The 1927 silent epic is one of the most influential films ever made. One would be hard pressed to find a modern film which even attempts to encompass as much social commentary as Metropolis does

The history of science fiction cinema is replete with tales of rebellious robots and malevolent machines: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Westworld (1973), Blade Runner (1982), and The Terminator films, to name but a few. But the forefather of them all is Metropolis, the 1927 silent epic by Austrian-German director Fritz Lang (1890-1976). Metropolis was not the first Science Fiction (SF) film ever made, nor even the first film to depict robots, but all previous efforts — and indeed most subsequent ones — pale in comparison to the scope of this film.

Metropolis has a convoluted plot, with several strands, but the central narrative involves a clash between Joh Fredersen, a cold-hearted industrialist who is master of the futuristic city of Metropolis, and the oppressed working classes who tend the giant underground machines that keep the city running. His son Freder, however, has experienced first-hand the appalling conditions of the workers, and empathises with their plight. Freder is also in love with Maria, a worker who prophesies the coming of a saviour who will bridge the divide between the rulers and the ruled. Fredersen, aware of revolutionary stirrings amongst the workers, instructs the inventor Rotwang to use his latest creation — a robot — to impersonate Maria in order to undermine the workers’ faith in her and to foment a rebellion, which Fredersen will then use as a pretext to move against them.

The android does its task, and the frenzied workers proceed to smash the machines. But they soon realise that they have more to lose than their chains when the devastation results in their underground homes being flooded and their children endangered. Fredersen, too, realises that things have gone awry when he learns that his own son’s life is at risk. In the end, the workers seize the android and burn it at a stake, while Freder becomes the prophesied mediator between ‘head’ and ‘hands’ by encouraging his father to make peace with the workers.

With a cast of tens of thousands and a budget dwarfing any German film produced up until that time, Metropolis was a massive undertaking, but it was a critical and commercial failure. The film’s ending drew negative reactions, with many critics regarding it as naive. Perhaps the most damning review came from someone who knew something of SF: H. G. Wells. “I have recently seen the silliest film,” began Wells’ review, which went on to describe the film as foolish, clichéd, derivative, pretentious, and a poor prediction of the future.

A few years later, Wells had the opportunity to convert one of his own books to film: the result was Things to Come (William Cameron Menzies, 1936), a production on which Wells held tight artistic control. In a memorandum to staff he wrote: “[...] whatever Lang did in Metropolis is the exact contrary of what we want to do here.” But Things to Come, while possessed of some striking set designs, has now been all but forgotten save by aficionados of SF or cinema, while Metropolis’ stature has grown over the decades.

One of the reasons for this is their vastly different attitudes to the future. In Things to Come we find a technocrat a century hence advocating “[…] an active and aggressive peace, when we direct our energies to tear out the wealth of this planet and exploit all these giant possibilities of science that have been squandered hitherto upon war and senseless competition […] We shall make such use of the treasures of sky and sea and earth as men have never dreamt of hitherto. I would that I could see our children’s children in this world we shall win for them.” But the descendants of early 20th century optimists are likely to cringe at this self-righteous notion of progress and identify much more with the conspiracy, wayward science, and economic exploitation of Metropolis.

In 1941, George Orwell penned an essay titled ‘Wells, Hitler, and the World State’; in it he criticised Wells’ inability to recognise the forces of nationalism and bigotry which were interfering with the fulfilment of Wells’ utopian prognostications. “Creatures out of the Dark Ages have come marching into the present,” wrote Orwell, “and if they are ghosts they are at any rate ghosts which need a strong magic to lay them.”

The film can be interpreted as a commentary on revolution, on the unpredictability and hubris of power, on the psychology of social classes, or on the dehumanising perils of industrialisation and the concomitant inability of technology to liberate humankind.

In the world of Metropolis the ghosts of ages past are very much present. As much as the film showcases an architectural aesthetic derived from modern artistic movements such as Art Deco, Expressionism, and Bauhaus, it has scenes in millennia-old catacombs and gothic cathedrals decorated with gargoyles and statues of Death and the Seven Deadly Sins. The saintly Maria addresses the workers in a cavern adorned with candles and crosses, while her evil doppelgänger is likened to the Whore of Babylon. A parable of the ancient myth of the Tower of Babel and its construction by slave labour is compared to Joh Fredersen in his high tower. Rotwang’s house is a centuries-old hovel overshadowed by modern skyscrapers; it appears to be bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. The doors are affixed with the magical symbol of the pentagram and, having no handles, seem to swing magically open at their owner’s command. Thus, while Rotwang seems to conjure up his android using science, it is not difficult to see this receptacle of dark secrets and hidden knowledge as a sorcerer. Such themes can be found in a number of prominent films of the period.

