Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)

Metropolis, 1927 [2001 Restored Version]

Metropolis is a German expressionist film directed by Fritz Lang. Produced in Germany during a stable period of the Weimar Republic, Metropolis is set in a futuristic urban dystopia and makes use of this context to explore the social crisis between workers and owners in capitalism. The film was produced in the Babelsberg Studios by Universum Film A.G. (UFA). The most expensive silent film ever made, it cost approximately 5 million Reichsmark. About $200 million in todays money.

Metropolis was cut substantially after its German premiere, and much footage was lost over the passage of successive decades. There have been several efforts to restore it, as well as discoveries of previously lost footage.

In 2001, a new 75th anniversary restoration, commissioned by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung, was screened at the Berlin International Film Festival. This version, with a running time of 124 minutes, restored the original story line using stills and intertitles to bridge missing footage. It also added a soundtrack using the orchestral score originally composed by Gottfried Huppertz to go with the film. This restoration received the National Society of Film Critics Heritage Award for Restoration 2002. In June 2008, a copy of the original film was discovered in an archive of the Museum of Cinema in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Twenty to twenty-five minutes of lost footage could be added to the 2001 reconstruction, filling most of the gaps. This was a 16-mm copy made of a 35-mm print owned by a private collector, who obtained it from the distributor who brought the original cut to the country in 1927.