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.
I can’t help but think that, were these mechanical cops to have been produced, they would have immediately been drafted into service by private entities. Indeed, the inset in the upper left of this illustration brings to my mind, not of the police sedating a mob — something that, along with “war purposes”, it is well suited for, according to the numerous mentions of each in the write-up — but of the private security forces of the Ford Motor Co., tearing through the picket lines of striking employees. The idea of, say, John Pierpont Morgan, his rhinophyma riddled visage contorted in murderous glee, controlling an army of unstoppable automatons, chills me to the bone. At the very least it would keep the machines from helping those in who are truly in need of robotic justice, like the young lady being harassed by this floating Rape-Bot. Maybe it’s just me, but I wonder just who was looking forward to the future of 1924.
There are people — some of whom I know — who are champions of the toggle switch. In their opinion it is blasphemy to use a cheap, plastic or rubber button when one could instead opt for the tactile thwack of a ponderous, metal toggle; and while I feel a certain apprehension at, say, replacing all the switches in one’s family mini-van with the intention of giving the driver an impression of piloting a slower, less attractive and Earth bound version of a DC-3, I can see the appeal. Certainly we here at Ectomo have a certain affinity for retro-futurist artifacts and these adding machines by Andy Aaron fit the bill marvelously featuring not just the aforementioned toggles but an array of cranks, knobs, keys, and blade switches that would look lovely in one’s office.
Picking up pets offworld was generally frowned upon by the Company, as there were no quarantine facilities beyond the Oort.
Foreign mammalia carried strange strains of crippling flu, shed itchy fibers on cockpit upholstery, and left crumbly little fewmets in secret places, fewmets that became apparent, and airborne, as soon as a ship hit ohgee.
In your daily meanderings through the hallowed halls of Ectomo you may at some point have taken note of my odd name. I can assure you it isn’t the result of air-headed, hippie parents and in spite of my questionable ancestry and modern American nature I still have quite a bit of reverence for parts of my dubious heritage.
As such, I can’t help but love this outfit recently featured by fashion aficionado The Sartorialist. This woman is the spitting image of the pack of post-apocalyptic Neo-Bedouins that stalk across the vast expanses of my imagination. I adore the combination of flowing, layered fabrics employed as shawl and head dress, and the tight, boot strapped pants easing mobility, all of which unites to form the image of an ancient wanderer fit for a modern age.
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.
Jeff de Boer is a Canadian artist who crafts amazing sculptures, including armor for mice and cats as well as rocket packs and retro-future space pistols (pictured after the jump).
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.
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.
An apple cheeked Russian child docks satellite and space ship in preparation to rain nuclear terror down on the world, ensuring a white Christmas across the globe.
The December 1930 issue of Modern Mechanics looks at one ultra-plausible, ultra-scientific possible fate for humanity: colossal longhorn beetles rampaging through our metropolises and gobbling down our dapper business men. Grimly confirmed by an actual college professor in his cups somewhere!
The article is actually a bit less ridiculous than you’d expect, but it sure does take some bizarre turns on its way to convincing us that mankind’s future is filled with man-eating giant insects:
Dr. Andrews told of treating a Mongol brigand who had been shot in the leg with an ancient blunderbuss loaded with nails and rusty scrap iron. When Andrews saw the patient, gangrene was so bad and the maggots so thick a giant syringe, used to treat sick camels, was necessary to wash the wound.
It’s positively surreal to see DEVO - DEVO! (and, for that matter, Ray Charles) - starring in a promotional video for Pioneer’s brandnew LaserDisc system…which, for all you kids too young to remember the 1980s, were basically just CDs the size of old vinyl records. The world’s most anti-corporate band has become hucksters for a dead-end technology.
Only DEVO would do the video dressed in suits, bow-ties, and weird one-eyed, spaz-haired skullcaps. Now that’s what I call a sales video.
BE STIFF! It’s hard to believe that 1) Saturday Night Live used to be funny; and 2) DEVO was once regarded as the future of music. Here at Ectomo, we believe heartily in Devo’s theory of de-evolution! I may only speak from personal experience here, perhaps because I am the only member of the staff who lives in the wilds of southwestern Pennsylvania and routinely ingests mutagenic materials for Fun and Profit, but I have seen de-evolution in action: both in my neighbors, and in myself. My newly-grown semi-prehensile tail clearly demonstrates a step backwards–but not so much as my realization that Devo’s cover of “Satisfaction” describes visually, musically, and conceptually my entire love life.
*Le sigh* I guess I’m just a spud boy, looking for a real tomato. You’d think things would’ve de-evolved enough by now that I’d be able to find on every street corner spud girls being stiff, through being cool, to get me jerkin’ back and forth…but not, it was all just wind in sails. ARE WE NOT MEN?! Sadly, we all still are. Nothing but a bunch of damn new traditionalists bound by our duty now for the future. As a transhumanist, I know that someday…someday I’ll be a mechanical man and be above all this human BS, but until then…I’m just a blockhead.
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