Metropolis was made at a time that witnessed a cascade of great German silent films. In addition to Lang’s brilliant Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922), the Weimar era saw the release of Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Paul Wegener and Carl Boese’s The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920), and F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and Faust (1926). The protagonists of these films use arcane knowledge to assert power. Sometimes this power is clearly supernatural or magical in origin, as in Nosferatu, Faust, or The Golem, but in the cases of Dr. Caligari and Dr. Mabuse, the power is — like Rotwang’s — ostensibly scientific, but with overtones of the supernatural.

Metropolis’ juxtaposition of the spectral and the scientific is not the only aspect of the film to bear some complexity. Another self-contradictory (or nuanced) facet of Metropolis is how it sympathetically portrays the drudgery that the working classes must endure, while simultaneously presenting the masses as fickle, gullible, and short-sighted, which is somewhat at odds with Lang’s declaration that “I am on the side of the people”. Hence, communists attacked Metropolis for its depiction of collaboration between labour and management, and the film was banned in the Soviet Union; those on the right condemned it as having Bolshevik leanings.

According to Lang, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels enjoyed Metropolis, but this did not prevent Goebbels from using samples of Lang’s work as representatives of “degenerate art”. The film’s style has been lauded, but its message derided. And the final irony is that while Metropolis is now routinely hailed as one of the greatest films ever made, Lang himself disliked it.

In Fritz Lang — Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, 2003), one can find Lang saying in 1959: “One cannot say now that the heart is the mediator between the hand and the brain, because it is a question of economics. That’s why I don’t like Metropolis. It’s false, the conclusion is false, I don’t accept that I made that film.” Yet, in other interviews, Lang made some comments on Metropolis which, while not abnegating his dismissal of the film, tempered it somewhat. For instance, he mentioned an industrialist writing an article in the 1950s agreeing with the film’s sentiment. Lang also revealed how, when he asked young people what was wrong with modern life, they would lament the heartless computerised society of their times.

Despite the fact that the scenes depicting the mechanically-moving workers as cogs in a giant machine are amongst the most powerful in the film, Lang thought his symbolism too simplistic. However, when he witnessed astronauts embedded in complex machines constantly attending to knobs and dials, he mused that screenwriter Thea von Harbou may have been right in some respects.

Mamoru Oshii, in the October 2010 issue of Sight & Sound, acknowledged the influence of Metropolis on his Ghost in the Shell films, adding: “[…] if we tried to go back and search for the origin of both Hollywood actresses and Japanese animation heroines, we’d eventually get to the android Maria.”

The idea of empathy being required to foster understanding between different classes has manifested itself in other SF. The Star Trek episode “The Cloud Minders” (1969) features a similar premise, in which Captain Kirk must force the luxurious sky-dwelling rulers of a planet and their mine-working menials to cooperate towards building a more egalitarian society. And then there is The Matrix series, a body of work as ambitious as Metropolis: here is another archetypal epic steeped in religious allegory, in which a messiah-like figure trapped between two worlds rises to bring about peace between man and machine. Unsurprisingly, the ending of The Matrix trilogy was as poorly received as Metropolis.

Despite some thematic similarities between Metropolis and later works, it is the film’s style which has had the greatest effect on cinema history. Mamoru Oshii, in the October 2010 issue of Sight & Sound, acknowledged the influence of Metropolis on his Ghost in the Shell films, adding: “[…] if we tried to go back and search for the origin of both Hollywood actresses and Japanese animation heroines, we’d eventually get to the android Maria.” In the same issue, Terry Gilliam wrote of the film’s influence upon his own dystopian Brazil (1985). The design of the android Maria is reflected in the Star Wars character C-3PO, the neon-lit skyscrapers of Metropolis foreshadow the Los Angeles of Blade Runner, and the black-gloved Rotwang is a precursor to Dr. Strangelove, Dr. No, and myriad villains and mad scientist archetypes.

