The MoFo Movie Club Discussion: Metropolis
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Good movie
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I don't agree that the entire last 40 minutes is monotonous, but I do think the resolution was a little bland.
Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)
Visionary production design. I think the ending whitewashes a few too many differences, but I watched the 3-hour version and it moves along very smoothly and is fully deserving of its status as a classic.
Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)
Visionary production design. I think the ending whitewashes a few too many differences, but I watched the 3-hour version and it moves along very smoothly and is fully deserving of its status as a classic.
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I can't believe this forum has so many intelligent movie fans on it. I'm actually shocked. Metropolis and Lang himself set the bar (along with Surrealists from this time like Dali) for the macabre and dark futuristic elements that have become pretty common in film today. It was a mass hysteria of the early 1900's that somehow communism and Marxism were going to overwhelm the world. Anyone who has ever read 1984 knows what I am talking about.
I love the themes of the movie, and each decade seems to have an example of this type of sci-fi whether it be Blade Runner or The Matrix. Of which, I have to say, that the first time I saw Metropolis I thought Blade Runner was pretty much a directly relevant movie. Even movies like Children of Men, The Road, Book of Eli, etc...all try to make us as humans imagine what life is like when either we fail our world or our world ceases to be a suitable environment for us. Even a movie like The Time Machine (the new one with Guy Pearce) gives us that "future is bleak" theme.
Oh, and whoever said Dark City, kudos. That movie is awesome and fits right in this wheelhouse.
I love the themes of the movie, and each decade seems to have an example of this type of sci-fi whether it be Blade Runner or The Matrix. Of which, I have to say, that the first time I saw Metropolis I thought Blade Runner was pretty much a directly relevant movie. Even movies like Children of Men, The Road, Book of Eli, etc...all try to make us as humans imagine what life is like when either we fail our world or our world ceases to be a suitable environment for us. Even a movie like The Time Machine (the new one with Guy Pearce) gives us that "future is bleak" theme.
Oh, and whoever said Dark City, kudos. That movie is awesome and fits right in this wheelhouse.
Bump. Please save the Movie Club.
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You ain't going to save it by bumping long dormant discussions.
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The ARCHITECT uses a (Freemason) compass, the girl closes ONE eye (each eye has a different meaning and it is no coincidence in Blade Runner the characters'eyes are bright, an eye reflects the city and we see the OWL's glowing eyes.... it turns its head like a real all knowing Watcher). You remember Booboo the owl in original Clash of Titans? It helped Perseus catching the all-knowing EYE kept by the blind witches. And in the land of blind ones the one-eye is king.
The beast machine is a bull MOLOCH entity, the workers are submessive and working 10 hours underground level (meaning sometimes they have to work during night shift but for them is all the same because they are underground) while the elite dwells at the TOP of the BABEL TOWER which is also the topic in Blade Runner and the creator of the Corporation. PENTAGRAMS and Pythagorean geometry only the ones in the knowing use.
Ridley Scott used big "miniatures" to build his pyramid in Blade Runner , a mimicry of what Fritz Lang did with Metropolis but at that time Fritz invented things. The cars and planes of his Metropolis had to be moved inch by inch and shooting frame by frame. Two minutes of the film took him 6 days to film and when it was ready someone at the lab screwed it all because he ignored the film was shot out of focus to give a sense of distance. So, calmly had to reshoot all over again.
The beast machine is a bull MOLOCH entity, the workers are submessive and working 10 hours underground level (meaning sometimes they have to work during night shift but for them is all the same because they are underground) while the elite dwells at the TOP of the BABEL TOWER which is also the topic in Blade Runner and the creator of the Corporation. PENTAGRAMS and Pythagorean geometry only the ones in the knowing use.
Ridley Scott used big "miniatures" to build his pyramid in Blade Runner , a mimicry of what Fritz Lang did with Metropolis but at that time Fritz invented things. The cars and planes of his Metropolis had to be moved inch by inch and shooting frame by frame. Two minutes of the film took him 6 days to film and when it was ready someone at the lab screwed it all because he ignored the film was shot out of focus to give a sense of distance. So, calmly had to reshoot all over again.
Last edited by all knowing; 10-14-13 at 12:31 PM.
