Metropolis

Eighty years after its premiere in Berlin on January 14, 1927, Austrian director Fritz Lang's Metropolis remains among the most powerful visions of urban modernity and the most famous German film in the history of cinema. It dramatically represented how the conflicts—economic, political, social, familial, psychosexual, architectural, and spiritual—of technological society dominate the prospects for life in the city. Already in its title, an English language word, it suggests a universal urban condition. Depicting the harshly routinized existence of city dwellers earlier analyzed by German sociologist Georg Simmel, Metropolis proposed the city as a productive but highly alienating machine.

Prior to Lang's film, which he claimed (falsely) was inspired by his vision of New York's bright lights during a visit in 1924 to promote his The Nibelungen, the city had rarely been represented in cinema as physically overwhelming. Dark alleys, criminal gangs, and moral corruption were the principal threats faced by most protagonists in silent movies. By contrast, Metropolis revealed the city as second nature, a human creation ultimately more inscrutable and dangerous than first nature, an idea telegraphically conveyed by advertising posters for the film in which masses of skyscrapers resemble mountain ranges. It suggested that the physical disparity between the increasingly vertical and machine-driven built environment and individual human beings resulted in feelings of anxiety [Page 503]and the sense that one had lost effective control over one's destiny.

Controlling Lang's futuristic city, located in the penthouse of a towering office building, is the cold and ruthlessly calculating industrialist Joh Fredersen (played by Alfred Abel). His son Freder Fredersen (Gustav Froelich) leads a life of indolent pleasure until he encounters the teacher, Maria (Brigite Helm), who one day ascends to his pleasure garden with a group of ragged children.

Metropolis depicts a vertically stratified society, and far below the surface of the Earth, its workers live and tend the Moloch-like turbines that keep it running. Maria preaches a gospel of love to them in an underground catacomb, which leads the threatened Fredersen Senior to approach the inventor Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge). He creates a robot replica of Maria, who incites the workers to destroy the machines and flood their underground city. Eventually, Fredersen and the machine foreman Groth reconcile themselves on the steps of a Gothic cathedral, according to the slogan “The mediator between head and hands must be the heart.”

Evoking contemporaneous sources, such as the anti-urban philosophy of Oswald Spengler expounded in his book, The Decline of the West; Weimar architect Bruno Taut's notion of the tall building as “crown of the city”; and playwright Georg Kaiser's drama of an industrial accident Gas, Metropolis is rife with visual symbolism and intellectual references. Its skyscrapers freely cite modern architectural styles then advanced by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Erich Mendelssohn, while the stylized choreography with which its armies of black-clad workers move owed much to expressionist theater and seem to exemplify Siegfried Kracauer's notion of the crowd as “mass ornament.” Novelist and screenplay author Thea von Harbou, then Lang's wife, wrote the treacly story that was the basis for Lang's visually haunting images, clearly indebted to the classic 1919 expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

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