Metropolis
by Marcus Liddell
Metropolis is a German silent film produced in 1927 that uses a dystopian society to explore the dangers inherent in capitalism and industrialization. Based on a novel by Thea von Harbou, it was directed by her husband Fritz Lang, who also co-wrote the screenplay, and stars Alfred Abel as Joh Fredersen, Gustav Fröhlich as Freder, Brigitte Helm as both Maria and the Machine-Man, and Rudolf Klein-Rogge as Rotwang the inventor.[1]
The film in its completed form has been lost, but most of Metropolis has been rediscovered, including a most recent addition of 25 minutes of previously missing footage. It holds the distinction of being the most expensive silent film ever made, with a final cost of almost 4.2 million Reichmark,[2] and has become known as one of the most contentious films of the Weimar era.
Plot Summary
The film opens with an introduction to Metropolis, a vast city where a working class lives underground and tends to the machines that power the city, and a ruling class, headed by Joh Fredersen, the creator of the city, lives above ground. Early in the film, Fredersen’s son, Freder, meets a woman named Maria, who is surrounded by dirty-looking children, apparently from the underground city. Freder is instantly infatuated with Maria, and chases after her, venturing down into the world of the machines.
There Freder witnesses the operation of one of the great machines, and is overcome by a vision of it as a demonic figure, consuming throngs of people who march into its maw. Freder rushes back to the surface, intent on convincing his father to free the working class. Joh Fredersen is unwilling to yield to his son’s pleas, however, and Freder leaves dissatisfied, determined to return to the depths of Metropolis. He does, and takes up a position at a machine, letting the worker stationed there switch clothing and escape to the world above.
Meanwhile, in an ancient house above ground, Fredersen and Rotwang confer. Rotwang is an inventor and the rival of Fredersen, and probably the designer of the machines used to run Metropolis. He has a new design: “a machine in the image of man, that never tires or makes a mistake” (Lang 47). Showing his creation to Fredersen, Rotwang indicates that his machine-man is intended to replace the workers of Metropolis. After the exhibition, Fredersen shows Rotwang a set of diagrams, which the latter interprets as a map of the ancient catacombs below Metropolis.
At the same time, Freder finishes his shift. Following a map of the catacombs similar to the one that has fallen into his father’s hands, Freder goes to a meeting. He sits with the other workers as his father and Rotwang, having infiltrated the area, watch from a distant peephole. Before their eyes, Maria enters again. She delivers a rendition of the Tower of Babel story, then bluntly introduces the theme of the film, saying, “Between the brain that plans and the hands that build, there must be a mediator. It is the heart that must bring about an understanding between them” (Lang 60). Freder understands himself to be this mediator, the messiah which Maria and the workers are waiting for, but he stays quiet through the end of the meeting. Rotwang, on Fredersen’s instructions, abducts Maria and duplicates her likeness onto the machine-man, which he then sends out to wreak havoc on all that Maria has accomplished.
The machine-man stirs the workers to riot, and they leave the caverns with one purpose in mind: to destroy the machines. As they are exiting the room, Freder enters and denounces the machine-man as a false Maria. The workers ignore his pleas and, upon recognizing him as Joh Fredersen’s son, try to kill him. He fights off the workers and survives, but in the commotion the false Maria is carried off with the mob of workers hell-bent on the destruction of Metropolis’ machines.
The workers destroy the central machine despite being warned that doing so will flood their homes. Meanwhile, the real Maria has escaped Rotwang’s house. She reaches the workers’ city safely, but shortly thereafter the elevators are destroyed, no longer powered by the generator. Water begins to erupt from the surface of the cavern. Maria gathers the children of the workers, the only people left underground, and brings them to the center of the town square. She rings the gong there, hoping someone will rescue them, and Freder appears. He and Maria help the children escape through a passageway out of the cavern, managing to save them all.
Meanwhile, Grot, the man who operated the central machine and tried to protect it until its demise at the hands of the worker mob, asks them where their children are, and they realize that the children have been left to drown. They blame the machine-man Maria for inciting them to such action and set off to find and kill her. As Freder, the real Maria, Freder’s friend Joseph, and the children of the workers arrive above ground, the worker mob seizes the machine-man and burns her alive.
