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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.
Could someone explain to me what the hell this article is about? It's just words, man!
The anime was the best! I loved the ragtime soundtrack. They didn't even credit Fritzy though :(
That's because the anime was actually an adaptation of a Japanese comic book, and not a reincarnation of Fritz Lang's masterpiece. Here is a handy link, if you want to learn more about the anime, or get trailers, etc.
Get off my launchpad!
Then don't watch Osamu Tezuka's Metropolis. It's quite a departure from the plot of the original, taking way too many pages from the Akira playbook. The character animation is across the board, but done so intentionally - Some of the characters look like they were drawn 30 years ago, while others are clearly modern and highly detailed.
Still, the drastic departure from the original plot keeps me from really enjoying this release...
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
Available here
Aw, fuck it. Let's go bowling. - The Big Lebowski
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.
There was an early Tom Hanks / Meg Ryan film called Joe vs. the Volcano which has the opening 15 minutes doing a GREAT takeoff on Metropolis - not camp or tongue in cheek, but a serious emulation with modern filmmaking. The rest of the movie was so-so to OK. Worth checking out.
As brought to you by FilmThreat, an interview with Martin Koerber about "Metropolis."
I'm with you, I thought the 80s rock version was pretty good. I particularly remember one scene that I think was an Adam Ant song set to the workers going down in the tunnels that I thought was particularly appropriate and well done.
Adam Ant did "Cage of Freedom," as I recall. A great piece, especially the full version as heard in the film. It seems appropriate even today.
The piece I most identify with the worker's march and descent into the underworld was Cycle V's "Blood From a Stone."
The lyrics from which I could quote in its entirety here, but I don't want to get whacked by the Valenti Heat. #B^)
But a line or two couldn't hurt, right?
"Circles of the human chain/
Turning for wheels of gain/
A system with a power of its own/
To draw blood from a stone"
Stefan
Ah, now it's slashdotted. Try here or here or here or here for more info on this major landmark in film history...
I can understand why some folks my object to the 80's pop, but I liked both the music and the reconstructions. Until Moroder did the work, the only version of Metropolis widely available was short, badly hacked up, and accompanied by an embarassing Moog Synthesizer track.
I would love to get the Moroder version on DVD. My videotape, dubbed from the laserdisk, disappeared years ago.
I certainly look forward to the new release, however.
The first collegiate-level production of Metropolis done as a musical was done in 1994 at Southwestern College (in San Diego, CA). (My father performed in it, so I ended up at the theatre for many-a late night.) Anyway, I remember hearing all sorts of debate over the different versions of the movie out there. Which was the "truest" to the original story (none, really), which was the most accessible.
Since we were the first in the US, the script and songs for the musical were re-written and umpteen number of times during production. It ended up as a sort of rock opera, but evoking many themes that were more present in the original than in later edits.
Apparently, even with as much research as they've now been able to do, there are still significant portions of it missing ('it' being Lang's original version).
Anyway, all technology workers deserve to see this story in one form or another. Definitely has as much to say now as it did 75 years ago.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
No, I take the back. It's mostly three scenes that are used, over and over: The creation of the robot Maria, the workers' descent into their dreary city, and the workers' revolt.
There are a lot more great scenes, of course. There's a amazing, simple, evocative shot in which the hero runs around a corner.
"Eh? So what?"
Because it's a HUGE corner, a giant, windowless, monolithic heap. Seeing Federsohn cruise around it gives you a great sense of scale.
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.
>
We have to make sure George Lucas dosen't get anywhere near this revision. That guy can't even remake his own movies.
>
Back in February I wrote a lengthy report on Metropolis for my college cinema class. The report was supposed to be about the themes of the film, but its history was so interesting I spent 2/3 of my time on that instead of the plot and events. An assignment for a 600 word paper turned into a 1700+ word essay that received an A+, not that I'm bragging or anything. I think it's an interesting read, whatever the grade was. The paper includes links to other sources and reviews more knowledgable than I. Check it out at www.msboycott.com/kmarks/metropolis.shtml .