Metropolis special FXs (by its director Fritz Lang):
FRITZ LANG: Do you know that there is a shot of my hands in each of my films? Ah, here is Brigitte Helm in Metropolis. God, she’s beautiful! You know, Metropolis was born from my first sight of the New York skyscrapers in October 1924, before I went to Hollywood where UFA was sending me to study American methods of production. It was terribly hot at that time. While visiting New York I felt it was the crucible of the multiple and confused human forces, with blind men scrambling around in the irresistible desire to exploit one another, thus living in perpetual anxiety. I spent an entire day walking the streets. The buildings seemed to be a vertical veil, very light and scintillating, a luxurious backdrop suspended from the gray sky to dazzle, distract and hypnotize. At night the city gave only the impression of living; it lived as illusions do. I knew that I must make a film of all these impressions. On returning to Berlin, in a burst of energy, Thea von Harbou (Lang’s wife) started to write the script. We imagined, she and I, an idle class living in a great city thanks to the subterranean work of thousands of men on the verge of rebellion, led by a daughter of the people. To prevent this rebellion the head of the city asks a scientist to invent a robot in the image of the girl in question. So the robot, Maria, turns against her people and incites the workers to destroy the machine that is the heart of the city, which controls it and gives it life. I have often said that I did not like Metropolis and this is because I can’t accept today the leitmotif of the message of the film. It is absurd to say that the heart is the intermediary between the hands and the brain, that is, of course, between the employee and the employer. The problem is social and not moral. Naturally, during the shooting of the film, I liked it, if I hadn’t I couldn’t have continued to work on it. But later I started to understand what didn’t work. I thought, for example, that one of the faults was the way I had shown the work of the man and the machine together. You remember the clocks and the man who works in harmony with them? He became, so to speak, a part of the machine. Well, that seemed to be too symbolic, too simplistic in its evocation of what is called “the evils of mechanization.” Now, several years ago, I had to revise my judgment again at the sight of our astronauts in their promenade around the world. They were scientists but still prisoners of the space capsule, nothing else—almost a part of the machine that was carrying them.
FRITZ LANG: See, here’s a shot by Shufftan, it’s Eugene Shufftan who did it. You asked me, Willy, what technical problems we encountered. Well, that scene we shot thanks to mirrors. Shufftan scratched the glass on certain parts of the mirror; then he placed it facing the camera lens so that part of the set–constructed to human scale–appeared in the mirror, which also reflected a miniature set representing the machines in motion. These miniatures extended the real set, because it would have been too costly and too complicated to build for such a short scene. This combination of reality and artifice was then filmed (instead of being done in the lab like it would be now), and that was due to the ingenuity of Shufftan.
FRITZ LANG: We constructed a miniature set of the streets about seven or eight feet long, in an old studio with glass walls and we moved the little cars by hand, inch by inch, one frame per movement, filming image by image. We moved the planes and photographed them in the same way. This scene that takes only one or two minutes on the screen took six days to shoot! Ultimately the worse difficulties we encountered were not in the shooting but in the lab. The cameraman had told the technician to develop the film normally. But the head of the lab, knowing the time we had spent filming this short scene, decided to develop it himself. No one had thought it necessary to tell him that for reasons of perspective, the cameraman had filmed the background a little out of focus to give the impression of great distance. The head of the laboratory started to develop the negative focusing the background and not the foreground. The scale of dimensions was then destroyed. I tried to keep my calm. “These things happen, my children,” I said, “Let’s start again.” And we did. (The first thing I discovered about making films is that you never make them alone. Your crew helps you. And I had a remarkable crew.) As for the videophone scene, it was done by projecting a part of the film shot previously in the rear of a telephone apparatus, across a translucent screen, one foot by two. This was the first rear projection and the first transparency. We didn’t realize the importance, the scope of what we had done, for if we had we would have made a fortune patenting a process universally employed today. At the time we only knew that there was a problem that had to be solved. My cameraman, Gunther Rittau, was determined not to fake the shooting; he used his intelligence to arrive at this solution: he synchronized the camera with a projector that was to project the picture of a man on the videophone. That was done with linked rods connected by mobile joints going from the camera to the projector, which were, because of the shooting stage, rather far from each other. Then, when the scene started, the two machines worked at the same time in perfect synchronization. The flooding of the workers city was real, shot in normal scale. Hoses at street level projected water like geysers.
The robot, galvanized by Rotwang's scientific machinery.
Another camera effect concentrated on creating the robot Maria. The concentric rings of light that surround her and move from top to bottom were in fact a little ball of silver rapidly turning in a circle and filmed on a background of black velvet. We superimposed those shots, in the lab, over the shot of the robot in a sitting position that we had filmed previously.
