Saw Fritz Lang’s brilliant film METROPOLIS at SOU on Saturday night, in a heated auditorium with a crowd of film geeks. It felt like we were being consumed by Molog.

Much of the film is lost from an early and brutal re-edit, but this 2001 restoration preserves as much of the original as exists – and includes intertitling to account for the missing portions of the plot. It’s also bundled with a recording of the original score.

It was curated by a professor who showed clips from BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, BLADE RUNNER, and a film that has thankfully been lost to the ages named INTERNATIONAL HOUSE, all with obvious borrowings from and tributes to the original.

THE MEDIATOR BETWEEN
HEAD AND HANDS
MUST BE THE HEART!

The actress who played both the saintly Maria and her evil Machine-Man self, Brigitte Helm, made me really believe in the possible returned success of theatrical, physical acting on film. She had a snakelike, Chaplinesque bendiness and sense of contortion. It was so stylized, and so far from realistic. Lovely.

The lighting was so gorgeous, too – everything would be dark except one spot of light, and the image would become its photo-negative, all light except one spot of dark.

I understood, after watching this on a large screen, what would possess someone to re-create a film shot by shot.