Metropolis (1927) is a German silent film directed by Fritz Lang. Considered “the first truly great work of science fiction cinema”,[1] Metropolis explores humanity’s future through its harnessing of the German Expressionist aesthetic, politics commenting on the contemporary social climate, and the technological pioneering that had a lasting influence on cinema. Marking the end of one filmmaking era for the beginning of another, Metropolis stands at the centre of film history, utilising a variety of artistic inspirations to pave the way for later films.
Metropolis follows Freder, son of the creator of Metropolis, Joh Fredersen. He lives in the comfort of the upper city, but falls in love with Maria, a teacher from the lower levels. This leads him to realise the unjust divide between the classes, concluding that there must be harmony after a robot that has taken Maria’s form leads a failed revolution. Metropolis is among the last of the silent films, as the first ‘talkie’ – Crosland’s The Jazz Singer (1927) – released in the same year. As such, there is a heavy focus on visual storytelling: a key feature of German Expressionism that can be described as “the depiction of reality that is widely distorted for emotional effect.”[2] Films of the genre are recognisable for their jagged edges, stark shadows and distorted perspective. In Metropolis, the scenes of Maria preaching are striking in their combination of the classic expressionist aesthetic with religious symbolism, evoking Murnau’s Faust (1926). The epic contrast of light and dark – that Murnau presents in the chiaroscuro images of angel and demon locked in Biblical battles – is distilled by Lang into macabre crosses cluttering the scene in a manner akin to Martin’s From Morn To Midnight (1920). Lang was likely influenced by this and Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), as Metropolis mirrors their filmmaking techniques in the darker moments, most notably in the framing of the characters looking straight into the camera to heighten the exaggerated emotion of their performance, such as when Machine Maria manipulates the workers with her grotesque gestures and maniacally swivelling eyes.
Yet while set design was a priority for German Expressionist filmmakers, what Lang created went further. As intriguingly entrenched in the nightmarish aesthetic the underworld of the film might be, the most striking visual aspect is the Metropolis itself. To realise his vision fully, Lang made the most expensive film of the time, constructing giant sets, enlarging them with mirrors, then using stop motion to animate the moving parts.[3] The result is a city filled with skyscrapers stacked on top of each other, with highways interconnecting like a spiderweb. Lights perpetually flicker: from the windows in office buildings, the multitude of cars driving past and the many signs that give the place character. Lang himself talks about how “the film was born from my first sight of the skyscrapers in New York… I looked into the streets—the glaring lights and the tall buildings—and there I conceived Metropolis”.[4] The idea for the futuristic city was born from reality, extrapolating contemporary human ingenuity and amplifying it to reach spectacular heights. The architecture that dominates Metropolis is mostly influenced by the Futurist movement, which envisioned “a new machine age of speed, novelty, dynamism, modernity, and scale”.[5] But Metropolis draws inspiration from many other artistic movements: Art Deco, Baroque, Bauhaus, Cubist and Gothic.[6] From this eclectic mix, one can infer that Lang did not solely want to create a city of the future, but rather one that encompassed all of human history. He combines the works of Sant’Elia – whose La Città Nuova formed the basis for Metropolis’s airborne pathways and high-rise buildings[7] – alongside the Godly aesthetic of temples and statues that can be seen in the likewise monumental set design of Griffith’s reconstruction of Babylon in Intolerance (1916), which Lang makes explicit reference to through the Tower of Babel – an allegory that is central to the film. Lang says in an interview that this appeal to the heroic depictions of humanity caught the attention of Hitler and Goebbels, as the stadium scene – with boys racing inside an arena of tall statues atop giant walls – captured the Nazi’s sense of idealism.[8] Regardless, the past and future are brought together to craft a city for the modern audience, showcasing why humanity is itself capable of creating the sublime.
