Metropolis: The Foundation of the Avant-garde

In the summer of 2002, film audiences will gather in theaters all over the world to witness a Manichaean struggle of light against dark set in a futuristic society of fantastic grandeur and sophistication. They will see wondrous airships float through shimmering corridors of glass and steel, marvel at a golden android as it ambles across the screen, see living beings cloned, and participate vicariously in the tumult of a civilization as it teeters on the brink of tyranny.

Such vivid pleasures await those who brave the ticket lines for George Lucas's Star Wars: Episode II. They also await those who take a different journey-a journey back in time to a film that first premiered 75 years ago in the legendary Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (UFA)-Palast am Zoo in Berlin. Those who take this journey will be treated to the exquisite treasures of an era now largely forgotten or misunderstood: the modern European era before fascism, the Great Depression, and the storm of Soviet communism into Eastern Europe.

This brief era offered the promise of unlimited scientific progress and was buttressed by a new European commitment to democracy and the peaceful pursuit of capital. It was the era before Einstein's revelations were transformed into a blueprint for the atomic bomb and before Freudian psychoanalysis became one more pretext for the Nazis' persecution of the Jews. It was an era in which the science of technology and the science of capital were joined to create a new worldwide network of communication and transportation (e.g., radio, television, air travel)-a network that promised cooperation between otherwise disparate peoples. In sum, it was an era in which the promise of scientific progress seemed poised to overtake religion as the guiding faith of the time.

Unlike Lucas's fully digital film, the older film will have been patched together and restored (by Germany's Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv and the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung) using the fragile, transient elements of photochemistry and will run unaccompanied by even a syllable of dialogue. As such, its appreciation may require an exercise in imagination for filmgoers who are more accustomed to the sensory overload of contemporary cinema. Such efforts will be compensated, however, by a spectacle unique in film history and uncanny in its ability to influence subsequent generations of film artists worldwide.

The title of this spectacle is Metropolis, writer-director Fritz Lang's gigantic overture to the upheavals of the mid- and late 20th century. A restored version of Metropolis that was first premiered at the 2001 Berlin International Film Festival is now touring Vienna, Los Angeles, and Paris. This new version represents what is likely to be the most authoritative version in posterity and as such will represent the best introduction to Lang's masterpiece for those viewers who are not otherwise familiar with it.

Few films have embodied both the promise and the failure of the cinematic art form more fully than Lang's sprawling, flawed masterpiece. Simultaneously classic in theme and avant-garde in style, Metropolis presents a dense texture of ideas and emotions, not all of which harmonize properly. As a result, considerable confusion has ensued over the meaning of the film; indeed, no less than the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels is said to have offered Lang a job in the Third Reich, primarily on the basis of Metropolis (which prompted Lang to catch the next train out of Germany).

In truth, ideological distinctions such as right and left have little meaning when applied to a film of Metropolis' s scale, for the earthly vision of this film stretches from biblical antiquity (as in the Tower of Babel and cathedral sequences) all the way forward to a time when the great ideologies of the 20th century are stripped to the barest filaments of passion: love, greed, desire, bloodlust, and a basic sense of justice. Metropolis is a film of no particular moment; its ambition is to be a film of all moments-past, present, and future.

The film's origins, however, are considerably more temporal. In 1925, the German film industry was in the position to fire off a decisive salvo of high-caliber productions in an effort to thwart Hollywood's rapidly increasing market dominance. Consequently, Metropolis was designed by Fritz Lang and producer Erich Pommer as a showpiece project for the UFA studio. In December 1925, Paramount Pictures and the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation provided UFA with what was by the standards of the time a gigantic $4 million dollar payment in exchange for unprecedented access to the German film market. A quarter of that payment would be spent by UFA on Metropolis alone in the hope that the film would stimulate American demand for more German films.

The gamble failed. Critical reaction to the film was mixed from the start, prompting a series of edits and reedits for the German and American markets (which frustrated subsequent attempts to restore the original version). Although Metropolis attracted considerable public attention, its only modest revenues shattered German hopes of seriously competing with Hollywood. Subsequent economic and political turmoil in Germany, capped by the Nazi takeover in 1933, permanently foreclosed such hopes and froze Metropolis in a curious stasis-the great emblem of what might have been.

What was it, exactly, that Lang had created? Metropolis was designed as the ultimate form of mass entertainment in an era in which the concept of mass entertainment itself was avant-garde. The cinema had been avant-garde from the beginning in its ability to bypass the literate classes and mobilize public passions. Metropolis attempted to achieve this goal on an almost unprecedented scale. Yet, in appealing to a mass audience, Lang would not stoop to the lowest common denominator; instead, he sought to elevate legitimate, cross-cultural anxieties regarding industrialization, urbanization, technology, godlessness, and revolution and project these anxieties onto a future tableau so intoxicating as to numb those fears altogether-at least for the span of a few hours.

