On Metropolis

I received this text from a friend back home about a week ago: “The Complete Metropolis is playing at a theater by my apartment. Should I see it?” My response: “Yes! It’s a big deal which cannot fully be explained via text message.”

I have always considered Metropolis Fritz Lang’s flawed masterpiece. It boasts a big game about ideology, the workers versus the city folk, yet it seems confused about what it is saying: its blatantly anti-communist and anti-fascist, and seems none too keen on capitalism either. What the heck does “the mediator between head and hands must be the heart” even mean? So in that respect, Metropolis for me is eye candy, mind-blowingly beautiful eye candy.

The story of how the footage was lost is infamous. Metropolis was Ufa Studio’s most expensive film to date and Lang went wildly over budget. At the film premiere when the full version was shown it was received disastrously. Thus it was shortened and cut to pieces, and the original version was thought to have been lost…until a few years ago when a print was found in the depths of an archive in Argentina. This is the stuff of legends.

I just finished taking a class all about Lang, so let’s just say me and Fritz know each other pretty well. In interviews Lang often refers to the shortened version as his version of the film. What a remarkable revelation: was Lang even happy with this elongated version, now toted as one of the biggest archival finds in history? This revelation suddenly brings up ideas about authorship and who this film belongs too.

Amongst the archival world, it is popular to try to update infamously cutup or altered films into their intended format. A great example is the reedited version of Touch of Evil that features an altered opening sequence with different sound and different titles. The basis for the scene changes come from a memo sent by Orson Welles over how the scene “should” look as he ranted to the studios, begging them not to touch his film. A professor of mine, Bill Simon, a renowned Welles scholar, once pointed out how ridiculous he felt the intentions of this definitive version were. I remember him proclaiming something like, “Welles never knew what he wanted, he may have wanted this one day but it was constantly changing his mind, if he’d been working on the film still who knows what he would have come up with, but I’m sure it would have been different from what’s in the memo.”

This example of Welles and Touch of Evil merely goes to show that these “definitive” “complete” versions of famously lost films may mean nothing: they may not be what the director wanted; we may be watching what the director intended to scrap or change or whatever. And that discredits the importance of their overall authorship authority.

Some directors are constantly updating their works, tweaking things and trying to make them “better.” (See the 80 versions of Blade Runner, and the CGI updated version of Star Wars). In these circumstances, I will say yes this is different from a group of historians, film lovers, and archivists altering a film in the name of a dead man: here the director is entitled to add updates; we can all agree that it is their films. Yet many would call the updates to Star Wars atrocities.

In both of these circumstances: this becomes a moral question. Do we make changes, make updates, or let history stand? The answer with all this helps make the directorial input irrelevant. Simply: which is better? The new version of Touch of Evil’s opening sequence is decidedly better…and so is the “complete” version of Metropolis. The addition of a few simple frames to sequences somehow made things pop more, and the greater character development, I greatly appreciated. So to answer my friend’s text, whether Lang liked it or not: go see The Complete Metropolis!