a reliable script of Lang's cut of the movie, the print was verified, in part, by seeing how well it played to the original score by Gottfried Huppertz. "That score is the only complete document from the 1927 premiere," said conductor Frank Strobel after the dress rehearsal. "The music played a big role right from the beginning because the film's editing was based to the score itself." Since 1975, there have been many soundtracks written, performed or recorded for "Metropolis," including one by Giorgio Moroder for his 1984 color-tinted restoration. For those familiar only with Moroder's music, featuring Freddie Mercury and Pat Benatar, Huppertz's operatic score is a revelation.
"The score gave us the information for the gestalt of the film," added Mr. Koerber, explaining that the music was also the basis for the 2001 reconstruction. But back then, Mr. Strobel complained, he needed to bend and break the music to fit the film. Not anymore. "When you put the score beneath the images, everything was clearer and flowed better," he said.

At the dress rehearsal for the gala screening, the montage synched up superbly to the lush, neo-Romantic score as played by the Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin. The marriage of sound and image was especially gripping during the film's final act, when the workers revolt and the subterranean city is flooded.

The main differences between the restorations of 2001 and 2010, Mr. Koerber said, was that the new footage (of poor visual quality despite restoration attempts) greatly affects the rhythm of the film, especially during the workers' rampage. On a narrative level, the restored scenes flesh out some characters' relationships, most crucially the rivalry between Joh Fredersen, one of the masters of Metropolis, and the mad scientist Rotwang. Other scenes detail the comic adventures of the worker who trades places with the film's hero, Freder, one of Metropolis's privileged sons. The sinister Thin Man (the famed German actor Fritz Rasp) also has an expanded role.
It becomes clearer that this isn't just a sci-fi movie," explains Mr. Koerber, adding that the film's humanistic aspects are now more easily identifiable. Eberhard Junkersdorf of the Murnau Foundation agrees: "The topics of joy and friendship can now be rediscovered. They are big themes in Lang's work and in the history of the Berlin Film Festival."

Is this the most complete "Metropolis" we will ever see? Or will the remaining lost footage (indicated in the current version by a handful of intertitles that describe the missing action) someday be found? Mr. Junkersdorf replies, "Miracles sometimes happen."

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