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Metropolis Reconstructed
Matt W writes "The New York Times (free as in beer reg, blah blah) has an article about a recent reconstruction of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. After being butchered by studios, Martin Koerber and Alpha-Omega have restored most of the scenes and score. Film Forum on Houston St. in NY City will be showing the film for two weeks." Collect all three! I don't think they're using Georgio Morodor for the soundtrack for this one.
Metropolis is a fantastic film and I am glad to hear that the english version is being revamped to be as close to Lang's original. With lost footage that Hollywood thought was to intellectual and made the movie to long for an american audience.
Hollywood tends to make the former mistake quite often. The original Star Trek pilot "The Cage" was rejected for that reason leading to the second pilot "Where No Man Has gone Before". Man, I would love to go threw Hollywood's extensive stack of rejected scripts. I'm willing to gamble that there is more diamonds in that stack than in
South Africa.
Lang did have a vision about the perils of a industrial society and the film delivered his message with for the time brilliant cinemetography and visuals. When you watch the film you must remeber that this was six years before "King Kong". Audio wasn't very widespread and the color film of the time was crap. Yet the cityscape and factory sets where remarkable and very well done, and I think I don't need to mention the robot. Lang wasn't the only artist who put their effort into the film.
The Americanized version of Metropolis proudly has a place in my DVD collection and so does the Anime. When the revision is released I would love to compare the three.
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*Somebody* has to be working with heavy machines in order to produce the manufactured goods you use and enjoy. In Lang's vision of the future, employees in a subterranean world beneath the city fulfilled that function. In reality, those of us in the West have just exported our heavy, exploitive, polluting drudgery to the Third World, where despots are more than willing to whip our servants into submission for us. I'd say Lang's vision of the future was fundamentally correct - he just got a few irrelevant details wrong.
*Somebody* has to be working with heavy machines in order to produce the manufactured goods you use and enjoy. In Lang's vision of the future, employees in a subterranean world beneath the city fulfilled that function. In reality, those of us in the West have just exported our heavy, exploitive, polluting drudgery to the Third World, where despots are more than willing to whip our servants into submission for us. I'd say Lang's vision of the future was fundamentally correct - he just got a few irrelevant details wrong.
And except for the fact that you've completely ignored the point of the post you're responding to, you're fundamentally correct.
Lang's vision of the future is fundamentally Industrial, which means it is based on things: Physical objects, such as oil and gold and wood and iron, are the basic items of commodity. They are the things corporations live and die on. They are the things that the whole infrastructure of nations is built to transport. The Interstate Highway System is the ultimate Industrial infrastructure, because it allows people to move things in a reliable way from any point in the country to another cheaply. That is what Lang saw for the future: More of the same, but bigger.
Now we have made a transition from Stuff to Information. We live in the Information Age, and we now have to move information around efficiently. We have to find or produce information. Corporations live or die on their ability to react to information. J. P. Morgan's steel works could ignore the goings-on of Nihon or Corea or French Indochina because none of those regions were close enough to affect it. These days, dead is the corporation that thinks physical distance has the slightest to do with impact, or that it is safe to ignore whole regions of the globe. The Internet is the new infrastructure, because it allows us to move information around reliably and cheaply.
How can you use my intestines as a gift? -Actual Hong Kong subtitle.