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Here, we bring you a new find: a 32-page program distributed at the film’s 1927 premier in London and recently re-discovered. In addition to underwriting almost one hundred years of science fiction film and television tropes, Metropolis has had a very long life in other ways: Inspiring an all-star sound ...
- Plot
- Cast
- Influences
- Production
- Music
- Release and Reception
- Restorations
- Copyright Status
- Adaptations
- In Popular Culture
In the future, wealthy industrialists and business magnates and their top employees reign over the city of Metropolis from colossal skyscrapers, while underground-dwelling workers toil to operate the great machines that power it. Joh Fredersen is the city's master. His son, Freder, idles away his time at sports and in a pleasure garden, but is inte...
Rudolf Klein-Rogge as Rotwang, the inventorMetropolis features a range of elaborate special effects and set designs, ranging from a huge gothic cathedral to a futuristic cityscape. In an interview, Fritz Lang reported that "the film was born from my first sight of the skyscrapers in New York in October 1924". He had visited New York City for the first time and remarked "I looked into the st...
Pre-production
Metropolis's screenplay was written by Thea von Harbou, a popular writer in Weimar Germany, jointly with Lang, her then-husband. The film's plot originated from a novel of the same title written by Harbou for the sole purpose of being made into a film. The novel in turn drew inspiration from H. G. Wells, Mary Shelley and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's works and other German dramas. The novel featured strongly in the film's marketing campaign, and was serialized in the journal Illustriertes Blattin...
Filming
Metropolis began principal photography on 22 May 1925 with an initial budget of . Lang cast two unknowns with little film experience in the lead roles. Gustav Fröhlich (Freder) had worked in vaudeville and was originally employed as an extra on Metropolis before Thea von Harbou recommended him to Lang. Brigitte Helm (Maria) had been given a screen test by Lang after he met her on the set of Die Nibelungen, but would make her feature film debut with Metropolis. In the role of Joh Fredersen, La...
Special effects
The effects expert Eugen Schüfftan created pioneering visual effects for Metropolis. Among the effects used are miniatures of the city, a camera on a swing, and most notably, the Schüfftan process, in which mirrors are used to create the illusion that actors are occupying miniature sets. This new technique was seen again just two years later in Alfred Hitchcock's film Blackmail(1929). The Maschinenmensch – the robot built by Rotwang to resurrect his lost love Hel – was created by sculptor Wal...
Original score
Gottfried Huppertz composed the film's score for a large orchestra. He drew inspiration from Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, and combined a classical orchestral style with mild modernist touches to portray the film's massive industrial city of workers. Nestled within the original score were quotations of Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle's "La Marseillaise" and the traditional "Dies Irae", the latter of which was matched to the film's apocalyptic imagery. Huppertz's music played a prominent r...
Other scores
Various artists have created other scores for Metropolis: 1. In 1975, the BBC provided an electronic score composed by William Fitzwater and Hugh Davies. 2. In 1978, Australian composer Chris Neal created an experimental score for the film. It was performed live around Sydney throughout 1979. 3. In 1984, Giorgio Moroder restored and produced the 80-minute 1984 re-release, which had a pop soundtrack written by Moroder and performed by Moroder, Pat Benatar, Bonnie Tyler, Jon Anderson, Adam Ant,...
Metropolis was distributed by Parufamet, a company formed in December 1925 by the American film studios Paramount Pictures and Metro Goldwyn Mayer to loan $4 million (US) to UFA. The film had its world premiere at the UFA-Palast am Zoo in Berlin on 10 January 1927, where the audience, including a critic from the Berliner Morgenpost, reacted to seve...
The original premiere cut of Metropolis has been lost, and for decades the film could be seen only in heavily truncated edits that lacked nearly a quarter of the original length. But over the years, various elements of footage have been rediscovered.This was the case even though cinematographer Karl Freund followed the usual practice of the time of...
The American copyright for Metropolis lapsed in 1953, which led to a proliferation of versions being released on video. Along with other foreign-made works, the film's U.S. copyright was restored in 1996 by the Uruguay Round Agreements Act; the constitutionality of this copyright extension was challenged, but was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in...
A 1989 musical theatre adaptation, Metropolis, was performed on the West End in London and in Chicago. The play's music was written by Joe Brooks and the lyrics by Dusty Hughes.In December 2007, it was announced that producer Thomas Schühly (Alexander, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen) had obtained the remake rights to Metropolis.In December 2016, it was announced that Sam Esmail would adapt the film into a television miniseries. In March 2022, Apple TV+ gave the production a series order, with Esmail writing and directing...The Metropolis manga, sometimes referred to as Osamu Tezuka's Metropolis or Robotic Angel, has parallels with the film. Mangaka Osamu Tezuka has said that he saw a single still image of the movie i...The cover of 1970s British rock band Be Bop Deluxe's 1977 album Live! In the Air Ageis a still from the film.David Bowie's 1974 Diamond Dogs Tour and Diamond Dogsalbum was inspired by the film with Amanda Lear recalling "He rented the film and ran it over and over again in his house. And that's where Diam...The German electronic group Kraftwerk's 1978 album The Man-Machinecontains the song "Metropolis".The rock band Motörhead's album Overkillcontains the song "Metropolis", which was written by Lemmy, the band's lead singer and bassist, after he saw the film in 1979. It was written to fill space o...- Fritz Lang
- Erich Pommer
- Gottfried Huppertz
- Thea von Harbou
People also ask
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Feb 10, 2022 · Originally published in Issue #5. A gleaming android stares mechanically at the viewer, its round, lidless eyes glowing with the light of some unexplained inner mechanism. A subterranean city peopled by the poor, ruled by a totalitarian state above. A wild-haired scientist bedecked in a white lab coat works feverishly at the controls of some ...
- Sam Stephens
Metropolis: themes and context Social and cultural contexts Metropolis is concerned with wider cultural and political issues, evidenced visually as well as thematically. The film’s social preoccupations have been described as a commentary on the political situation that existed in Germany at the time, but also
Starring: Alfred Abel, Gustav Fröhlich, Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Fritz Rasp, Theodor Loos, Heinrich George, Brigitte Helm. Release: 01/1927 Duration: 147'. A dystopian philosophical tale with an original esthetic and cinematography which has influenced many science-fiction films. Click here to watch the film IMDB.
Metropolis represents something of a house of cards. Its multiple contradictions stack up so as to lend one another a precarious stability. The fragile con-struction that results reflects the remarkable 'combi-nation of receptivity and confusion' that Lang's script-writer, Thea von Harbou, channelled into the story -
Metropolis contains such magnificent visuals that all else about the film recedes, allowing its all-consuming mythical status to take over.A technical masterwork of the Silent Era by Austrian director Fritz Lang, the 1927 picture’s incredible, cutting-edge special effects and futurist imagery have become immeasurably iconographic and made the picture a benchmark of influential science ...
