CLASSIC CINEMA:The restored version delivers more than just a coherent narrative. It reveals the original narrative rhythm and flow, lost in the botched edit, writes DEREK SCALLY
SOME MIRACLES TAKE time and the Metropolis miracle, depending on how you count, took either 81 years, two decades or just 20 minutes.
In January 2008 at the Buenos Aires Film Museum, 20 heart-stopping minutes is all it took for museum director Paula Félix-Didier and film archivist Fernando Pena to confirm they had a miracle on their hands.
“We looked in the index, the archivist got the reels,” says Félix-Didier, “Fernando held one to the light and said ‘Está todo’ – it’s all there.”
“It” was the full-length version of Fritz Lang’s cinematic masterpiece Metropolis, presumed lost for eight decades. Cinema history would have to be rewritten.
Before Titanic, before Star Wars, before Ben-Huror Gone With the Wind, there was Metropolis. When it premiered in Berlin in 1927, it was the biggest, most expensive, most anticipated feature film ever made.
Even today the film dazzles with fantastic images of a futuristic city of skyscrapers and flyovers. The story, however, always left something to be desired. The tale of a millionaire father and son battling for the soul of their futuristic city got lost in an ambitious narrative of slaves revolting in an underground kingdom, a romantic love story and a remarkable robot woman. The subject material demanded working to a scale never before seen in the film industry and no expense was spared to realise Lang’s vision of the future: a cast of thousands, massive models of 70-storey skyscrapers, monorails and videophones. Filming began at the UFA film studios outside Berlin in May 1925 and finished in October 1926. With 650km of footage shot at a dizzying cost of five million Reichmarks – it is still the most expensive silent film ever made – UFA desperately needed Metropolis to be a hit. It wasn’t.
Critics attacked the film on its January 1927 release, describing it as overloaded and sentimental. Shaken, UFA left the film running in Berlin but released it nowhere else, and just 15,000 people saw the film in the next four months.
The film’s drastic cost over-runs, the botched release strategy and the wider economic turmoils of Weimar Germany drove the studio to the brink of bankruptcy and forced its sale to German media mogul Alfred Hugenberg in May 1927. He withdrew the premiere prints and cut out half an hour – similar to what Paramount did to the US version – and destroyed the excised material. This shortened version of Metropolis – known as the “torso” in cinema circles – is what went on general release in Germany and around the world.
The story, complicated enough to begin with, no longer made sense. Yet even in its reduced state, the film remained a work of genius that continues to influence how Hollywood sees the future, from Bladerunner to The Fifth Element.
“Historically the film only grew in importance decade by decade, after its perceived lack of success and subsequent cutting,” says Peter Walsh, cinema manager of the Irish Film Institute, which organised tonight’s sold-out screening of the film in the National Concert Hall, in association with the Goethe Institute. “But the film became iconic because of its visual style, envisioning the city of the future.”
That might have been the end of the story if it weren’t for the second Metropolis miracle, originating in a remark overheard by film archivist Fernando Pena in the late 1980s at a Buenos Aires film club.
“It’s bad enough I have to show such a poor quality copy of Metropolis,” complained the elderly projectionist, “but it’s getting hard at my age to stand at the projector for over two hours, to make sure the film doesn’t spring out.”
Pena knew Metropolisbegan life as a two-hour 24 minute epic. But the official release version was less than two hours, hacked back to fit in an extra daily screening in cinemas.
He tried to find out more about the print over the years but got nowhere, something he complained about regularly to fellow film archivist Paula Félix-Didier. When in 2008 she became head of the Buenos Aires Museo del Cine, which by then owned the print, they slipped into the archive, ordered the reels and, when they arrived, discovered they were sitting on a cinematic sensation. Bit by bit the full story came together. In 1927, Argentinian film distributor Adolfo Z Wilson was in Berlin and saw the premiere version of Metropolis. Impressed by what he saw, he purchased the Argentinian rights and headed home with a premiere print in his luggage.
These precious reels found their way into the collection of prominent film critic Manuel Peña Rodríguez, who loaned his films to local film clubs. On his death in 1970, the collection was donated to the state and, in 1992, it passed into the archive of the Museo del Cine.
There was one caveat to the sensational find: sometime in the 1970s, the original 35mm nitrate print had been copied, carelessly, on to 16mm film. Decades of neglect – every particle of dust, every scratch – were copied over and were now part of the print.
“We were shocked by what we saw,” admitted Horst Martin of the Murnau Foundation, custodian of more than 6,000 German films made between 1920 and 1960.
Just a few years earlier the foundation, named after Nosferatu director FW Murnau, had produced the “definitive” Metropolis by putting the best materials available at the time through a digital restoration. But it was still the “torso” version, with stills and inter-titles describing the lost scenes, a quarter of the total.
Now they had to go through the process again, this time with damaged new footage. It took a year of slow, frame-by-frame restoration, €600,000, and difficult artistic decisions.
“We have our own specially-developed software for this work, but there’s always a fine line between clean and too clean, where the historical value of the images is lost,” says Martin. “In the end, we decided on a level of restoration where you will notice the difference between the footage but not so much, we think, that it disturbs the narrative.”
In the case of a handful of scenes, around eight minutes in total, the original scenes are still missing or too damaged to be included. Even so the "new", original Metropoliswas a revelation at its second premiere during the Berlin Film Festival in February. Critics agreed that the restored version delivers more than just a coherent narrative. It reveals for the first time the original narrative rhythm and flow, lost in the botched edit. Now the film, almost complete, is part of Unesco's "Memory of the World" register, alongside other German contributions such as the Martin Luther Bible and Beethoven's ninth symphony.
One of the unexpected pleasures of the restoration – and this evening’s performance – is the chance to hear the original full-length score by Gottfried Huppertz. His score is a true delight, with melodies that float somewhere between the light Richard Strauss and the later romantic Hollywood sweep of Max Steiner and Franz Waxman. Even 83 years on, the strings yearn for the utopian future of Lang’s images, before rougher melodies expose the underground hell of nameless workers making this utopia possible.
“The music at the time would have seemed more modern and more experimental than now, but it is still very sophisticated, very good music,” says Helmut Imig, conductor of tonight’s performance, the premiere of the “salon orchestration” for 16 instead of 66 musicians. This will be an interesting test of the quality of the music, he says, “because with 16 musicians you can’t hide behind the same wall of sound as you have with 66 musicians . . . The key to playing live is to know when to throw out what you’ve rehearsed and to do what have to do to keep up.”
The original Huppertz score played a crucial role in the restoration: as the only element of the original film still intact, the orchestra cues helped restorers insert the rediscovered scenes in their correct position. As the Dublin audience will see this evening, the complete Metropolis is more than just an extraordinary science-fiction picture, but a remarkable film and, in its new, old form, an unforgettable film about film history.
Metropolis is at the NCH tonight (sold out) and from September 10 for two weeks at the IFI, Dublin 2, as part of a Fritz Lang season
