'Metropolis' Lost and Found

This weekend, the Detroit Film Theater (DFT) debuted its first of several showings of the classic silent film Metropolis. This groundbreaking work, directed by the prolific Fritz Lang, has influenced and inspired countless directors. Why then has it taken more than 80 years for this masterpiece to be seen in anything close to its original form? The simple answer is that no one bothered to save the original. Up until 2008, it was thought that the complete version of the film was lost forever. Thanks to the hard work of some talented archivists and film preservationists, and a few lucky breaks, Metropolis can be seen today more or less the way Fritz Lang intended it to be seen. The history of how Metropolis was nearly lost and later miraculously found again is a fascinating lesson in the importance of archiving cultural materials.

For those unfamiliar with the film, here is a synopsis of the plot: Sometime in the indeterminate future, the great industrialist Joh Fredersen has founded and built the teeming city of Metropolis. (It is suggested that the city is of such a scale that it would dwarf even today’s vast mega-cities.) The city is kept running by an army of workers who live deep below the city in a subterranean city of their own. In contrast, the managing class of Metropolis lives the high life in glittering skyscrapers. One day, Joh’s son Freder sees a beautiful girl from the working class and follows her to the lower levels. There, he witnesses some workers being killed when a machine explodes and is horrified. Freder is determined to see how the workers really live and to help them ease their burden. What follows is an exciting series of events in which a religious prophet (the girl he followed), an evil robot clone, a mad scientist, and rioting workers do battle and wreck havoc on the streets of the city. Here is a video of the trailer for the latest restored version.

It is easy to see how complex themes such as the exploitation of workers, labor riots, and religious mysticism would have made censors nervous at the time. There are also a few scenes that contain sexual content that would have been considered quite racy back then. After the film premiered in Berlin in January, 1927, the 153 minute film was cut substantially. Paramount, the U.S. distributor of the film, cut nearly 40 minutes from the film. UFA, the German film studio who produced the film, was nearly bankrupted by the cost of Metropolis, which was one of the most elaborate and expensive films ever made, and they were desperate to make back some of their money. Therefore they made the same cuts as Paramount, hoping to please audiences and avoid losing any more money. One of the film’s restorers, Marin Koerber, says that the editors “turned it into more of a Frankenstein story and softened the film’s Christian themes.” Unfortunately, in their haste to get the film into circulation quickly, the cuts were made to the original negatives and no one bothered to preserve a complete version of the film.

With the benefit of hindsight, many film buffs industry experts realized the egregious way in which Metropolis had been treated and sought to restore to classic film to its former glory. After World War II, a few copies of the film resided in East Germany’s Staatliches Filmarchiv where a few young archivists sought to patch the original film back together. Wolfgang Klaue, an archivist who worked there for nearly 30 years detailed Ekkehard Jahnke’s attempt to restore the film: “[He] undertook the first reconstruction/restoration of Metropolis. The tools for a job of this kind had not yet been developed. When comparing the different materials from other archives, he had questions that neither he nor any of his colleagues could answer.” This first restoration premiered at the International Federation of Film Archives’ 1972 conference in Bucharest but it did not receive much attention.

The most complete version of the movie, until recently, was the definitive 2001 restoration by the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation, which is dedicated to preserving German cinema for posterity. This version was 124 minutes long, still 29 minutes shorter than the complete version. In a stroke of good luck, a complete 16mm copy of the original 35mm nitrate print was discovered in the archives of the Museo del Cine Pablo C. Ducrós Hicken in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It is believed that this copy was made by an Argentine film distributor who saw the movie at the 1927 premiere and took it back with him to Argentina. The copy ended up in the hands of a private collector and was donated to the museum in 1992, where it sat until it was found two years ago. The copy wasn’t in great shape but film restorers were able to use it to create a version that runs for 147 minutes, meaning that only six minutes of the original are still missing. Thanks to this lucky break, audiences can now enjoy Metroplois more or less as Fritz Lang intended it to be seen.

Movie lovers may have gotten lucky when it comes to Metropolis but countless other films have been lost forever due to poor archiving practices. Luke McKernan, of the Centre for British Film and Television Studies, discusses the case of a 1912 film called The Coronation Durbar at Delhi, which was one of the first color films ever produced: “The Delhi Durbar film was made over twenty years before any national film archive had been established, and the company that made it and most of its Kinemacolor productions were lost to history, neglected or destroyed once they became of no financial value.” This has been the case of numerous early films. They were made, shown to a few audiences, and then discarded once their producers could no longer sell it. No one thought to take the expense to save these films and there was no real system in place to do so even if the filmmakers wanted to do this.

In the U.S. the Library of Congress maintains the Moving Image Collections and runs the National Film Preservation Board. In Germany, the Bundesfilmarchiv, which has been instrumental in restoring Metropolis, protects Germany’s rich national cinema. Britain actually has four national film archives. Archiving a nation’s films is as important as archiving any other works of art in that they are an integral part of the national culture and collective memory. Though many early films have been lost, passionate archivists have helped protect many old films and have restored some of those that were thought lost forever.


References:

Back to the Future: Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis' Over Time Retrieved June 14, 2010, from http://www.filmportal.de/df/e9/Artikel,,,,,,,,EFA4FC6971A20FE7E03053D50B373B0A,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,.html

Goldman, A. J. (2010, February 19). Metropolis Now Wall Street Journal Retrieved June 14, 2010 from http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704804204575069383586138138.html

Klaue, W. (2006). Every Film an Adventure Journal of Film Preservation (72).

McKernan, L. A Short History of Film Archiving Centre for British Film and Television Studies Retrieved June 14, 2010, from http://www.bftv.ac.uk/events/archhist.htm

METROPOLIS -Sicherungsstück Nr. 1: Negative of the restored and reconstructed version 2001. (2001, May 15, 2008). UNESCO Scientific and Cultural Organization Retrieved June 14, 2010, from http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=23221&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

Metropolis (1927). IMDB.com.

National Film Preservation Board: Public Moving Image Archives and Research Centers. (2010, April 27). Retrieved June 14, 2010, from http://www.loc.gov/film/arch.html