GR-related: Burgess on Metropolis

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

"Klein-Rogge was carrying nubile actresses off to rooftops when King Kong was still on the tit with no motor skills to speak of. Well, one nubile actress anyway, Brigitte Helm in METROPOLIS. Great movie. Exactly the world Pökler and evidently quite a few others were dreaming about those days, a Corporate City-state where technology was the source of power ..." --- Gravity's Rainbow, p. 578

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jun/03/observer-anthony-burgess-prize-fritz-lang-metropolis-childhood


* ... It is a melodramatic plot, and the implausibilities stick out like sore thumbs. Some of the acting would be booed even on an old-time barnstorming circuit. But realism is not wanted here: Fritz Lang is working in the German tradition of Expressionismus. The aim of that movement was to thud home a thesis, usually political, with every possible device – symbolism, song, choral chant, stylised movement, decor – and a total abandonment of such traditional dramatic properties as character.

The film is, for all its faults, one of our few cinematic classics, and this is because it provides icons. The visual exaggerations are metaphors that stick in the mind. Lang first saw the towers of Metropolis when he approached the New York skyline from the sea, but his own imagined city borrows only the Babel aspect – “Let us build a tower that will reach the sky”. His pasteboard architecture chills because of its beauty: the Paternoster Tower has, in its structure as well as its name, a biblical resonance, a cathedral-like quality which announces a new religion. The worship of power and money is seen in New York not in an architectural philosophy: the skyscrapers are not bound together in an urban plan, they are each a monument to individual thrust, and, in New York, individualism is rampant. But in Lang’s Metropolisindividualism is the property of one man only, the Master. We are in a totalitarian state, and the architecture is totalitarian.

Lang’s vision is, of course, prophetic, but the prophecy has never been fulfilled. Hitler came to power seven years after the film was completed, but his tyranny took a form different from Joh Fredersen’s. Fredersen’s power is at least sane in the American manner. It is based on money and is totally American. There is nothing militaristic or racial in it.

Film is a visual medium, and, if the task of literature is to stud the brain with quotations, cinema’s job is to cram it with images which transcend story line and feed the need for myth. There are very few films which have done this. We are told by the French post-structuralists that the writer doesn’t write: the writer is written, is controlled by the language he uses. And so Lang was controlled by the limitations of black and white, by mocked-up urban landscapes which never pretended to be real, and probably by the strange ambiguous beauty of Brigitte Helm. The film was never meant to be propaganda. Lang admits that he was primarily fascinated by machines, above all perhaps by the huge machine which is the film-making complex.

When I say, though with many reservations, that Metropolis is a movie that changed my life I perhaps really mean that it changed my childhood. “In the lost childhood of Judas,” wrote George Russell, “Christ was betrayed.” Perhaps our adult lives are nothing more than sophisticated replays of our extreme youth ... *