Introduction to METROPOLIS (Lang, 1927)

The Image of the Baltic a Festschrift For Nils Blomkvist, 2012

The author would like to thank the conference participants for valuable remarks. 2 Karl Freund, who had been the cinematographer of Metropolis, was also the cinematographer of Dracula: he had moved to Hollywood in the late 1920s. 3 Cf. Elsaesser, Thomas: Metropolis (London, BFI, 2000), pp. 57-69. 4 For more information, see the homepage of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ ID=23221&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html (2010-02-18). 5 The German weekly newspaper Die Zeit has had extensive coverage of the story on the newly discovered and restored print of Metropolis. Cf. the German newspaper's coverage, which in part is the newspaper's own English language translations of its articles:

in Lavoro! Storia, organizzazione e narrazione del lavoro nel XX Secolo, a cura di N. di Nunzio, M.Troilo, Aracne, Roma 2016, pp. 259-269., 2016

An examination of the myth of Prometheus in Fritz Lang's science-fiction epic Metropolis. This chapter examines the Promethean connotations of the film's plot and characters, and posits the iteration of the myth by Goethe as inspiration for Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou.

The essay will argue that Metropolis is not only a film about a futuristic city in which class struggle occurs, but an allegory to the problems that modernity had brought in interwar Weimar Germany, with leitmotifs relevant to this day. Modernity is suggested to be interpreted by Lang and his wife Harbou as a lack of communication, or dialogue between humans and their own values, which will be explored and explained in the introduction and the context. The thesis of the lack of dialogue is then arbitrarily separated in three, namely the impending issues brought by the dehumanisation generated by the machine which disconnects humans from their very humanity, by the desacralisation of the robot which dissolves all human morals and spirituality, as well as the dictatorship, which profits from both dehumanisation and desacralisation by gaining profit and solidifying power, reinforcing at the same the issues voluntarily. Specific scenes will be analysed to back those three elements, while expressionist strategies will be examined in tandem with these scenes as they are useful both artistically and diegetically. The piece is more evidently recommended for those who are interested in the film Metropolis, as well as for those researching into the context of interwar Germany, which is examined and exemplified by the film at hand.

Both Crary and Burch discuss the varying degrees and progression of different cinematic techniques and their effects on entertainment and the viewer. The progression of monocular and one-dimensional film into a more uncanny and three-dimensional experience creates disorientation between the subject and the viewer as experienced in Lang’s 1927 version of the acclaimed film Metropolis.

Metropolis and Our Uncanny Reality Both Crary and Burch discuss the varying degrees and progression of different cinematic techniques and their effects on entertainment itself and the viewer. The progression of monocular and one-dimensional film into a more uncanny and three-dimensional experience creates disorientation between the subject and the viewer as experienced in Lang’s 1927 version of the acclaimed film Metropolis .

Contrary to the mainstream view held by film critics, Weimar cinema does not patently represent society’s degenerate psychological drives and sexual behaviours that accompanied the horrors of industrial warfare, nor does it clearly represent the destabilization of the bourgeois family induced by political and socio-economic modernization. Rather, Weimar cinema reflects the deep German ambivalence of modernity experienced in the 1920s, blurring a distinctive sexual identity and gendered authority crisis. This is explicit within Friedrich Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and M (1931). On one hand, the dialogue, symbolism and mise- en-scéne of these films foreground the prevailing threats that the “new man” and “new woman” posed on conservative family morals and the stable patriarchal order. However, on the other hand, these films simultaneously fortify feminist liberation away from a strict patriarchal order, and fantasize sexual emancipation in the form of extramarital affairs and homosexuality. Thus, Weimar cinema recognizes the ambivalence of this new cultural environment, obscuring a definite decline in “idealized” moral and cultural structures. This sense of ambiguity represents the torn German response to modernity that both inspired the desire for gendered and sexual liberation away from traditional norms, and provoked contradictory fears of sexual violence, political aggression and familial fragility.

Critical Planning, 2012

The Japanese animated film “Metropolis” (2001) drew on two earlier visual narratives sharing its name: Fritz Lang’s famed silent film (1927) and Osamu Tezuka’s early postwar comic book (1949). This paper understands these three tales as instances of what Walter Benjamin referred to as the dialectical image. It examines the imaginary cities offered up by the stories, places them in the context of their contemporary urban and political discourses, and relates them to applications of military and police violence over the arc of the last century as understood through the work of Giorgio Agamben. Making a few observations on the topologies of the dialectical image and of the state of exception, it raises the question of where their relationship might be taking us now.