Metropolis: The City That Divided the Future

I was forty-three years old when they ran the first print through my booth.

I had been projecting since 1916 — through the war years, through the silents, through the beautiful flickering chaos of an industry that was still making up the rules as it went. I had seen ambition on screen before. I had seen spectacle. But nothing quite prepared me for what Ufa sent over in the winter of 1927, wound onto reels that seemed to carry more weight than any film had a right to.

My child sat with me that night, as they sometimes did, cross-legged on the floor beside the projector housing, chin resting on folded arms. Neither of us said a word for two and a half hours. When it ended, the silence in the booth lasted another minute before either of us moved.

That was Metropolis. That is still Metropolis.

The Dream That Cost a Million Marks

Fritz Lang did not make modest pictures. But Metropolis — shot across 1925 and 1926 at the Ufa studios in Babelsberg — was something different even by his own standards. It was the most expensive film ever produced in Germany, and almost certainly the most expensive silent film made anywhere in the world.

The numbers still stagger: thirty-seven thousand extras, hundreds of sets, a miniature city built to its own engineering logic. The machines in the workers' underground were real machines, built specifically to be filmed. The men who operated them for the cameras were worked until they could barely stand.

Lang had been to New York the year before. He had stood on the deck of a ship and watched the Manhattan skyline rise from the water like a fever dream, and the image never left him. What he built on those Babelsberg soundstages was not New York — it was something darker, something that sat behind New York's eyes and didn't blink. Metropolis the city: a tiered world where the wealthy live in towers above the clouds while the workers live underground, tending machines they do not understand, dying in shifts so the city above can keep its lights on.

The production nearly destroyed the studio. It ran over schedule, over budget, and over every expectation Ufa's executives had placed on it. The industry murmured that Lang had gone too far.

They were wrong. But they were also, in a way, right.

The Head and the Hand and the Heart

The story Lang and his then-wife Thea von Harbou wrote is one of the oldest stories there is: the son of privilege who descends into the world of the dispossessed and comes back changed.

Freder Fredersen, son of the master of Metropolis, follows a woman named Maria into the underground and sees how the workers live. Maria preaches patience and a philosophy built around a single line that the film wears as its conscience: The mediator between the head and the hand must be the heart.

It is a conservative resolution to a radical problem, and that tension runs through everything.

Joh Fredersen — cold, calculating, the man who runs the city from his high tower — responds to unrest by commissioning the scientist Rotwang to give his robot Maria's face. Rotwang is one of cinema's great figures: a man who has lost a hand to his own invention and replaced it with a mechanical one, who lives in a medieval house wedged improbably between skyscrapers, still in love with a woman who chose Fredersen over him decades before. His robot, given Maria's face, descends into the underground and incites the workers to destroy the machines. The flood that follows nearly drowns every child in the workers' city.

The resolution is a handshake. It satisfied almost no one.

The False Maria

Brigitte Helm played both Marias — the saint and the machine — and her performance as the false Maria is among the greatest things the silent screen produced. The robot body, designed by Walter Schulze-Mittendorff, was built from a plastic wood material and painted silver. It took over an hour to fit onto Helm each day. She could barely move in it.

What Schulze-Mittendorff created became the template for the machine-woman in every decade that followed. The replicants of Blade Runner owe a debt. The hosts of Westworld, the androids and the cylons and every artificial consciousness since — all trace a line back to that studio in Babelsberg.

Lang understood something the film never quite articulates: the terror of the false Maria is not that she is a machine pretending to be human. It is that she is better at being human than the humans are. More beautiful, more charismatic, more compelling. She drives men to murder each other with a glance. The real Maria, saintly and sincere, can barely compete.

It is the anxiety of every age that has created an image of itself and then feared it.

Why It Divided Everyone Who Saw It

The film opened in Berlin in January 1927 and was not an unqualified success. The critics were uncertain. H.G. Wells, whose scientific romances had helped invent the genre, reviewed it publicly and was withering. He called it the most foolish film he had ever seen. His complaint was the one that still dogs the picture: that its politics are incoherent, that a story of class oppression cannot be resolved by a handshake, that the system Freder brokers peace within is the same system that ground those workers to death.

Wells wanted rigour. Lang and von Harbou gave him poetry.

Both responses are correct. That is what makes the film endure.

It is a film that thinks in images rather than arguments, and its images are more powerful than any argument it could have made. The workers moving in lockstep shifts, like a machine made of men. The great gong of the clock that marks their hours. The machine that must be fed with human bodies, and the figure of the overseer watching from above. These images do not resolve into a political position — they simply burn themselves into the viewer and refuse to leave. I have projected tens of thousands of films. I still see the Metropolis workers when I close my eyes.

The visual grammar belongs to the same tradition as German Expressionism — the same shadows, the same architectural dread, the same instinct that power is most frightening when it is most orderly.

What We Almost Lost

Ufa re-cut the film almost immediately after release. The American distributor cut it further — removing nearly a third of the original running time, eliminating whole subplots. For most of the twentieth century, what audiences knew as Metropolis was a truncated version of itself, a film with visible gaps and characters who referenced scenes that no longer existed.

Then in 2008 a near-complete print was found in the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires — a 16mm reduction negative, sent to South America in the 1920s and simply never returned. It was badly deteriorated. Some of the recovered footage was almost unwatchable, streaked with damage that no restoration could fully repair. But it was there. The footage that came back from Buenos Aires filled the largest gaps. Metropolis was, for the first time since 1927, something close to what Lang intended.

I think about those reels sitting in Buenos Aires for eighty years. I think about what else we have lost, what other films are gone because a projector ran too hot or a storage room flooded. The history of cinema is also the history of its disappearances — a history I have explored elsewhere in full when writing about the lost world of nitrate film.

What the City Left Behind

The films that divide people are usually the ones that matter. The films that please everyone, that resolve cleanly, that send audiences home satisfied — those are entertainments, and there is nothing wrong with them. But the films that generate argument, that are called brilliant and foolish in the same breath, that refuse to sit still — those do something to the culture that lasts longer than any review.

Metropolis was attacked for being too expensive, too long, too politically naive, too visually overwhelming. It was cut apart by distributors who thought they knew better. It was nearly lost entirely. It came back from the dead, literally, on reels found in the southern hemisphere eighty years after it was made.

And it is still here. Every science fiction film made after 1927 carries some piece of it. Every tiered dystopia, every robot with a human face, every story of a man from the upper world who descends and sees how the other half lives — all of it begins somewhere in Babelsberg, with Fritz Lang pointing a camera at a city he built from wood and paint and obsession.

I ran that print the last time sometime in the 1950s, in a small theatre that no longer exists, for an audience of perhaps thirty people who sat very quietly through the whole thing.

The city is still there when I close my eyes. It always will be.

— The Projectionist