Metropolis Director's Cut

[Monica Belevan]

I never knew ´´ Metropolis´´ had been castrated like this. It reminds me of 
what was done to Orson Welles´ ´´ The Magnificent Ambersons´´. Does anyone 
know if there is a released uncut version for this film at all? It has been 
in a thorn on my side for a while now...

--Monica

>From: "Otto" <ottosell at yahoo.de>
>To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: Metropolis Director's Cut
>Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2002 09:33:17 +0200
>
>"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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