Metropolis - Page Fritz Lang / Giorgio Moroder







Metropolis, the Fritz Lang`s absolute masterpiece.

Metropolis originally ( 1927 ) had a total length of 4189 meters, which correspond to a total running time of 204 minutes with 18 frames/ sec. which was a very long film. The film was shortered down to 63 minutes for the american release and of the original copy do not exist any copy. A restored, 87 min. version was re-released in 1984, featuring a soundtrack produced by Giorgio Moroder
( see the discographie page for track info ).


FROM MS CINEMENIA:
Director Fritz Lang was inspired to make METROPOLIS when, while visiting New York, he first saw the vast and seemingly endless peaks and canyons of skyscrapers from the deck of his ship. His wife, Thea von Harbou, at his suggestion, wrote a futuristic novel (some historians believe the screenplay came first) and the director, using all of his considerable skills, eventually put it on film. The result was the biggest production of the silent era (surpassing even the mighty INTOLERANCE, 1916 and ROBIN HOOD, 1922, as well as Lang's earlier two-part DIE NIBELUNGEN, comprising SIEGFRIED and KRIEMHILD'S REVENGE).



Synopsis

Futuristic city. The story is set in the year 2000, and tells of a mighty city which is ruled by Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel), a heartless capitalist, whose only son Freder (Gustav Frohlich) lives an idyllic life, enjoying the beautifully sculptured gardens, which are his birthright. Then one day he meets Maria (Helm), a saintly figure who cares for the children of the slaves who toil in the workers' city below to keep the wheels of industry rolling. Frohlich follows her and is appalled to see the conditions that exist there. Returning to the surface, he confronts his father, and when he's told that that's the way things are, he decides to desert his class and become one with his downtrodden brethren.

Maria and the childs

Humanity replaced. Before long, Frohlich is invited to attend a meeting where the Christ-like Helm is addressing the workers and imploring them to reject the use of violence to improve their lot, and to think in terms of love and the Savior who will some day come in the form of a mediator. But even this minor act of defiance is too much for Abel, who has observed the speech in the company of Rotwang (brilliantly played by Rudolf Klein-Rogge) his mad scientist hireling. Given the green light to do his worst, Klein-Rogge abducts Helm, creates a robot in her image, and programs it to return and lead the workers in a revolt.

one of the most interesting shenes


Freder and Maria

Forces unite. Then follows some truly spectacular footage in which the lower city is flooded as a means of making the "subhuman" populace who dwell there forever subservient. Frohlich, however, rescues the real Helm, and together they manage to save the hildren. Then, fearing that his own son may have been killed in the madness, Abel surveys the ruins and comes to the realization that Helm was right, and that love is the most important of human emotions. The picture ends with Klein-Rogge's death and the capitalist shaking the hand of the representative of labor.



Fritz Lang Biographie:


Birth Name: Friedrich Christian Anton Lang
Born: December 5, 1890, Vienna, Austria
Died: August 2, 1976
Education: Technische Hochshule (architecture); Vienna Academy of Graphic Arts (art); School of Arts and Crafts, Munich (art); Academie Julien, Paris Human Desire (1954), made during Fritz Lang's last decade as a film director, begins with an emblematic image: a locomotive rushes forward, swift and dynamic, but locked to the tracks, its path fixed, its destination visible. Like Lang's films the train and the tracks speak of a world of narrowly defined choices. The closing image is even more severe: survivor Glenn Ford departs, his locomotive passing a sign on a bridge. Ford does not see the sign, but we do; abbreviated by intervening beams we suddenly see "The world takes" just before the film ends.
This vision of a hostile universe, constraints on freedom and messages that are missed or misunderstood but always seen by someone, can be found in all of Fritz Lang's films. His work has a consistency and a richness that are unique in world cinema. In Germany, in France, in Hollywood, then in Germany again, Lang built genre worlds for producers and audiences and veiled meditations on human experience for himself.
Lang's vision is that of the outsider. James Baldwin, an outsider himself, catches Lang's "concern, or obsession...with the fact and effect of human loneliness, and the ways in which we are all responsible for the creation, and the fate, of the isolated..." Born an Austrian, Lang fled his training as an architect for a jaunt through the middle and far east, returned to Paris just in time for the beginning of WWI, then fought on the losing side of the war. Recovering from wounds which cost him the sight in his right eye, Lang wrote his first scenarios: a werewolf story which found no buyers, and Wedding in the Eccentric Club and Hilde Warren and Death, which were sold and eventually produced by Joe May. May's deviations from Lang's scripts motivated Lang to become a director himself; his first movie was Halbblut/The Half-Caste (1919), a still-lost film about the revenge of a half-Mexican mistress. Later that year he directed the first film of a two-part international thriller called The Spiders (1920). Part one, subtitled The Golden Lake, proved so popular that his producers insisted Lang immediately make part two, The Diamond Ship. He had been working on another script which he hoped to film, so he reluctantly gave up The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) to Robert Wiene. His contribution to that landmark film nevertheless was crucial: Lang thought up the framing device, in which it is revealed at the story's end that we have been watching a tale told by a madman, thus significantly undercutting the audience's perceptions of the story.
Lang's career in the 1920s was one of spectacular rise to fame. With each film, he became more assured, garnering critical acclaim as well as a popular following. Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922), Die Nibelungen (1924), Metropolis (1926), and Spies (1928) are among the greatest silent films produced anywhere. Lang also made a remarkable transtition to sound, with M (1931), but he ran afoul of Nazi authorities with The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse/The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), whose villains mouthed Nazi propaganda. When the film was banned and Lang was requested to make films for the cause of the Third Reich, he immediately fled Germany, leaving behind most of his personal possessions, as well as his wife, screenwriter Thea von Harbou (who had joined the Nazi party and become an official screenwriter).
Lang made one film in France, then moved on to Hollywood, where he spent the next 20 years working in a variety of genres, mainly thrillers (e.g. Man Hunt, 1941, Scarlet Street, 1945, While the City Sleeps, 1956) and some outstanding westerns (The Return of Frank James, 1940, Rancho Notorious, 1952). Tired of warring with insensitive producers, Lang left the U.S. in the mid-1950s to make a film in India and then returned to Germany for his last set of films, including a final chapter in the Dr. Mabuse saga.
The disorienting frame in Caligari is an important part of Lang's distinctive vision. His films are punctuated by shifts of viewpoint and discoveries which transform the reactions of his characters - and of his audience. The most obvious of these shifts of viewpoint come in Caligari and The Woman in the Window (1944), in which the drama is suddenly revealed to be a dream. But they also occur in the Mabuse films; in M, with the policeman mistaken by a burglar for another thief; and in The House by the River (1950), when a servant is strangled because another maid appears to be responding to her cries for help.
Lang's films are also about contingency, the recognition that extra-personal forces mold our lives, shape our destiny in ways we cannot predict and only somewhat modify. In the two-part film, Die Nibelungen, Kriemhild is transformed from a secondary figure in the first film (Siegfried) into a whirlwind of fury in the second (Kriemhild's Revenge). Even the characters in the film are shaken by these transformations. The king of the Huns is staggered by Kriemhild's thirst for death; the vengeful underworld in M that has captured and tried Peter Lorre is taken aback by Lorre's confession that he "must" rape and murder, that he is something of a spectator to his crimes.
These moments of perception are the foundation of Lang's importance and continuing strength as a filmmaker. They constitute a kind of morality that he never abandoned. In the script for Liliom (1934), his French film made after he fled the Nazis, Lang wrote, "If death settled everything it would be too easy...Where would justice be if death settled everything?" Thirty years later, playing himself in Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (1963), Lang wrote for his character, "La mort n'est pas une solution." ("Death is no solution"). Nor does death erase human striving. In Between Two Worlds/Der Mude Tod/Beyond the Wall/Destiny (1921) the force of love survives, in Fury (1936) the cycle of vengeance is broken, in Clash By Night (1952) Barbara Stanwyck chooses reponsibility, in The Big Heat (1953) Glenn Ford finally turns to the police and ends his vendetta, and in Human Desire Ford again leaves the scene of the crime, choosing life over the locus of death.

Biography from Baseline's Encyclopedia of Film


Metropolis