Metropolis The Film and the Book: Paul M. Jensen
Metropolis 1927.
Despite UFA's large investment of time and money, Lang's Nibelungen films proved successful enough for the studio to give the director carte blanche on his next project. Work began in March 1925, and was not concluded until October of the following year. Three hundred and ten days and sixty nights were spent exposing nearly two million feet of negative, while a total of over thirty-six thousand men, women and children were eventually used in front of the cameras. With more than one and a half million marks paid out in salaries alone, the film rapidly became UFA's most expensive picture to date. Even before filming ended, the company's resources were so exhausted that a four million dollar loan from two American studios, Famous Players and Metro-Goldwyn, was needed to avert financial disaster. By the time the production was finished, the company owed more than forty million marks to the Deutsche Bank (its main backer) and to several other concerns
Because of this, the immediate financial future of UFA depended upon Metropolis, the "costliest and most ambitious picture ever screened in Europe.”[1] The film was premièred on January 10, 1927 at the UFA Palace, in Berlin, before an enormous audience which included Cabinet officers, members of the diplomatic corps, and the city's major social, artistic, and literary figures. Critically, however, Metropolis did not meet expectations; its visual and technical qualities were praised, but the simplistic and sentimental social content was harshly condemned. Though it attracted large audiences (ten thousand people were reported waiting outside the Rialto Theatre at its American opening), the movie still could not recover its tremendous investment and save UFA.
When the practically bankrupt company was refused a state subsidy, it passed into the hands of Alfred Hugenberg, a powerful a newspaper publisher who also owned the country largest non-official news agency. Backed by the Nationalist Party, Hugenberg took complete control of UFA in April 1927, when he was able to seat nineteen members on the Executive Committee of twenty-seven. His interest in the 135 theatres and two giant studios of Germany's largest film company was supposedly strictly personal. As one-man "dictator" of films, he could determine the political character of his own productions and specify which foreign pictures would be shown in UFA houses. It appears, however, that the company's practical distress forced him to postpone spreading reactionary propaganda until its finances were stabilised.
The motion picture that caused the downfall of the "old" UFA was first conceived in 1924. With Siegfrieds Tod enjoying successful runs in London and Paris, Lang visited America to study the local movie industry. He arrived from Hamburg in October 1924, accompanied by producer Erich Pommer, Felix Kallmann (President of UFA), and Frederick Wynne-Jones (the company's American representative). During their seven-week stay they visited nearly all the studios and met with many film-makers, including Ernst Lubitsch. It is said that while looking at the New York skyline from the deck of his ship, Lang thought of setting a film in such a city far in the future. He discussed this idea with his wife, Thea von Harbou, and she wrote a novel based on it, which the two then converted into a scenario.
In the year 2000, Freder, the son of the Master of Metropolis, rebels against the way his half of the city–the idle "aristocracy”– has dehumanised the labourers. Limited to lives of hard and lengthy work, the latter live underground, below the halls where the machines are located. Potential rebellion has been prevented by Maria, who urges her companions to await the arrival of a mediator who will unite the city. Freder is that saviour, but he is hindered by his father, who orders a robot that exactly duplicates Maria to spread dissatisfaction among the workers. The plan succeeds and a mob smashes the machines, thus causing their own homes to be flooded. Thinking that they have drowned their children, the workers attack the robot and burn "her". Meanwhile, Freder and the real Maria have rescued the children. Suddenly Rotwang, a scientist who built the robot, chases the girl on to the cathedral roof. Freder follows, and in the ensuing struggle Rotwang loses his balance and falls to his death. Seeing his son's danger, Joh Fredersen relents and agrees to shake hands with a representative of the workers.
In 1928, Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou were charged with plagiarism when a certain Frau Debeke declared that she had sent Pommer and Lang a scenario containing every element in Metropolis, and that it was returned to her with the comment that it would not be used. "When Frau Debeke returned to Berlin, after a long absence, she was surprised to find the film Metropolis advertised.”[2] The amount of truth in this accusation is unknown, but whoever did originate the story was not being entirely original. No doubt R.U.R., Karel Capek's play about mechanical workers, and the Russian silent film Aelita (1924) affected the concept, and H. G. Wells found "decaying fragments of my own juvenile work of thirty years ago, The Sleeper Wakes, floating about in it." Wells's The Time Machine contains a very similar social division.
Metropolis was re-edited for its 1927 American release by Channing Pollock (a playwright), Julian Johnson, and Edward Adams; about seven reels were cut from the original seventeen. This condensed version, lacking almost half the intended footage, is still the only one available. The novel has recently been published in translation, however, so the abbreviated picture can now be compared with its original plot. This makes it clear that while Metropolis was naïve and silly to start with, the elimination of many scenes and the re-writing of some titles have excessively confused certain motivations and characters. For example, what happens to Josaphat, the secretary who is kept from suicide, or to the worker whose place Freder takes when he visits the cavern of machines? Both characters are introduced in the prints available, then abruptly disappear.
