Lost and found ... Friz Lang's Metropolis
The discovery of key scenes from Fritz Lang's 1927 silent sci-fi epic Metropolis is fascinating. Half-an-hour of running time, fully one-fifth of the original movie, was for decades considered hopelessly lost. Now the complete film can be viewed for the first time in 80 years - the first time, in fact, since it was premiered in Weimar Berlin, hissed at by the press, and ignominiously chopped down for foreign distribution. But will the missing 30 minutes "explain" this sprawling and operatic movie? Or just make it more baroque, more mysterious, and more mad than ever?
Lang's flawed Gothic-Futurist masterpiece is set in a 21st-century privatised city state presided over by the cruel autocrat, Joh Fredersen. While the pampered ruling class amuse themselves in nightclubs, an Untermensch race of exploited workers toil underground. To Fredersen's horror, his idealistic son Freder falls in love with the workers' beautiful, insurrectionist leader Maria; but his scientist employee Rotwang has an idea: he has invented a bizarre "gynoid" robot, which he can fashion in Maria's form to provoke cataclysmic disorder among the workers.
New scenes may make more sense of the head-spinning narrative. Fredersen has an enigmatic henchman called Der Schmale, or The Thin Man, who's paid to spy on his son. All his scenes, once cut, have now been restored, which may help us understand Fredersen's voyeuristic control-freakery, and supplement the expressionist, noir-ish menace of the film. The new scenes show more of Worker 11811, with whom Freder exchanges clothes to gain access to the underground: these revived sequences may lubricate the film's passage into the working-class depths. And there are more scenes reportedly showing fights between Fredersen and Rotwang, who is revealed to have been in love with Fredersen's late wife, Freder's mother - these scenes may shed more light on the film's deeply strange, innovative techno-sexual imagery.
Or perhaps it will all just be more fascinatingly strange and perplexing than ever. At any rate, this promises to be an unmissable, and unique "director's cut".