The story of Metropolis is not just about the spectacle however, as emanating from the intricately detailed sets comes a complex dissection of society. On the one hand, it presents a utopia, where humanity has progressed to the point of living like gods; on the other, it presents a dystopia, as those living atop the monumental buildings are held up by the unrelenting work of those quite literally at the bottom. At face value, this appears to be criticising class divide through a Marxist lens. After all, the Machine copy of Maria riles up the workers to destroy the machines, as they are “lubricat[ing] the machine joints with their own blood… feed[ing] the machines with their own flesh”. The beginning of the film shows how the workers have been drained of life as they robotically march into the factories and perform their repetitive actions with inhuman precision amidst the steam and soot that envelops their world. There is a visual parallelism between the factories of Metropolis and Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914), especially when the workers march straight into the gaping mouth of some ancient deity – Lang shows them being sacrificed by those in power. This is contrasted by the breathtaking wide shots of the surface city, with towering skyscrapers embodying vast luxury and human potential: the comfort of some people comes at the expense of those worked to death beneath them. Metropolis “captures in brilliant visual terms the transition from Saint Simonism to a Marxist critique of capitalism.”[9] Saint Simon emphasised industrialisation and scientific progress as the cornerstones of a socialist society – a vision in which even entrepreneurs like Joh Fredersen (the city’s creator) is legitimised in his position of power, as “the spiritual direction of society would be in the hands of scientists and engineers”.[10] For Saint Simon, a distinction between classes does not preclude equality. Against this, Marx focused attention on the problems caused by class divide, advocating the overthrow of capitalists by the proletariat because their interests “are diametrically opposed to each other”.[11] As such, Lang is arguably being critical of the glorification of progress, as he shows how society’s rapid development was leaving many behind.
However, as Machine Maria is the antagonist of the film, her manipulation of the workers to rise up proves to have devastating consequences. They destroy the machines that were supposedly enslaving them, only to have their underground homes flooded while the rich surface dwellers experience an inconvenient power outage. The gap between the two classes is ultimately bridged when both realise they depend on each other for prosperity. This is encapsulated by the film’s iconic moral: “the mediator between the head and the hands must be the heart”. This is conveyed by Maria with the story of the Tower of Babel, which took the combined efforts of head and hand to create, but was destroyed because of a dissonance between them. Thus, Metropolis cannot be a Marxist critique of capitalism as Stoicea and others state, since it shows how revolutionaries bring about their own destruction – class warfare stunts the development of humanity. This alternative reading is supported by the political climate of the Weimar Republic, which despite facing many economic problems, was experiencing a golden age in the arts. From within this cultural flourishing, artists explored the country’s political turmoil, with communists and fascists pulling in opposite directions. Dickson compares Metropolis to The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, “reflecting the schisms that divided German society in the ‘golden 1920s’.”[12] This fuels the central conflict, the conclusion being that cooperation between those with different views and social standing must occur if Germany is to retake its place as the bastion of culture, science and industry that it once was.
Metropolis is the first film of such scale and vision, fixing “for the rest of the century the image of a futuristic city as a hell of scientific progress and human despair.”[13] Its iconic aesthetic and critical examination of society has left a lasting legacy in many other films: for example, the vision of a futuristic city in Elvey’s High Treason (1929) and Butler’s Just Imagine (1930). The manner in which the workers operate the machines was parodied by Chaplin in Modern Times (1936), tackling similar themes of the dehumanising nature of industry, only with more levity. Dulac uses a lot of superimposition in The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928), with faces splitting in two and the thoughts of the protagonist becoming visible to simulate a mind falling into madness, paralleling the moment in Metropolis when Machine Maria dances, the unsettling assortment of eyes showing how she is bewitching the men. German Expressionism later evolved into the Film Noir genre of 1940s Hollywood, with Reed’s The Third Man (1949) among those most explicitly showcasing its expressionist roots: the abundance of chiaroscuro lighting and Dutch tilts imaginatively recreates the expressionist set design, and the final chase through the sewers is especially reminiscent of the catacombs of Metropolis. Even Hitchcock was inspired by what Lang created, with Blackmail (1929) using the Schüfftan effect that Metropolis pioneered: magnifying a miniature set with mirrors that distort the lens, allowing for a “playing with the scale of the city and tricking the eye into seeing the actors in between large buildings or in magnificent gardens and the stadium.”[14] This effect remains integral to the crafting of epics, with Jackson’s Lord of the Rings (2001-2003) utilising the same techniques that brought Metropolis to life for the fantasy locations of Middle Earth.
