Metropolis Director's Cut

[Otto]

"On Jan. 10, 1927, Fritz Lang's "Metropolis," a wildly ambitious, hugely
expensive science fiction allegory of filial revolt, romantic love,
alienated labor and dehumanizing technology opened at the Ufa Palast theater
in Berlin. Lang's film, of course, went on to become one of the touchstones
of 20th-century cinema, exhaustively studied and endlessly imitated, but
apart from its brief theatrical run in Berlin and Nuremberg 75 years ago,
the movie as Lang made it has never really been seen. (...)

A few weeks after the premiere, Ufa, the studio that had produced the film,
pulled it from theaters and cut out 7 of the original 12 reels. (...)
Paramount, the American distributor, went even further, engaging a
playwright, Channing Pollock, to compose English title cards and to reshape
the story to fit his own tastes. "I have given it my meaning," Pollock
boasted. (...)

Pollock complained that, in Lang's version, "symbolism ran such riot that
people who saw it couldn't tell what the picture was all about." He was not
altogether wrong: Christianity, German romanticism, modernism and Marxism
stampede through the movie like the crowds of angry workers and bourgeois
revelers in the apocalyptic climax, but the confusion that results
ultimately resolves into hallucinatory, visionary clarity. Only by pushing
himself to the very edge of coherence was Lang able to transcend the
schematic moralizing that keeps so much science fiction tethered,
ultimately, to the mundane. (...)

The story of the scientist Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), a modern Pygmalion
designing a female robot to replace his lost love, stands between
"Frankenstein" and "A.I." as an expression of the defining modern
preoccupation with machines that blur the boundary between the human and the
mechanical."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/12/movies/12METR.html?8hpib


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