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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.
Actually, the anime was based on a manga by Osamu Tezuka, and that manga was inspired by F.L.'s Metropolis. Even twice removed for it's original inspiration, it still would have been appropriate to credit Fritz at the end of the Anime.
I scanned it in for my own site about a month ago.--scroll down a little, it's maybe the seventh book.
Text is public domain/not renewed, but Gutenberg didn't like the version I used (and doesn't like not renewed in general), so they wouldn't add it.
Interesting read--was written by Lang's girlfriend of the time, Thea von Harbou.
I saw the original Metropolis at Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival last Spring here at the University of Illinois. The film was made much more memorable because they used a live orchestral score by the Alloy Orchestra (who apprently specialize in silent film music) - although it was three people (drum, woodwind, sythesizer) it really created an excellent mood and atmosphere.
In addition - Ebert showed the anime Metropolis after the original, as a double feature. I really enjoyed the film, it was entertaining and very brilliantly animated and drawn, although I didn't find it particularly complex or intellectually deep. I was also very pleased that Ebert insisted on using subtitles rather than a english dub.
Sincerely,
Kevin Christie
Neuroscience Program
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
crispiewm@hotmail.com
I own a copy of the version Netflix has. It is really bad - a very poor quality, highly abridged master was used.
Wait for this restoration to come out on DVD. Even the Moroder version is better than the current DVD.
Rotten Tomatoes, one of the two great meta-review sites, doesn't seem to "get" that this release is very different from all previous cuts of the film, especially the recut, tinted, rock-n-roll-soundtracked 1984 Moroder cut. Many of the reviews refer to the "out of place rock-n-roll soundtrack" and "terrible image quality". This is a real problem, because people will be choosing whether or not to see the film based on extremely inaccurate data.
I've emailed them about the problem (and offered to provide them with a list mapping reviews to releases), but they seem to be ignoring me. If we can get enough people to let them know that yes it is worth taking the time to be accurate about this, this release might actually get the respect and attendance it deserves. Please mail them and let them and (as politely as possible) inform them that this is important.
Thank you.
Exactly. As far as I'm concerned, 2001 is almost a silent film as it is. There are basically three expository passages of dialogue in the film (the briefing by Dr. Floyd, the televised BBC interview, and the final recorded message from Dr. Floyd to the crew), and the rest could be eliminated completely without too much editing.
Maybe in my spare time I'll do an artsy parody of 2001, re-editing the DVD as a silent film with just a musical soundtrack and some title cards for essential dialogue. Sounds like a fun little project.
You heard it here first.
Wake up, pancho.... Metropolis is one of the films Lucas repeatedly alludes to in his Star Wars trilogy, and if haven't picked up on it you should take a course or two in film analysis and quit bashing Lucas as a filmmaker.
Besides the direct visual allusions he gives us to Metropolis in AOTC, here are some of the more striking commonalities between the two films:
(1) An emphasis on clones. The heroine, Maria (who advocates peace) is replaced by a robotic Maria who looks just like her and who advocates war in an evil attempt to cause the workers to destroy themselves so as to enrich the corporate ruler of the city. Likewise the prequels show us individuals who abandon pacifism to advocate war.
(2) Overarching theme that violence/war is self-destructive. Identical to theme in AOTC, where aggressors ALWAYS lose.
(3) The hero of Metropolis is a mediator between "the brain" and "the muscle" of the city -- not a direct parallel to AOTC, but think about balance in the Force, and wisdom versus emotional action. Close enough....
(4) The hero of Metropolis is a SON! In other words, a father-son relationship is at the heart of the movie, and the son is a saviour figure. Just like Star Wars.
(5) The wicked inventor of the robotic Maria has a mechanical hand.
Translation: if you can't pick up on the more obvious of visual allusions Lucas provides in ttack of the Clones, it really isn't your duty to bash the film, or its directory for his lack of sophistication as a filmmaker....
So all of a sudden mass-production is back to the level of the late Industrial age with absolutely no automation at all. How nice.
Your words, not mine. And your bile. There was automation in Metropolis - what do you think the workers were doing? That's right - running machines in factories.
Ignoring the fact that most 'industrial' jobs bear little resemblence to what was being done in the 19th and early 20th centuries because most of the tedium has been mechanized is simple ignorance.
Ha! You've obviously never worked a day in a factory in your life, let alone a factory in the Third World. Kathy Lee Gifford and Nike have to lock 'em in their sweatshops for a reason. And those sweatshops are a paradise compared to places like mines & smelters. Just because horrible working conditions have been (pretty much) eliminated from your immediate vision (as they had been for the elites in Metropolis) doesn't mean they don't exist elsewhere in the world. Of course we've been able to eliminate most of that from our little corner of the world - we're now largely the management class overseeing the labors of around two BILLION people. It takes a hundred million people to manage that pool of labor, and another hundred million to support those managers. But nothing that we do is "magic", and it's certainly nothing some of the workers couldn't do for themselves. Lang's film serves as a stark warning of what's going to happen someday when, en masse, they figure that last bit out.
'Things,' physical artifacts, have gotten so cheap that they don't drive economies anymore. They have gotten this cheap because production methods have changed radically, removing the need for people to stand in front of machines of steam and steel just to produce the most basic items of commerce.
Ha!!! You have two billion people working at slave wages to produce goods for you, troops stationed all over the world to keep the cost of energy down, and then crow about how cheap things have gotten thanks to the "Information Age"? Please! Things have gotten cheap because the pool of labor is ten times what it was in 1927, and the relative cost of energy has plunged. Things have gotten cheap because 100 years of industrial might have produced a military machine nobody can resist. Sure, "Information Age" technologies have helped to facilitate these changes - you couldn't manage two billion people spread all over the globe or fight a modern war without them - but please. A stealth fighter may be a marvel of modern information technology, but without the materials to build it and the fuel to run it, it's just a CAD drawing. And nobody's going to be intimidated - let alone killed - by something out of a videogame.
You don't eat ideas. You don't drive around town in information. We live in a material world, and all the information you shuffle about on the Internet won't ever change that fact.
And as for automation, it only makes sense to build hugely expensive and complicated robots to perform industrial tasks when the cost of labor is extremely high, as it became in the West and Japan during the 1970's, and the government doesn't allow you to move those jobs to Third World nations (as is the case with the heavily-regulated automobile industry). The per-capita GDP of China in 1990 was $798 US dollars. For America, it was around $32,000 dollars. So long as labor remains cheap in the Third World, they aren't going to be automating those jobs.