There you have it.
== Paul Rickard, Editor of The Microsoft Boycott Campaign ====
I was there too, hopefully when this new release is available the Alloy Orchestra will be allowed to license it. I greatly prefer the Alloy Orchestra's soundtrack to that of the original. I can't wait for this movie release to make it to DVD though, the rest of the DVD releases of Metropolis have horrible video quality!
After being butchered by studios, Martin Koerber and Alpha-Omega have restored most of the scenes and score.
What's the subject of that sentence?
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
The Club Foot Orchestra did a
soundtrack that was just marvelous.
It was also a great experience to see the film with the group playing live in the theatre.
unless they found a BUNCH of reels of film, they can't say restored most. 7 of the 17 reels (3301 ft) of the film are missing, thanks to them shortening it for "American audiences".
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
I saw that version of Metropolis even before I saw Bladerunner, and I swear it somehow turned me into the sci-fi geek I am now. Now the only copy of Metropolis that's available is a very poor DVD that I have. The DVD itself looks like there has been 0 attempt at a restore. I suspect they may have burned the DVD from a VHS tape. I'm -so- looking forward to any new DVDs that show up as a result of this.. and I'd even love to find the fruited-up 80's version (because it sorta rules in it's own way too).
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
IIRC, Metropolis fell into the public domain or something (or at least, there are 50 million versions of it, editing aside -- sort of like His Girl Friday).
Will they be releasing this spiffed up version at some point in the future?
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
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.
No, Freddie Mercury was on one song (Love Kills) on the soundtrack.
on a side note, I believe it was "Radio Ga Ga" by Queen that used parts of the film in their music video
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
"Only by pushing himself to the very edge of coherence was Lang able to transcend the schematic moralizing that keeps so much science fiction tethered, ultimately, to the mundane."
Personally, I push my perl code to the very edge of coherence in order to "transcend the schematic moralizing"... but YMMV.
P.S.- what the heck does that mean!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
funny, Ive liked all versions I have run across, Moroder's, the original, the anime based on the magna which is based on the original movie. I have read the book many times, and I have the book-on-tape version as well...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Try turning the sound off before watching some more recent movies and see if you can discern their underlying messages. Here's what I came up with:
- Training Day: Cops do drugs and beat up homeless/crippled people.
- 2001: Always bring your helmet when leaving the space ship.
- Tron: Jeff Bridges should not smoke crack before operating a computer.
- Full Metal Jacket: Soldiers kill people.
- Dr. Strangelove: Peace is the military's profession.
- AI: What the hell was that all about?
It's not so easy, is it?Is this the Superman vs. Batman movie that has been rumored? Superman lives in Metropolis, right?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Here is a review that does that.
What is interesting to me about 'Metropolis' (besides a cool flick) is the history of the term 'robot'. The Russian word for 'worker' is 'robotnik.' Kinda puts a different slant on our (if you're lucky) 40 hour work week.
Back in Austin, I think I saw the silent version of Metropolis with a Kraftwerk soundtrack. I enjoyed it, but was kinda... medicated.
Here's what MonsterZine has to say:
"In 1920 Czech writer Karel Capek's play R.U.R.: Rossum's Universal Robots coined the term "robot" (from the Czech robotnik, worker) for mechanical man. In the play emotionless artificial persons wipe out humanity, only to develop emotions of their own. In Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927), a grandly mad scientist (Rudolph Klein-Rogge) creates an evil robot, then, through a spectacular display of electrical equipment, transforms the robot into the duplicate of a virtuous labor leader (Brigitte Helm)."
And here is what Kraftwerk has to say about it:
The Robots
We're charging our battery
And now we're full of energy
We are the robots
We're functioning automatik
And we are dancing mechanik
We are the robots
Ja tvoi sluga (=I'm your slave)
Ja tvoi Rabotnik robotnik (=I'm your worker)
We are programmed just to do
anything you want us to
we are the robots
We're functioning automatic
and we are dancing mechanic
we are the robots
Ja tvoi sluga (=I'm your slave)
Ja tvoi Rabotnik robotnik (=I'm your worker)
We are the robots
. This sig unintentionally left blank. I meant to put something here, but I'm busy.
didnt read your whole message. i guessi was wrong.
