As the curtain falls on 2010, the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine asked the paper’s critics to reflect on a single moment of cultural transcendance this year. Here’s the answer from the paper’s senior film critic, Kenneth Turan…
“My moment was a screening on April 25 of the miraculously rediscovered director’s cut of the silent masterpiece Metropolis. Having this Fritz Lang film come back to life, being able to watch it accompanied by the inspired Alloy Orchestra and experiencing it all with a capacity crowd of 2,200 in the still vibrant Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood let me feel more hope about the future of cinema past than I usually allow myself.”
– Kenneth Turan
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I saw the newly expanded/restored version on Turner Classic Movies later in the year – it was excellent!
Last time I checked this movie was available for streaming on Netflix.
I saw this screened minus alloy orchestra and found it strangely over-the-top, politically regressive-simplistic and was heartened to discover Lang redpudiates the film in several interviews, he says essentially “I hate the film and the blame is mine, I cannot believe I covered this film with such facile themes” This eras aggressive lauding strikes me as hopeful sentimentalism while many other silent films explode beyond metropolis’s excesses with ideas that are much more modern.
Check out some first year graphic design students posters inspired by Metropolis. Using paper and photoshop: http://www.brobygrafiska.se/grafiskmedieproduktio… PART 1 http://www.brobygrafiska.se/grafiskmedieproduktio… PART 2 http://www.brobygrafiska.se/grafiskmedieproduktio… PART 3
Ecstatic it's been re-found nearly complete, unthrilled by its story, which ends in a long, hyperbolic, confusing race essentially to untie the heroine from the railraod tracks, and except in one sequence unimpressed by the importance of its 1000 brief "new" inserts, Metropolis is overhyped. As noted, Lang rarely bragged about it as he did M and the middle Mabuse film, all for good reason. The sets stand alone as the justifiable reason for its high status in cinematic history.