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Preserve Then Show 2.Korr. 9/16/02 3:20 PM Side 126 Preserve then show 2.korr. 9/16/02 3:20 PM Side 126 SIDE 126 / DANISH FILM INSTITUTE / PRESERVE THEN SHOW RESTORATION Notes on the Proliferation of Metropolis (1927) MARTIN KOERBER “Metropolis” (Fritz Lang, DE, 1927). Photo: Ufa/DFI Metropolis is popular. It is impossible to imagine a retrospective of classic German silent films, science fiction films, or cinematic architecture (the series of possible topics could go on and on) without this film. Many have, at some point, seen something on the screen called Metropolis. But what could they have seen? Certainly not the film written in 1924 by Thea von Harbou and directed by Fritz Lang in 1925/26, because that film ceased to exist in April 1927. What is being offered under the title Metropolis by various distributors and archives, what is for sale on videocassettes, or occasionally seen on TV are versions, sometimes more and sometimes less removed from Lang’s film. On February 15, 2001, at the Berlin International Film Festival, a new restoration of the film was shown. It has been touring the world ever since. This new version, commissioned by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung (a public foundation holding the copyright to this film, as well as to almost all other German films produced prior to 1945) is the result of a joint effort of a working group, comprising of archivists from the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv (Federal German Film Archives, Berlin), Filmmuseum München, and the Deutsches Filminstitut in Wiesbaden. The author of this text was Preserve then show 2.korr. 9/16/02 3:20 PM Side 127 MARTIN KOERBER PRESERVE THEN SHOW / DANISH FILM INSTITUTE / SIDE 127 initially charged with researching the existing film material, and then hired by the Murnau-Stiftung to coordinate and oversee the actual restoration process. My initial findings were published in the book, Metropolis, A Cinematic Laboratory of Modern Architecture,1 while we were still working on the project. This essay is an updated version which attempts to summarize how Metropolis was destroyed and repeatedly reconstructed and restored over several decades. Above all, my thanks go to Enno Patalas for sharing his knowledge about the film with me for the good of the project. In his time as director of the Munich Filmmuseum he had put a tremendous effort into his own reconstructed version of Metropolis; furthermore, he reworked his notes into a documentation of the film and its surviving elements which formed the basis of the new editing structure. Meanwhile, his notes have grown into an independent publication, available in German, which makes it possible to understand on a scene by scene basis what happened to the "Gestalt" of this film, thus giving an in-depth insight into what was possible to restore, and what not.2 What I can do here, however, is give an idea of the proliferation of one of the most famous silent films of all time, emphasizing that the story of this film is by no means unusual. Many classics that we take for granted as they appear on the screen today have had a similar fate. What makes Metropolis special is the amount of documentation about the original form of the film, which has made it possible to trace the "real thing," and restore some of it from the surviving fragments in the best possible print quality. METROPOLIS APPEARS AND DISAPPEARS AGAIN The festive premiere of Metropolis took place at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo in Berlin on January 10, 1927. At the time, the length of the film was 4,189 meters (13,823 ft): at a projection speed of 24 frames per second (we can only guess at this today), meaning the showing lasted 153 minutes.3 The film was accompanied by music for a large orchestra by Gottfried Huppertz; the orchestral score and the piano arrangement, because of the numerous cues they contain, are one of the best sources for those who want more accurate data about the form of the premiere version.4 As early as December 1926, the American representative of Ufa, Frederick Wynne- Jones, brought Metropolis to the US and showed it to Paramount, who intended to distribute the film in America. Apparently, it was immediately decided to cut down the monumental film for the American market to “normal” feature length. The playwright Channing Pollock was commissioned to do this work. The changes he made in the film were nothing short of drastic: The basic conflict between Joh Fredersen, the industrialist (Alfred Abel), and Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), the scientist-inventor, namely their rivalry over a dead woman, Hel, was completely removed from the film, and with it the rationale for creating the machine woman, and finally the