More important to the plot is the question of why Joh Fredersen, Freder's father and the Master of Metropolis, wants to have the workers lose confidence in Maria. She preaches patience and peace to the rebellious workers, and this would seem to be to Joh's advantage. But instead of acting logically, Joh sends the robot Maria to impel the workers to criminal acts, and when they revolt he orders his foreman to throw open the doors, thus allowing them to destroy the machines, flood their homes, and perhaps drown their forgotten children. A title says that he is "looking for an excuse to use violence against the workers," but since his method cripples the city's ability to function, he is also working against his own interests and those of the upper classes he represents. This problem originated in Mrs. Lang's novel, though, and was not caused later by the film's editors.
With the false Maria out on her mission, the real one is imprisoned by the scientist-mystic Rotwang. In the American version she is suddenly shown to be free, and her escape is never explained. Since Rotwang is presented as a villain, we are also bothered by seeing him speak kindly to Maria in her "cell". He even seems to offer his hand in friendship, and later, when she is free, he tells her, “If the mob sees you they will kill you for having tricked them.' This seems a well-intentioned warning, but Maria suddenly turns and flees from him ; then he, surprisingly, chases her on to the cathedral roof and fights with Freder. Such behaviour is inexplicable in the context of the titles and scenes we have been shown, but the novel reveals how re-editing eliminated Rotwang's motivation and destroyed the picture's continuity.
The key change was the removal of all mention of the woman Hel, who had died before the start of the story. Though loved by Rotwang, she had not been able to resist Joh Fredersen and had gone away with him. She died giving birth to Freder, but it was really Joh's excessively strong love and her own guilt at ruining Rotwang's life that killed her. The resulting antagonism between the two men gives Joh's dependence on Rotwang for advice and inventions an edge of irony that the film lacks.
While talking with the imprisoned Maria, Rotwang declares, "Joh Fredersen took the woman from me. He made me evil but I will defy the Will which is above you and me. I will open the door for you… If you give me your hands I will go with you into the City of the Dead, so that you can warn your brothers, so that you can unmask your stolen ego." This dialogue does not appear in present prints of Metropolis, though part of the scene is included without titles.
At this point in the novel Joh enters and attacks Rotwang, and during the struggle Maria escapes. When Rotwang regains consciousness he thinks he is dead, and so goes in search of Hel. He mistakes Maria for his love, and when she flees to the cathedral he chases after her uncomprehendingly. As the sequences leading up to this final encounter are now missing from the film, the characters' actions seem strange, to say the least. It is to Rudolf Klein-Rogge's credit that even though needed scenes have been excised and new titles added, a viewer still senses more to Rotwang's character than is actually shown; suspicions of sympathy are aroused, and are not entirely overshadowed by the mad-scientist stereotype being forced on him.
A foot race which Freder ran at the start of the film was also removed, though photos of the vast stadium still exist. Other missing scenes are those devoted to Yoshiwara, a shell-shaped auditorium where a crowd shares a common narcotic delusion in which one of them becomes "the embodied conception of the intoxication of them all Each of the thousands of others in ecstasy lives the thousandfold ecstasy which embodies itself in him." It is here that the freed worker ends up, and where he goes mad at the new sensation.
Randolph Bartlett, writing in The New York Times, tried to defend this technique of re-editing. The Germans, he said, have either a "lack of interest in dramatic verity or an astonishing ineptitude. Motives were absent or were extremely naive,' and so the importers decided to improve the narrative technique. The case of Freder's mother, however, presented another problem. According to Bartlett, one shot showed :
a very beautiful statue of a woman's head, and on the base was her name--and that name was "Hel". Now, the German word for "hell" is "hoelle" so they were quiet [sic] innocent of the fact that this name would create a guffaw in an English speaking country. So it was necessary to cut this beautiful bit out of the picture, and a certain motive which it represented had to be replaced by another.[3]
So, haunted by fears of Hel, the editors snipped out all references to this major plot thread. Unfortunately, they failed to provide the promised replacement and simply left actions unexplained. The editors were trying "to bring out the real thought that was manifestly back of the production, and which the Germans had simply 'muffed'," said Bartlett. "I am willing to wager that Metropolis, as it is seen at the Rialto now, is nearer Fritz Lang's idea than the version he himself released in Germany When we add to this the fact that American audiences require fare far different from that of the European, we multiply the necessity for adaptation." On the other hand, after seeing what he calls the "mutilated surrogate" of his film, Lang supposedly vowed never to direct in the United States.
