Metropolis

Metropolis (1927) splits a city in two: towers and gardens above, and below them the workers turning the machines. Freder, son of the man who runs the city, sees the underground and after an accident understands what happens there. A woman named Maria preaches patience to the workers. An inventor builds a machine that is her exact copy, and the false Maria incites them to revolt. Its visual language is still in use almost a century later: the design of the robot, the mass choreography in the machine hall, the enormous cityscapes. But the real story is what happened to the film. It was badly received and the studio cut it, removing around a quarter. The cut sections were lost and Metropolis circulated incomplete for decades. In the spring of 2008 two rusted cans turned up in a small cinema museum in Buenos Aires. They held a 16mm copy of the long version, taken to Argentina in 1928 and passed from hand to hand until it reached the museum's archive. Nearly all of the missing twenty five minutes was there. The Murnau Foundation spent two years restoring it and the completed film was shown in Berlin in 2010. So we watch this film today more completely than anyone did in the nineties. It is silent and long. It runs 148 minutes. Good for: film history, science fiction, and visual design. Less good for: the rhythm of silent film and the heightened acting take getting used to, and the story is simple.