But the impact of Metropolis goes far beyond cinema. Music videos, from Queen’s ‘Radio Ga Ga’ to Madonna’s ‘Express Yourself’, have borrowed from it. The trudging, robotic workers of Metropolis appear in a scene from the famous Ridley Scott-directed Macintosh television advertisement of 1984. The creators of Superman — Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster — named the home of their superhero after the film. Imagery from Metropolis inspired Japanese manga pioneer Osamu Tezuka to create his Metropolis comic in 1949, and the android Maria features in Alan Moore’s 2014 comic Nemo: The Roses of Berlin.

Metropolis was released during a period which witnessed a flowering of important literary SF, at a time when even the term ‘science fiction’ had yet to acquire popular usage. H. G. Wells, as noted, was still alive and still producing ‘scientific romances’. Karel Čapek’s play R. U. R. had coined the word ‘robot' just a few years before in 1920. The same year saw the publication of David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We had been published in 1924, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was only five years away.

Often overlooked in histories of SF is the 1925 serialisation of the novel Metropolis, written by Lang’s wife Thea von Harbou coterminously with the film’s script. In earlier years Harbou had not only written the scripts for several of Lang’s films, but had also done screenwriting work for other great film directors of the time, such as F. W. Murnau and Carl Theodore Dreyer. Because criticism of Metropolis in the aftermath of the premiere led to much footage being cut and subsequently lost, the novel was often used to provide clues as to what the complete film looked like, despite the book having significant differences to the film (including a much more equivocal ending).

This guesswork came to an end in 2008, when a near-complete but badly damaged print of Metropolis was discovered in Argentina; two years later, and after much restoration work, a reconstructed version of the film became available to the public. Short just a few minutes of the original running time of 153 minutes, it is now possible to see the film as Lang intended, and to do so accompanied by the powerful original musical score by Gottfried Huppertz. Several confusing plot points have been resolved, and the lengthier film is a much stronger work than the cut piece which formed the basis for so much antagonism over the years.

In 1926, Lang wrote an article for the German magazine Die literarische Welt titled ‘The Future of the Feature Film in Germany’, in which he wrote: “The internationalism of filmic language will become the strongest instrument available for the mutual understanding of peoples, who otherwise have such difficulty understanding each other in all too many languages. To bestow upon film the double gift of ideas and soul is the task that lies before us. We will realise it!” This strident faith in the potential of cinema as a unifying force signified Lang’s belief that art should include social critique. Cinema was an art form for the masses, but Lang lamented the way in which it had either become an industry, or a recondite exercise aimed at cinéastes.

Lang, who had studied art, was a veteran of World War I, and who had acquired inspiration for many of his films from newspapers, believed that “a director has to know life, has to know the straits of life, and have experience, in order to make good films. It is not a matter of age.” For Lang, content was more important than form, and in later years he derided the New Wave of filmmaking as the death of art, the sorts of products which one reviewer of the Cannes Film Festival (Michèle Manceaux) described as “conscientious, humanist films, slices of life served up just right to move you.”

Lang’s criticisms were expressed in the 1960s and 1970s, but they are even more applicable today. One is reminded of documentarian Adam Curtis’ assertion in a 2005 BBC interview that cinéastes and filmmakers have “run into a dead end. […] I haven’t seen a movie that deals with society for 20 years”. Curtis’ appraisal is too harsh, perhaps, but one would be hard-pressed to find a modern film which even attempts to encompass as much as Metropolis does. The film can be interpreted as a commentary on revolution, on the unpredictability and hubris of power, on the psychology of social classes, or on the dehumanising perils of industrialisation and the concomitant inability of technology to liberate humankind.

Metropolis has also been seen as reflecting the decadence and economic woes of Weimar Germany, and as presaging the rise of fascism. It is difficult to agree with H. G. Wells’ linear reading of the film, or with novelist Thomas Mann’s view of cinema as quoted in Hans Günther Pflaum’s book German Silent Movie Classics (Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung/Transit Film, 2002): “You will kindly pardon me when I say that I do not believe that the film has a great deal to do with art...”.

Watching Metropolis today has its challenges — some of the performances are overly theatrical, the plot is confusing, and there are some implausible narrative points, but after 90 years the film still has the ability to impress both visually and intellectually.

An anecdote in the documentary Voyage to Metropolis (Artem Demenok, 2010) provides an arresting testament to the power and prescience of Lang’s film. It relates the story of a man entering a Nazi concentration camp in 1943; gazing upon innumerable men and women with shaved heads in work clothes, he turned to one of his fellow prisoners and said: “Do you know Metropolis?”

The author is an antiquarian and freelance writer.

Published in Dawn, EOS, July 2nd, 2017