Metropolis

Let me just say to start off with, I'm not going to recommend you ever watch Metropolis, a 1927, German-made, two-and-a-half-hour silent film. I'm thoroughly surprised I made it through the whole thing, myself. Nick wanted to watch it for his shared podcast at derailedtrainsofthought.blogspot.com; an in-depth discussion of it will be on an episode you should be able to listen to soon. I watched it with him because it was two and a half hours of TV in my living room; what else was I going to do? Thankfully, we split it into a two-night show.

Now, to be fair, it's an amazing film for its time, but you have to know how to appreciate silent films. Honestly, they just aren't my thing: the jerky movements, the exaggerated make-up and stage actions, the sparse dialog written on black screens, the pound-you-over-the-head lesson of the movie. In this case, it was something like "The mediator between the head and hands is the heart!" It's really almost comical. But when you think about the movie from the standpoint of the people viewing it at the time, it was probably both remarkable and as fast-paced as it should have been. Since then, we've learned to watch movies differently, as my husband pointed out to me. Our movies are faster, chaotic, but they've gotten so by degrees, matching the pace our lifestyles have set. We expect movies to be unrealistic and as realistic as possible. We accept the impossible in the blink of an eye. In 1927, they were used to seeing plays, so the movie was a glorified play, slowed down so that you could process the unbelievable things portrayed in the movie, things that could never happen so comparatively realistically in a play.

Metropolis is actually science fiction, believe it or not, a vision of their future and our current times. We laugh now, but think about our fantasies for the years ahead. Humans like to dream the impossible, and usually we shoot both too far and too little ahead at the same time. Their vision was much more industrialized; who could have predicted the digital world? But they also envisioned whole cities underground and flight between buildings. The plot is essentially about a young man, Freder, from the upper, wealthy city, who falls in love with a prophetess who is trying to help the laborers of the underground city. He switches places with a worker and learns how miserable life below is, all for the benefit of those above. Meanwhile, a mad scientist creates a double of the prophetess out of a robot to destroy the life and work of his nemesis, Freder's father Joh Fredersen, the creator of the city of Metropolis. Surprisingly, there is a happy ending to the madness. I don't think our movies today would have gone in that direction.

The timing of the movie is interesting. Think about it: 1927 in Germany...right before Hitler. Portions of the film were lost, and then years later, some of those were retrieved in Argentina, of all places. The movie remains incompletely recovered to this day, but any missing pieces are filled in by written narration on black screens.

I guess this movie inspired generations of film makers after, and you can see why, but just take my word for it. Unless you are a film school student or an avid watcher of the classics, this movie has no need to cross your radar...and I apologize for making it cross yours. But if you are like my husband, you might be glad to have seen it, once it is over. Some people can appreciate such things better than I can, movie-lover that I am.