Every aspect of Metropolis is played out on a mass scale. A massive future city (Fig. 1) is fueled by a massive labor force that generates massive amounts of power and wealth, all of which is concentrated in the hands of one man, Joh Fredersen. Fredersen's monopoly over the city in turn aggravates unrest and leads to a mass revolt. Subplots abound, although some have been lost in the reediting. The most intriguing of the subplots involves the mad scientist Rotwang and his creation of an android. Rotwang, who is himself partly mechanical (much like Anakin and Luke Skywalker, his cinematic descendants), lives in twisted rage over the long ago loss of a woman to Fredersen. Fredersen commissions Rotwang to remake an android into a likeness of Maria, a gentle prophet of the city's working class (Figs. 2 and 3). The android Maria whips the laborers into a false revolutionary frenzy, all as a pretext for Fredersen's planned crackdown (still another plot conceit shared by Lucas's forthcoming Episode II). Only the love affair between Fredersen's son and the true Maria saves the city from calamity.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

The android Maria is arguably Lang's most ingenious invention-the Minotaur hidden in the city's labyrinth. The android's agenda is chaos as a prelude to violent suppression. Its guise is an all-too-familiar one from the 20th century: that of revolutionary prophet, fakir, and sexual provocateur-Rosa Luxembourg and Louise Brooks (or perhaps Patricia Hearst and Madonna) rolled into one (Fig. 4). Lang's message could hardly be more obvious: revolution is merely the final illusion on the path to despotism. Still more subversive is that Lang's android raises the possibility of science itself as the vehicle by which mankind is mechanized and thereby dehumanized.

Figure 4

The strength of Metropolis does not lie in its plot, however. What is ultimately most memorable about the film is its ambitious fusion of contemporary and archaic designs. Lang's design team drew variously from Expressionist, Constructivist, Bauhaus, and Jugendstil styles in projecting an image of the future city (actually New York City as Lang and Pommer had experienced it in 1924); yet this city is grounded-especially in its lower, subterranean levels-in structures that are irrevocably primitive. Fredersen's tower is the Tower of Babel (as in the painting by Bruegel the Elder), Rotwang's house is a purely Gothic Faustian laboratory; the laborers gather in what are essentially the Roman catacombs; and the android is nothing so much as a metallic Golem topped by a West African mask.

The transformation of the city's power apparatus into a vision of Moloch-a central dream sequence in the film-represents only the most obvious example of Lang's avant-garde strategy to tap into atavistic memory, to stir primitive fantasies, and to fuse and extend the mythology of many nations into the future. Since Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), George Lucas'Star Wars (1977), and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1981), this strategy has become familiar; its origins, however, are in Lang's 1927 superproduction.

In effect, Metropolis went underground after 1927. World War II had the effect of discrediting German cinema, and it was not until the 1970s that the dust would begin to settle. As Germany was welcomed back into the fold of Western culture, a new group of filmmakers began to revitalize Lang's vision of the future. This effort provokes a question: precisely how far ahead of his own time had Lang been? How avant-garde was Metropolis in terms of the mass fantasies it evoked? Had its return been inevitable all along?

Perhaps Metropolis and the more contemporary film spectacles that it has spawned-Blade Runner and even The Phantom Menace (1999) among them-suggest that the calamities of the mid-20th century (i.e., World War II, the Cold War) may represent only painful interruptions of a cultural project that was already firmly in motion by the 1920s. Namely, they may express Western society's faith in progress, a kind of cross-cultural secular religion of technology, unrestrained capitalism, and aesthetic design. In 1927, Metropolis may already be looking forward to that era referred to by social theorist Francis Fukuyama (following Hegel) as the end of history-namely, that era in which all nations embrace capitalism and some form of democracy and have made peace with each other. At this late stage of history, the last remaining challenges presumably resemble those of Lang's film: the reconciliation of management with labor, father with son, the mind with the hand. They also represent design or esthetic challenges-lifestyle choices, as we have come to term them. Fredersen's son-the film's Hermes or mediator-must make a somewhat shallow lifestyle choice between the blue-collar drudgery of the lower city and the white-collar splendor (capped by the Eternal Gardens) of the upper world. His somewhat frivolous, uninformed ardor for the laboring class becomes the pretext for the entire plot.

Metropolis is an artifact of an era that is now largely forgotten: the modern European era that briefly existed before fascism, worldwide economic depression, and the export of Soviet ideology cast a dark cloak of nihilism across Europe and Asia. It was an era in which scientific progress seemed poised to unlock the ultimate mysteries of time and physical matter (Einstein) and the human psyche (Freud). The optimism associated with this era propelled writers such as Thomas Mann to completely redefine European humanism (as in his tetralogy of Joseph novels). In Germany, it also was the era of republican government born out of the ashes of the Great War. It was the era of Hugo Eckener, whose Graf Zeppelin airship promised unheard-of achievements in German technology. It also was the era of Lang, whose Nibelungen films had pushed German cinema into the heady stratosphere of German literature, theater, and music. This period was a time when great things still seemed possible for Europe-before Metropolis became Alphaville.

The period from the Armistice of 1918 to the worldwide market collapse of 1929 may have lasted only a little longer than a decade, yet these years were pregnant with possibility in ways that few eras ever have been. It was an era curiously similar to our own-splendid, yet foreboding. Metropolis is the emblem of those years and represents a touchstone for reenvisioning our collective future. For the cinema, it has become the foundation of the avant-garde.