Though both film and book are philosophically muddled, it is still possible to isolate certain themes. For example, the duality of human nature that fascinates Lang is here in abundance. The split in each individual between the mental and the physical has evolved, by the year 2000, into a social division. One group of people retains only the brain, while another uses only muscle. These extremes are geographically and pictorially contrasted, with the underground workers marching slowly in tight formation while the rulers cavort freely in pleasure gardens on the surface. Yet the two types are also "brothers". and complementary parts of a single organism.
Another dichotomy is that of a female's dual natures, schematically divided into the characters played by Brigitte Helm. The real Maria embodies purity and virginity, while her mechanical double is an evil, seductive harlot; at the same time, these two also contrast humanity with its opposite, the machine. This reflects the division between the free rulers and the machine-like workers they control. Eventually, the suppressed humanity of the latter group breaks free of its regular formations, and a mob results which destroys ordered patterns and instead acts according to emotional impulse.
When Freder becomes a mediator, he begins to function as a typical Lang hero: he is an outsider separate from and caught between the two halves of his society. Lang represents this quite literally by having the character descend into the area of the machines, which is situated above the workers' homes and below the surface city. Now on his own, Freder is involved in a seemingly impossible struggle; he is opposed on all sides by both good and evil, friend and foe. His father tries to limit his investigations, the workers resentfully turn on him when they find out who he is, the secretary whose life he saved betrays him (in the novel), and even Maria seems for a time to have deserted him. With no one to trust, he works alone against both groups in order to synthesise them.
According to Maria the heart must mediate between the hand and the mind, so Freder represents the heart (hence, also the emotions) and his humanity avoids the taint of mechanisation. This may explain, though never justify, the curious acting of Gustav Fröhlich in the role. Freder is all impulse, and the tendency to incline his head forward and charge blindly from place to place is a misguided attempt to illustrate this characteristic.
Besides advocating emotions as a solution to the lack of communication between leaders and labor, Fritz Lang also supports this approach because it allows humanity to triumph over machines. This simplification of a highly complex problem is difficult to take seriously, and therefore one of the film's major flaws. It can only be attributed to the director's romantic-expressionistic faith in victory through love (as seen in the ending of Der müde Tod). Yet Lang contradicts himself, for while favouring the emotions he also sees them as impulsively producing the weaknesses and violence which cause a character's destruction (as in the case of the murderer in M and the lynch mob in Fury.) Thus a person who is calm and pleasant on the surface may contain within him unknown depths of violence, and a man may one day find these forces fighting to take command. When primitive emotions control many people at the same time, the result is a mob. In such a case, a whole city or society may be said to suffer a revolt from beneath its surface, as witness many of the race riots in America. In Metropolis, this is made literal by placing the city of the rebelling workers deep within the earth. The implacable flood they cause is a striking visual parallel to the escape of these pent-up emotions, and here Lang's classical attitude toward the passions unwittingly conflicts with his romanticism and makes the blind blundering of Freder seem a false ideal. indeed.
Lang often creates a master-opponent such as Dr. Mabuse to embody all the forces against a hero, and Joh Fredersen is assigned that function here. From his tower office, above the city and distant from others, he controls his world with the "infallible certainty of a healthy machine." He lives by his own laws and imposes his will on all. However, it is never made clear what prompts such an omnipotent force to create a revolt among the workers. If there is a reason, it is not supplied in the work itself; if it is an arbitrary action, Fredersen does not deserve the position and respect he is accorded. His authority is also weakened by his dependence on Rotwang for aid.
Metropolis contains an abundance of direct, unsubtle religious references. Freder, the only son of Joh (Jehovah), is destined to redeem the common people and unite the divided world. Maria (Mary) combines the function of prophet, predicting the arrival of the messiah-mediator, with elements of both the Virgin Mary (who "creates" him) and the prostitute one. Freder refers to everyone else as his brother, and (in the novel) addresses a statue of the Virgin as "Mother" Labouring with extended arms at the clock-machine, he prays to his Father for deliverance; he has taken upon himself the weight of suffering imposed on the workers, as well as the guilt of the rulers who impose it.
The Joh-Jehovah parallel notwithstanding, the closest Lang has come to presenting a God is in the figure of Death in Der müde Tod. That character of course is not defeated at the end, but Lang's more secular menaces such as the criminal organisation heads can usually be overcome. Joh Fredersen is a combination of both types of antagonist, though instead of merging into a single complex figure they tend to alternate from scene to scene.