Asimov did not coin the term "robot." He did however coin the term "robotics" to describe the study and creation of robots. Asimov goes into the etymology of the word "robot" somewhere in one of his bazillion books' forwards, I think.
"No, no, no. Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."
*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.
Leni Riefenstahl is still alive and active at age 99. She knew Fritz Lang when he was making Metropolis; they were working at the same studio.
No, the sentence is not correct. Just in case anybody else out there needs an explanation, the sentence is incorrect because it's an example of a misplaced modifier.
Properly constructed sentences place modifying clauses or phrases adjacent to the word that they modify. In this case, the sentence is incorrect because ``being butchered by studios'' is not descriptive of ``Martin Koerber and Alpha-Omega.'' If you parse the sentence correctly, it's funny.
After being butchered by studios, Martin Koerber and Alpha-Omega have restored most of the scenes and score.
The strict meaning of that sentence is that Martin Koerber and Alpha-Omega were butchered by studios, and that they subsequently restored the film. This error is doubly egregious because the noun that the adverbial phrase modifies-- ``the film''-- isn't even in the sentence. It's just implied by the elliptic construction, ``restored most of the scenes and score (to the film).''
To be grammatically correct, the sentence could have been written this way. It's not great, but at least it's strictly correct.
After the film was butchered by studios, Martin Koerber and Alpha-Omega restored most of the scenes and score.
The right thing to do in this case, of course, is to rephrase the idea so it can be expressed less awkwardly.
``To read makes our speaking English good.''
I'm a huge anime fan, so I'm probably more forgiving on anime than most movie-goers... and let me tell you, I thought the anime Metropolis was completely awful.
:P
None of the characters were developed in a way that made me feel any empathy, and most of the plot was murky and full of babble. Animation was good but not good enough to make up for the weak story and characters.
Just a quick FYI, Osamu Tezuka based his Metropolis manga off of Fritz Lang's movie in the circa 1950's. He based it VERY loosely, since he'd never actually seen the movie, so it was more of an inspiration thing, rather than an adaptation.
I don't know how closely this modern animated version sticks to the manga- I'm guessing it's a fairly loose or at least highly compressed adaptation of the manga, since that's what happens when a multivolume printed work is crammed into a 2-hour movie.
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
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....
from your review:
We can summarize [the moral of the original film by saying] that men are, by nature, greedy and selfish. Those who have the capacity to oppress others for their own gain will always do so, and the advancement of technology makes that easier. Rebellious masses can be placated, fooled, or eliminated by technologies that appear to be helpful at first but slowly remove more freedom and individuality as they become more advanced.
Or if that doesn't work, you can start a war. That usually keeps those commie rebels who keep griping about human rights confused and occupied long enough to destroy them.
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
*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.
(free as in beer reg, blah blah)
CNN, MSNBC, ZDNET, CNET are all "free as in beer". What news site that you know of, gives away the rights to its stories?Well, I don't think the average Nike or DeBeers worker would see any great changes in working conditions over the last 300 years and they ain't insignificent companies.
I think the poster had a point, for the mass of humans the idea that you can look up Perl6 on google and find information and that you have any use for that information is almost like something from a myth. There is a parallel here between you (and me) and the upper classes in Metropolis.
Slavery still exists and is perhaps more common than you'd like to think.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
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.
This guy reconstructed a metropolis over a month ago!
--
E_NOSIG
Tezuka was inspired by posters/reviews for Lang's Metropolis. He hadn't actually seen the film itself, so I don't think you can really say that he was inspired by it.
Sound of Silents: METROPOLIS Digitally Restored Print!
September 21 With live organ accompaniment
September 22 With restored 60-piece orchestral soundtrack
It's a beautifully restored theater, built in the Roaring 20's, with gold trim, chandeliers, a balcony, and a pre-show organist.
AlpineR