It is interesting to note that Metropolis was a failure upon release.[15] Because of this, it became lost for many decades, with the only widely distributed versions being heavily butchered American cuts of the film. Since the 1960s, German film activists have endeavoured to piece together the original from fragments around the world, and although the film was not fully restored until 2010, Moroder’s 1984 cut put Lang’s masterpiece back into public consciousness.[16] While German Expressionism evolved into Film Noir, Metropolis’s futuristic city served as a template for the Cyberpunk genre. Scott develops this vision of the dystopic yet beautiful city in Blade Runner (1982), repurposing the same architecture and amplifying it; with parallels between the robot of Metropolis and Scott’s replicants, through whom a looking glass is held up to humanity and its social conflicts. Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) does much the same, though with absurdist comedy and surrealist horror, with a more explicit demonstration of the dreaming of breaking free from the city’s structures that Metropolis touches on. It also had a lasting impact in Japan, as Otomo’s Akira (1988) and Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell (1995) showcase in the building of their own Metropolises.Even pop music has taken to homaging the film, as Beyonce, Lady Gaga, Kylie Minogue and Madonna have all dressed as Lang’s Robot, proving just how iconic the film has become in popular culture.
The many re-releases of Metropolis continue to have a rejuvenating influence on filmmaking, as it remains just as fresh and innovative nearly a century after it was made. Fusing German Expressionism with Futurism – alongside a multitude of other art styles – permanently changed the direction of science fiction, with a vision of the future that captures the imagination while simultaneously challenging such notions through social critiques that have become almost integral to the genre. Despite not being an instant success, its influence is now undeniable, because as Ebert states: “Metropolis is one of the great achievements of the silent era, a work so audacious in its vision and so angry in its message that it is, if anything, more powerful today than when it was made.”[17]
[1] Howard Hughes, Outer Limits, 2014, p.1
[2] Alissa Darsa, ‘Art House: An Introduction to German Expressionist Films’, 26 December 2013
[3] Barry Keith Grant, Fritz Lang: Interviews, 2003, p.70
[4] Fritz Lang, quoted by Michael Minden and Holger Bachmann, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis: Cinematic Visions of Technology and Fear, 2002, p.4
[5] Sjfilmhistory, ‘The Influence of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis on Future Films’, 3 February 2014
[6] Patrick McGilligan, Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast, 1997
[7] Nora Landes, ‘100 Years after His Death, the Legacy of Futurist Architect Antonio Sant’Elia Lives On’, 25 August 2016
[8] dir. Erwin Leiser, Zum Beispiel: Fritz Lang,1968
[9] Gabriela Stoicea, ‘Re-Producing the Class and Gender Divide: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.’ Women in German Yearbook, vol. 22, 2006, p.23
[10] ‘Henri de Saint-Simon’, Encyclopedia Britannica, 13 October 2020
[11] Karl Marx, Wage Labour and Capital, 1849, p.18
[12] Andrew Dickson, ‘Culture in Weimar Germany: on the edge of the volcano’, 25 May 2016
[13] Roger Ebert, ‘Metropolis’, 28 March 1998
[14] Sjfilmhistory, 2014
[15] Howard Hughes, Outer Limits, 2014, p.4
[16] dir. Artem Demenok, Die Reise Nach Metropolis, 2010
[17] Roger Ebert, Roger Ebert’s Movie Home Companion: 400 Films on Cassette, 1980-85. 1985, p.222