During the spectacle, Rotwang discovers and pursues the real Maria, afraid that if she’s discovered to exist he’ll be killed. As Rotwang and Maria rush across a parapet above the crowd, Freder notices them. He pursues, and reaches the parapet as Maria struggles with the inventor. Rotwang and Freder fight, culminating in Rotwang’s fall off the parapet and subsequent death.
Next, in the film’s final scene, Grot stands facing Joh Fredersen on the steps of the cathedral, the roof of which witnessed the death of Rotwang. Hesitantly, they approach each other, and Fredersen half lifts a hand toward the worker. Watching, Maria says to Freder, “There can be no understanding between the hands and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator” (Lang 130). In response, Freder approaches the men, draws their hands together, and links them. In that way, with Grot the worker on one side, Fredersen the mastermind of Metropolis on the other, and his son Freder in the middle, the film ends.
Reception
Reactions to the film and its thematic elements have varied over the years. Certainly, its impact was enormous. In 1927 there was “hardly an article in the papers that […] did not make reference to it” (Elsaesser 22). Most of these articles lauded its technological ingenuity, but many were critical of the film’s themes and plot.
Among the important later critics of Metropolis, Lotte H. Eisner was especially impressed by the “beauty of the light and shapes” in the film.[3] Eisner showers Lang with praise for his use of geometric formations and contrast in lighting, movement, and juxtaposition, and seems especially impressed, ironically, by the “mechanical perfection” with which the enslaved workers move during their shifts. He also praises the way that Lang avoids becoming “trite” with geometric stylization by keeping the crowds alive even when they are clearly moving in a designed way, as shown in the movement of the pyramid of supplicating children when Maria and the children wait for help as the cavern fills with water around them (Eisner 229). Lighting, Eisner remarks, is handled “admirably” to create an expansive cityscape out of just a partial model (Eisner 233). The cumulative effect, according to Eisner, is “a genuinely dramatic crescendo” in the film (Eisner 236).
In retrospect, Fritz Lang himself felt that the film was “silly and stupid” in its content.[4] Many of the film’s critics agreed, though as a body they also express fascination with the technical achievement of Metropolis. According to one contemporary reviewer, the film “will make the commoners talk if no more than to say, ‘You must see that crazy picture’” (Minden & Bachmann 93).
One of the more scathing critiques of the themes present in Metropolis comes from Siegfried Kracauer. In his book, From Caligari to Hitler, Kracauer notes the painstaking detail in landscapes, machines and human formations within the film. He notes the praise this received, particularly from German and American audiences, but asserts that “all illustrate Lang’s penchant for pompous ornamentation."[5] He goes even further, ultimately calling the scene in which Maria and the children wait for rescue in the rapidly-flooding lower city “humanly a shocking failure” (Kracauer 150).
Kracauer also asserts that Metropolis espouses fascist ideals developing at the time, if perhaps unconsciously. For this argument, he offers a closer look at both the ending and the explicit message of the film--that the heart should reconcile the hands, which represent the members of the lower classes who carry out the work, with the brain, which represents the members of the higher classes who devise plans and decide what work should be carried out and to what ends. In the end, he contends, “it seems that Freder has converted his father; in reality, the industrialist has outwitted his son” (Kracauer 163). Joh Fredersen, in his estimation, is only using this symbolic alliance with the working class to enable him to influence them more directly. As for the message of the film, Kracauer states that the appeal to the heart is directly in line with the techniques of Nazi propaganda. He notes that the Nazi party aligned itself firmly with emotion and manipulated that to their advantage, the same way he contends Joh Fredersen does at the end of Metropolis. It’s after viewing Metropolis, Kracauer points out, that the Nazis decided to recruit Lang to direct their propaganda films, an offer, however, that Lang refused.
- ↑Fritz Lang, Metropolis (Letchworth: The Garden City Press Ltd., 1973), 18.
- ↑Thomas Elsaesser, Metropolis (London: British Film Institute, 2000), 12.
- ↑Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen (Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1965), 223.
- ↑Michael Minden and Holger Bachmann, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (Rochester: Camden House, 2000), 3.
- ↑Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler (New York: North Rivers, 1947), 149.