Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is a thrilling, troubling vision of a future city. We recommend it for its scale and visual precision, while finding its proposed cure for class conflict much too easy.
Metropolis is worth its 148 minutes, though we would occasionally like to interrupt the lecture. Fritz Lang approaches science fiction with the certainty that a city can tell us how its inhabitants treat one another. Industry, wealth and human suffering belong in the same picture, and he insists on making us look at all three. The size of the undertaking matters because it makes exploitation feel like something a whole society has agreed to organise.
The city gives that society a frightening solidity: the buildings look as if their owners expect to remain in charge indefinitely. Cinematographers Karl Freund, Günther Rittau and Walter Ruttmann keep the city’s hard outlines legible amid the visual bustle. We felt oppressed by the city before we had much investment in anyone living there. The sheer scale of the structures did it; people seem to occupy whatever space the buildings have left for them.
Gustav Fröhlich makes Freder Fredersen so earnest that we occasionally want him to sit down. His broad gestures suit a film that expects its people to express their convictions with their whole bodies. Alfred Abel gives Joh Fredersen a more controlled presence, while Rudolf Klein-Rogge’s Rotwang readily accommodates the film’s appetite for exaggeration. Brigitte Helm gives Maria a stillness that can hold our attention against all that scenery. Her restraint is welcome when so much else is demanding that we look at it.
Lang, also credited as editor, makes the spectacle work through rhythm as much as size. He allows the images to establish their force, then presses on until the accumulation becomes oppressive. Gottfried Huppertz’s music supplies urgency and a sense of ceremony, fitting the film’s habit of treating industrial conflict as a Biblical trial. The combination can be stirring, although there are passages when the visual insistence and musical emphasis seem to be making the same point twice.
The difficulty is what Thea von Harbou and Lang’s screenplay wants us to accept about power. Its governing proposition is that the heart must mediate between the hands and the brain. That makes the conflict immediately understandable, but it also makes workers and bosses sound like parts of a body that simply need help getting along. We are asked to place considerable faith in understanding, without being given much reason to think that understanding changes who gives the orders. The film’s own depiction of exploitation makes that faith difficult to share.
Its influence on later science-fiction cities is easy to understand. Lang gives other filmmakers a way to make hierarchy visible before anybody has explained the rules. There is considerably more here than a collection of images for subsequent films to borrow, though: technological fascination, class anger and religious longing all compete for our attention. The mixture can feel excessive, but it keeps the city strange and unsettling even when its architecture has become familiar through imitation.
We would not defend every broad gesture or every renewed statement of the message. Some stretches feel longer than they need to, and the moral instruction grows wearing. Yet we kept finding something in the images worth attending to, even when the screenplay had exhausted our agreement. Choose an evening when nobody is in a hurry.