The defeat of an Unconquerable Menace is a convention of melodrama, meant to offer the viewer a limited feeling of security. The question is, how acceptable within its own framework is the conclusion of each particular plot? The ending of Metropolis is not prepared for and so fails to satisfy. It is one thing to destroy a threat, and quite another for that threat to see the light and to reform. Jo's "conversion" from his earlier views completely disregards the suggestions of infallibility already established. On the other hand, Siegfried Kracauer's conclusion that "the industrialist acknowledges the heart for the purpose of manipulating it" is a delusion, for the novel assures us (though it is hard to accept) that Fredersen's heart really is "utterly redeemed."
The formalised actions of the workers are far more successful than the rulers' now comic decadence, which includes an extraneous, seductive dance by the female robot. Young Brigitte Helm, in her first screen appearance, is impressive as both the mechanical vamp and the heroine with the innocent Gish-Pickford look, while Gustav Fröhlich fails as the effusive Freder. In contrast, Alfred Abel keeps a tight rein on Joh Fredersen's restraint and dignity, even in his final moments of kneeling remorse. In fact, the viewer sympathises more with the rational father than with the simple-minded overly-emotional son. Commanding the appeal of Shaw's industrialist in Major Barbara, he is a kind of ultimate Undershaft.
Lang's hero struggles against his entire environment, including everything human (a mob, Fredersen) and inanimate (the flood, a series of opening and closing doors that lures him through several rooms in Rotwang's house). Everything is a threat, even a seemingly innocent object. This feeling is best communicated during Maria's panic-stricken flight through the underground tunnels, as she struggles to free herself from the beam of light that thrusts her forward. This exciting and skilful sequence uses the moving camera, and light and darkness, to create an implacable Unknown from which there is no escape. This is the atmosphere of Lang's world, with an intangible threat existing nowhere but felt everywhere.
Despite such occasional atmospheric success, Metropolis is simply a compendium of Lang's themes with none sufficiently dramatised to make it meaningful. There is mob violence, seduction, insanity, duality of good and evil, the innocent hero, the threatening environment, the master-mind, opposing social forces, the virtues of love, and even an attempt at science-mysticism-religion But it is not for any of these that the film will be remembered.
Aside from the atmosphere mentioned above, the chief merit of Metropolis is its visual style. Most individual shots are carefully composed, with the emphasis on a balanced arrangement of objects within the frame. The organisation of shapes is formalised, but seldom as static as the picture's detractors claim. Many scenes require movement for their effects, such as when the edge of the flood approaches the fleeing children; in another case, only a few workers at the Tower of Babel are standing in the foreground until a shift in position reveals thousands in the distance.
The settings, particularly the workers' homes, are stylised into mere forms with black rectangles for windows. A number of these were models, which were combined with live actors through the Schüfftan process. Invented by photographer Eugene Schüfftan, it used a camera with two lenses which focused two separate images onto a single strip of film; this allowed actors and models to be recorded together without resorting to double exposure or laboratory work. The designs are expressionistic; but the architect in Lang rebelled against the surface distortion and linear anarchy of Caligari's use of the style. Instead, his settings are solid and substantial, extending in more than two dimensions. Their design is regular, controlled and organised, dwelling on simplicity rather than clutter.
The moving camera is used sparingly, with the aim of heightening emotional empathy in certain scenes of excitement. A swinging camera, similar in effect to today's zoom lens, is used when Freder is stunned by the first explosion, later when he faints at seeing Maria with his father, and finally when he collapses on a stairway during the final holocaust. The major tracking shot occurs when we follow Maria through the catacombs, as Rotwang forces her on with his flashlight.
A painter's eye for composition and staging is again revealed in Lang's direction. Any selection of the best examples tends to be determined by memory and subjective inclination, but particularly effective are the bearing of injured workers in silhouette past Freder, the shots of children running along the street with the water's edge flowing a few seconds behind them, and the tent of electricity surrounding the robot during the creation scene. Only in Die Nibelungen, and to a lesser extent in Der müde Tod, did Lang allow his painter's eye and architect's pen to create as much excitement; in his other films he adapted himself to varying degrees of realism. But the romantic legends of Siegfrieds Tod and Kriemhilds Rache perfectly blend with a classical form, while Metropolis is unwisely treated as though it too were another romantic legend. Actually, the basic conceptions of the city and of the themes are intellectual, and so conflict with the childish sentimentality of the plotting, motivations, and feelings. The content of Metropolis fails to live up to its visual treatment, but the film is still a treat to the eye.
Notes
1 Metropolis Film Seen', The New York Times (March 6, 1927).
2 Claims Metropolis Play', The New York Times (December 23, 1928).
3 Bartlett, Randolph. 'German Film Revision Upheld as Needed Here', The New York Times (March 13, 1927).