destruction of Metropolis.5 Also extirpated was the pursuit of Freder (Gustav Fröhlich), Fredersen’s son, Georgy (Erwin Biswanger), and Josaphat (Theodore Loos) by the Thin Man (Fritz Rasp), as well as the majority of scenes taking place in the “Yoshiwara,” Metropolis’s red light district. Further deletions involved the extended pursuit scenes at the end of the film. In order to restore the comprehensibility of the film as a whole after these deletions, it was necessary to make radical changes in the inter-titles, and Preserve then show 2.korr. 9/16/02 3:20 PM Side 128 SIDE 128 / DANISH FILM INSTITUTE / PRESERVE THEN SHOW RESTORATION occasionally to change, in important ways, the editing of surviving scenes. After all the changes were made, the American version was still approximately 3,100 meters (10,230 ft) long. Pollock summed it up this way: „As it stood when I began my job of structural editing, Metropolis had no restraint or logic. It was symbolism run such riot that people who saw it couldn‘t tell what the picture was all about. I have given it my meaning.“6 In Berlin, Metropolis was withdrawn after a few weeks. The reasons for doing this are still unclear. Perhaps here, too, it was felt that the excessive length of the film was an obstacle to its distribution in the rest of Germany. On April 7, 8, and 27, 1927, the Ufa’s board of directors held meetings about the film and decided that “Metropolis, in its American version, after the removal of titles that tend to be communist in nature,” would also be screened in Germany.7 The surviving documents do not indicate whether Fritz Lang was involved in the adaptation of the second German version of his film. It seems unlikely, as he is never mentioned in the lists which give the names of people busily editing, screening, and re-editing the film. We do know that Lang was very outspoken in complaining about what had happened to his project when asked by British journalists during a stay in London in September of 1927: "I love films and so I shall never go to America. Their experts have slashed my best film, Metropolis, so cruelly that I dare not see it while I am in England."8 Some decades later Lang would even go so far as to refer to Metropolis as a film "that does no longer exist (sic)". The altered version of Metropolis was submitted to the Berlin film censorship office on August 5, 1927, with cuts largely modeled on the American version and with inter- titles changed as necessary, and was then, at a length of 3,241 meters (10,695 ft), released for distribution. Only in this and similarly shortened versions that were exported by Ufa to other countries was it ever shown outside Berlin. Over seventy years have passed since the premiere screening of Metropolis and the destruction of the original version which occurred almost immediately. This most famous of all German silent films became an almost equally famous case for the history books. Over the past forty years or more, film archives have been struggling to produce copies from the extant mutilated versions that are “better”, meaning more complete than the versions marketed by Ufa and Paramount. It is difficult to trace the history of these efforts, because many of these versions were never precisely documented, at least up until now. By comparing the many different copies stored in the world’s film archives, it has however been possible to deduce from the film material itself the changes made to the film, as well as the attempts to reverse those changes. Of course, it was not only impossible, but also unnecessary to look at the dozens of Metropolis copies that exist on this planet. My preferred method was to single out and concentrate on the surviving nitrate source material from which in one way or another all these copies were derived. In its advertisements for Metropolis, the Ufa publicity department boasted that allegedly 620,000 meters (2.046 million ft) of negative film and 1,300,000 meters (4.29 million ft) of positive film had been used in the film’s production. Compared to Preserve then show 2.korr. 9/16/02 3:20 PM Side 129 MARTIN KOERBER PRESERVE THEN SHOW / DANISH FILM INSTITUTE / SIDE 129 a premiere screening length of 4,189 meters, this would mean a shooting ratio of approximately 148:1. If this data is accurate, one might deduce that from this more than ample material Ufa not only failed to extract the shots declared no good, but also, contrary to accepted film industry practice, copied more than double the amount of rushes – the only way to explain the use such a huge amount of positive film. In other words, these figures are scarcely plausible, although they support legends about Fritz Lang, characterizing him as a sadistic circus trainer of his actors, and a heedless squanderer of material.
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