Viewed: 18 September 2002
Directed by: Fritz Lang
Listed in: Movies, Cinema

The mediator between the Brain and the Hands must be the Heart. I saw the remastered 35mm print of Metropolis the other night at the Coolidge. They added in text descriptions for the scenes that no longer exist. Like worker 11811’s night in Yahrawa, which would probably be very interesting. And of course through out is Fritz Lang’s superb muse-en-scene. The amazing images of Metropolis active with traffic, it is no wonder this has become so iconographic. I’ve been desensitized to silent film plots and editing unfortunately, so it didn’t hold my interest through out. The images were so intense. The workers on the heart machine, all moving in unison. The slow death march to the machine rooms. The clock machine Joh fights to work. The tower of Babylon being built by the slaves. The workers being sacrificed lemming like to a demonic industrial god. Brazil took so much from this, it reminds me of alternate histories about steam engines being invented centuries earlier. Sometimes I wish I lived in Metropolis.