Giants poke and prod the denizens of Fritz Lang’s vast city, doing their best to bend them to the filmmaker’s will.

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis [Golden Age Comic Book Stories]

Up until now the only way one could see Metropolis — Fritz Lang’s cinematic masterpiece — in its original, uncut form was to build a time machine and travel back to Berlin between January and May, 1927. When it was released in America, Paramount edited it considerably, leaving us with the beautiful, yet confusing, version we have today. All this has changed recently with the discovery of the previously lost footage in the film archives of Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires by the current curator Paula Félix-Didier.

Among the footage that has now been discovered, according to the unanimous opinion of the three experts that ZEITmagazin asked to appraise the pictures, there are several scenes which are essential in order to understand the film: The role played by the actor Fritz Rasp in the film for instance, can finally be understood. Other scenes, such as for instance the saving of the children from the worker’s underworld, are considerably more dramatic.

ZEITmagazin has a number of stills from the newly found footage available to peruse and one can see that they show a fair degree of wear. This does little to diminish my excitement. Metropolis has always been a movie that I have loved and the opportunity to see Lang’s original vision is simply fantastic.

“Metropolis”: Key scenes from the famous movie rediscovered [Zeitmagazin] : Coilhouse

The transformation of mankind’s idealized future over the last century is a fascinating thing. Our tendency to speculate wildly is our greatest trait, resulting in a rich history of lofty, unrealistic goals and incredible literature that only serves to drive us to speculate further; to hope for a future like nothing we’ve ever seen.

From a sky full of hot-air balloons, from which dapper gents doff their hats to ladies on pedal powered flying machines, to pill-food and brushed chrome flying cars, to now, where our idealized future includes skull-mounted USB jacks and HUD’s. However, our visions of the future have a distinct difference from those of our forebears. Namely in that we envision the possibility of a dystopian future, a blasted, rusted heath on which we eke out our misery filled days; which we dream of alongside the optimistic fantasy of a future of soft, off-white plastics, bio-integrated technology, and utopian ideals.

It’s almost as if in the last 50 years or so we’ve finally started to realize that the future might not be coming to save us, but that it might just be one more boot to humanity’s collective chin.

Hydro Net [Flickr] : Dezeen : Drawn!

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is very much a film that could only have been made in 1920’s Berlin, where the decadence of the cosmopolitan elite rubbed against the struggles of the working man like salt against a razor wound. Where gentlemen clubs existed off of Unter der Linden based around the concept of gang sodomizing, then consuming geese; where helmet-haired starlets pranced naked in winter down Friedrichstrasse, clad only in mink and garters; where the saying went that cocaine replaced water from the flowing faucets of Charlottenberg’s penthouses; and where, beneath all this excess, the working class seethed, wanting some semblance of sanity restored to their lives as they did everything humanly possible to keep their families’ heads above water.

Eventually, this schism between working class and decadence would cause otherwise sensible people to think Hitler’s ultra-conservative (and ultra-crazy) Nazi party might have the right idea. The point is, the film — undeniably a masterpiece — is a sci-fi extrapolation of the times. It isn’t a vision of the future: it is the class warfare of 1920’s Berlin extrapolated to its logical — but not historically accurate — conclusion.

Even if you don’t buy all of that, Metropolis is a classic: a film perfect unto itself, that Hollywood shouldn’t touch. No one else could be Maria than Brigitte Helm. No CGI could be more spectacular than Eugen Schüfftan’s art deco modern cityscapes. And the Moloch Machine should never be touched: it is a mechanical industrialpunk god utterly nonsensical in a computerized age.

But Hollywood has never cited necessity as inspiration for its terrible ideas. So why be surprised that producer Thomas Schuehly (responsible for the execrable Alexander) is planning on remaking Metropolis. And no doubt ruining every single thing that has made the original so timeless. Maybe Hollywood itself is the modern-day Moloch Machine.

Thomas Schuehly Is Producing a Remake of Metropolis [Movieweb]

The city of the future was not always synonymous with shimmering pods set upon stilts: there was a time when architecture looked less to sci-fi to predict tomorrow’s cityscapes and more to the Tower of Babel. This is the look of Gotham: Biblical enormity, architecture that sets up the ideas of mankind — our dreams, our hopes, our designs — as the new gods, so much larger than our flesh that the individual is something smaller and less potent than an insect. A city of holy dread.

On the forefront of this very retro-futuristic city design was Hugh Fenriss, an architectural draftsman who made atmospheric chiaroscuros of the awesome cities he composed in his head. Clearly, his work was a major inspiration to the look of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Read more about him here or check out this Flickr gallery for over 300 of his designs. We all live, in small part, in his world.

Hugh Fenriss [Flickr] : Quiddity : Feuilleton