The city lit up at night was done with an animated drawing. The way we filmed the explosion of the heart machine was one of the first uses of the subjective camera, giving the audience the same impression that the actors feel of the shock. The camera was attached to a swinging pulley on a vertical board that advanced toward the machine on the platform then moved back to give the effect of the explosion.
Speaking of camera effects, there are some that can only be done thanks to make-up. For example, in The Testament of Doctor Mabuse, when Doctor Baum meets the ghost of Mabuse at night, he sees on its head the living brain he had dissected that very morning, in order to discover what anomaly had made Mabuse a great criminal. This is how it was done: we had a special skull on which we put glass tubes outlining the form of the brain. The tubes were filled with mercury so the liquid moved whenever Mabuse did. Between the glass tubes the make-up man put bits of white hair, like Mabuse had in real life, which gave the public the impression of seeing his brain through the skin. To enhance the horrible aspect of the spectre, a bit of eggshell was placed over each eye and the cornea was painted in a deformed way. "
FRITZ LANG: Do you know that there is a shot of my hands in each of my films? Ah, here is Brigitte Helm in Metropolis. God, she’s beautiful! You know, Metropolis was born from my first sight of the New York skyscrapers in October 1924, before I went to Hollywood where UFA was sending me to study American methods of production. It was terribly hot at that time. While visiting New York I felt it was the crucible of the multiple and confused human forces, with blind men scrambling around in the irresistible desire to exploit one another, thus living in perpetual anxiety. I spent an entire day walking the streets. The buildings seemed to be a vertical veil, very light and scintillating, a luxurious backdrop suspended from the gray sky to dazzle, distract and hypnotize. At night the city gave only the impression of living; it lived as illusions do. I knew that I must make a film of all these impressions. On returning to Berlin, in a burst of energy, Thea von Harbou (Lang’s wife) started to write the script. We imagined, she and I, an idle class living in a great city thanks to the subterranean work of thousands of men on the verge of rebellion, led by a daughter of the people. To prevent this rebellion the head of the city asks a scientist to invent a robot in the image of the girl in question. So the robot, Maria, turns against her people and incites the workers to destroy the machine that is the heart of the city, which controls it and gives it life. I have often said that I did not like Metropolis and this is because I can’t accept today the leitmotif of the message of the film. It is absurd to say that the heart is the intermediary between the hands and the brain, that is, of course, between the employee and the employer. The problem is social and not moral. Naturally, during the shooting of the film, I liked it, if I hadn’t I couldn’t have continued to work on it. But later I started to understand what didn’t work. I thought, for example, that one of the faults was the way I had shown the work of the man and the machine together. You remember the clocks and the man who works in harmony with them? He became, so to speak, a part of the machine. Well, that seemed to be too symbolic, too simplistic in its evocation of what is called “the evils of mechanization.” Now, several years ago, I had to revise my judgment again at the sight of our astronauts in their promenade around the world. They were scientists but still prisoners of the space capsule, nothing else—almost a part of the machine that was carrying them.
FRITZ LANG: See, here’s a shot by Shufftan, it’s Eugene Shufftan who did it. You asked me, Willy, what technical problems we encountered. Well, that scene we shot thanks to mirrors. Shufftan scratched the glass on certain parts of the mirror; then he placed it facing the camera lens so that part of the set–constructed to human scale–appeared in the mirror, which also reflected a miniature set representing the machines in motion. These miniatures extended the real set, because it would have been too costly and too complicated to build for such a short scene. This combination of reality and artifice was then filmed (instead of being done in the lab like it would be now), and that was due to the ingenuity of Shufftan.
