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Written by Pete Timmermann Thursday, 22 July 2010 10:25

The real draw here is that it now includes about 25 minutes of footage recently found in Buenos Aires, which hasn't been seen in the 83 years since the film's premiere.

In this age of home video (and worse, digital downloads), I always urge people to see classic movies in the theatre when the opportunity presents itself. There's not as much of a call for repertory theatres since we can pretty much see whatever we want whenever we want, but that doesn't mean that you're seeing the film the way the filmmakers intended-in most cases, you can safely assume that you aren't.

It is enough of a treat to see Fritz Lang's 1927 sci-fi masterpiece Metropolis on the big screen—I never have before. But the real draw here is that it now includes about 25 minutes of footage recently found in Buenos Aires, which hasn't been seen in the 83 years since the film's premiere, and has never before been seen in the United States. The short version of the deal with this is when the film originally premiered in Berlin in 1927, it was about 153 minutes long, but soon after its premiere censors and all manner of incredulous dickheads laid their dirty hands on the film, and by the time it made it to the United States (still in 1927) it ran only 90 minutes. It has undergone various restorations over the years—the DVD I own of the film, put out by Kino in 2002, runs 124 minutes and features a blurb from J. Hoberman on the package: “…The most complete version since its Berlin premiere.” That is to say, whenever bits of footage thought lost surfaced they were reinstated, but the remaining 30 minutes of film missing from this release was assumed lost forever; that is, until all but about six minutes of it surfaced in a near-complete print found in Buenos Aires.

So, this version of Metropolis is by far the most complete and true to Lang's vision as any version that has been available in your lifetime. Kino's done their usual stellar job in putting the film in context as best they can—we get intertitles explaining what's missing in that six minutes of footage still lost, Gottfried Huppertz's original score is in place on the soundtrack, and we get nice title cards at the beginning explaining more or less what I did above, so it's easy to get up to speed even if you've never seen any version of Metropolis before. (It bears mentioning that even the bastardized versions are still brilliant.)

But how does it hold up with the new footage? Honestly, going into the film I was worried I wouldn't be able to spot what was new—I've seen Metropolis several times in my life, but the most recent time was many years ago. How sharp could my eye be for the new footage? It turns out it is very easy to spot—it is of lower quality than the previously extant parts of the film, so you know what's new right away. In addition to looking very noticeably worse, the aspect ratio is slightly different on the new footage, too. Also interesting is I imagined it would maybe be one or two lengthy scenes, but in fact it's more like fifty different thirty-second bits interspersed throughout the film.

As one would expect, the “new” version of Metropolis is just as brilliant as it has ever been, and its storytelling is a lot more lucid now, too. That said, it kind of takes you out of it the way the film goes back and forth between clean-looking footage and beaten-up footage. I know that all clean footage is out of the question at this point, but part of me wishes that they had just ran with the whole film being beaten up, if only for continuity's sake. Even so, this Metropolis restoration is every film historian and sci-fi buff's wet dream, and should not be missed; I wouldn't hold my breath that that last six minutes will turn up anytime soon. | Pete Timmermann