FRITZ LANG: We constructed a miniature set of the streets about seven or eight feet long, in an old studio with glass walls and we moved the little cars by hand, inch by inch, one frame per movement, filming image by image. We moved the planes and photographed them in the same way. This scene that takes only one or two minutes on the screen took six days to shoot! Ultimately the worse difficulties we encountered were not in the shooting but in the lab. The cameraman had told the technician to develop the film normally. But the head of the lab, knowing the time we had spent filming this short scene, decided to develop it himself. No one had thought it necessary to tell him that for reasons of perspective, the cameraman had filmed the background a little out of focus to give the impression of great distance. The head of the laboratory started to develop the negative focusing the background and not the foreground. The scale of dimensions was then destroyed. I tried to keep my calm. “These things happen, my children,” I said, “Let’s start again.” And we did. (The first thing I discovered about making films is that you never make them alone. Your crew helps you. And I had a remarkable crew.) As for the videophone scene, it was done by projecting a part of the film shot previously in the rear of a telephone apparatus, across a translucent screen, one foot by two. This was the first rear projection and the first transparency. We didn’t realize the importance, the scope of what we had done, for if we had we would have made a fortune patenting a process universally employed today. At the time we only knew that there was a problem that had to be solved. My cameraman, Gunther Rittau, was determined not to fake the shooting; he used his intelligence to arrive at this solution: he synchronized the camera with a projector that was to project the picture of a man on the videophone. That was done with linked rods connected by mobile joints going from the camera to the projector, which were, because of the shooting stage, rather far from each other. Then, when the scene started, the two machines worked at the same time in perfect synchronization. The flooding of the workers city was real, shot in normal scale. Hoses at street level projected water like geysers.
The robot, galvanized by Rotwang's scientific machinery.
Another camera effect concentrated on creating the robot Maria. The concentric rings of light that surround her and move from top to bottom were in fact a little ball of silver rapidly turning in a circle and filmed on a background of black velvet. We superimposed those shots, in the lab, over the shot of the robot in a sitting position that we had filmed previously.
The city lit up at night was done with an animated drawing. The way we filmed the explosion of the heart machine was one of the first uses of the subjective camera, giving the audience the same impression that the actors feel of the shock. The camera was attached to a swinging pulley on a vertical board that advanced toward the machine on the platform then moved back to give the effect of the explosion.
Speaking of camera effects, there are some that can only be done thanks to make-up. For example, in The Testament of Doctor Mabuse, when Doctor Baum meets the ghost of Mabuse at night, he sees on its head the living brain he had dissected that very morning, in order to discover what anomaly had made Mabuse a great criminal. This is how it was done: we had a special skull on which we put glass tubes outlining the form of the brain. The tubes were filled with mercury so the liquid moved whenever Mabuse did. Between the glass tubes the make-up man put bits of white hair, like Mabuse had in real life, which gave the public the impression of seeing his brain through the skin. To enhance the horrible aspect of the spectre, a bit of eggshell was placed over each eye and the cornea was painted in a deformed way. "
This scene always reminds me of this book cover.
Anyway, I think I've only seen Metropolis twice, and the last time was at least 10 years ago, I must re-watch and review it sometime.
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The ARCHITECT uses a (Freemason) compass, the girl closes ONE eye (each eye has a different meaning and it is no coincidence in Blade Runner the characters'eyes are bright, an eye reflects the city and we see the OWL's glowing eyes.... it turns its head like a real all knowing Watcher). You remember Booboo the owl in original Clash of Titans? It helped Perseus catching the all-knowing EYE kept by the blind witches. And in the land of blind ones the one-eye is king.
The beast machine is a bull MOLOCH entity, the workers are submessive and working 10 hours underground level (meaning sometimes they have to work during night shift but for them is all the same because they are underground) while the elite dwells at the TOP of the BABEL TOWER which is also the topic in Blade Runner and the creator of the Corporation. PENTAGRAMS and Pythagorean geometry only the ones in the knowing use.
Ridley Scott used big "miniatures" to build his pyramid in Blade Runner , a mimicry of what Fritz Lang did with Metropolis but at that time Fritz invented things. The cars and planes of his Metropolis had to be moved inch by inch and shooting frame by frame. Two minutes of the film took him 6 days to film and when it was ready someone at the lab screwed it all because he ignored the film was shot out of focus to give a sense of distance. So, calmly had to reshoot all over again.
The beast machine is a bull MOLOCH entity, the workers are submessive and working 10 hours underground level (meaning sometimes they have to work during night shift but for them is all the same because they are underground) while the elite dwells at the TOP of the BABEL TOWER which is also the topic in Blade Runner and the creator of the Corporation. PENTAGRAMS and Pythagorean geometry only the ones in the knowing use.
Ridley Scott used big "miniatures" to build his pyramid in Blade Runner , a mimicry of what Fritz Lang did with Metropolis but at that time Fritz invented things. The cars and planes of his Metropolis had to be moved inch by inch and shooting frame by frame. Two minutes of the film took him 6 days to film and when it was ready someone at the lab screwed it all because he ignored the film was shot out of focus to give a sense of distance. So, calmly had to reshoot all over again.