Episode 752: Metropolis (1927)

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
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Speaker 2 (00:08):
People say, good money to see this movie. When they
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Speaker 4 (00:16):
In the protection booth, everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.

Speaker 5 (00:20):
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Speaker 1 (00:25):
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Speaker 2 (02:08):
Welcome to the projection Booth. I'm your host. Mike White
joined me once again as mister Federico Bertolini.

Speaker 5 (02:14):
Hello, thank you, great to be back.

Speaker 2 (02:17):
Also joining us is mister Ranjit Sandhu.

Speaker 4 (02:20):
H do you do?

Speaker 2 (02:22):
We are kicking off a new sci fi July with
one of the granddaddies of science fiction films, Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
Co written with his wife, Thea von Harbo, the film
tells the story of future city Metropolis, which is run
by industrialists Joe Federson. The potential power behind the throne
is mad scientist Rotwang. Meanwhile, Joe's son, Frader, is a

(02:44):
playboy who happens to meet the hero of the workers, Maria.
It's the story of Freder and Maria that propels the narrative,
which explores class relations, mysticisms, science, and a whole lot more.
We're going to do our best to spoilis nearly century
old film. Haven't seen Metropolis? Please do so now you
will not regret it. So, Federico, when was the first

(03:05):
time you saw Metropolis? And what did you think?

Speaker 5 (03:08):
It was sitting at my desk in high school on
a laptop that was about like twenty inches and it
was the twenty ten restoration that had just came out,
and I heard about the fine in Argentina, the sixteen
mil so I was like so excited. It was all
over the internet. I went out and I found it

(03:29):
and I loved it. It had such a poll in culture.
It was just Metropolis was this thing, you know up
here in the heavens that everything almost tried to and
people emulated and copied and stole off of endlessly. So
it was nice to finally go back to the original
and to see what all the fuss was about.

Speaker 2 (03:50):
And Rian, Geet, how about yourself?

Speaker 4 (03:52):
There's a story behind how I first came to see this.
In high school, everyone who knew me knew that I
was the only kid who liked silent movies, which made
me the village idiot. So autumn of nineteen seventy six,
eleventh grade, three kids burst into the classroom beaming smiles,

(04:15):
telling me excitedly about this great movie they're watching their
film history class, something called Metropolis and it's silent, and
it was wonderful Metropolis. I've never heard of this movie, Metropolis,
but I thought, what a role reversal, other kids telling
me about a silent movie. And a few months later,
it was May twenty first, nineteen seventy seven, Saturday night,

(04:40):
ten pm, K and Emmy Channel five Albuquerque PBS Movie
Theater that night showed Metropolis, and I decided, what the heck,
I'm going to watch this. I'm curious now. I watched it,
and from the moment it started, I was completely mesmerized,
couldn't take my eyes off the thing. And I did
and know why because I watched this movie and it

(05:04):
is so ridiculous, so preposterous, so childish. It's like a
really bad comic book that an eight year old boy
would throw in the trash. Why am I hooked on this?
Why can't I tear myself away from it? And then
I started obsessing it. Two months later, it popped up

(05:26):
at a local cinema, Don Panchos, and I knew they
would crop it in wide screen and went there and
they cropped it to widescreen, and I watched it and
this is not the movie I saw on PBS at all.
It's totally different. Why am I seeing a different Metropolis
here and a different one on PBS? And then both

(05:50):
versions vanished. I've been able to get a bad copy
of the PBS version. I have never been able to
get another copy of the one I saw don Poncious
And that's what drove me crazy. What is going on
with this movie? And then I found out it was
massacred almost from the time it was released. And you

(06:11):
know that, I get obsessed when I discover that the
movie's been massacred. I want to know what it was
originally Like, I grew up watching the Radio Gaga music video.

Speaker 2 (06:23):
That was my exposure to Metropolis. Thank goodness for Queen
and David Bowie, between the two of them, because Radio
Gaga gave us gave me a lot of exposure to Metropolis,
and under pressure gave me a ton of exposure to Nospharatu.
So I saw Nospharatu in college, absolutely loved it, but

(06:45):
never saw Metropolis projected on the big screen until I
think it was the twenty ten restoration, which, oddly my
mom wanted to go see my mom and her husband,
and then my wife and I. We went to a
community college that we had, you know, my mom had
actually attended that years and years before, and we went

(07:07):
there and they showed it on a pretty darn big screen.
No live orchestral accompany, meant just the soundtrack that they
had with the film, which is, I believe the same
version that now is on Keno Laura bur It's very
very similar, if not that exactly. I can't say that
I'm in love with this film. It's very very interesting,

(07:29):
and I really appreciate the restoration, and I kind of
like that the Argentinian footage or the other footage that
they cut into this looks kind of shitty because I
can really tell the difference as to what is being
added versus what was there before. And I know to
your point, Renjeet, there are so many versions of this movie,

(07:50):
and it is just wild how many are out there.
Even last night, I was trying to get a copy
of it to play for myself, and I said, oh,
I'll just go out to Amazon and I'll buy the
version that's out there that's two hours long. That's not
two and a half hours long. I'm just like, oh
my god, like I just spent three dollars for nothing.

(08:11):
Thanks a lot, Amazon, Why the hell do you have
this two hour version? But regardless, Yeah, I've watched a
ton this week in preparation for our discussion. Like you said,
it's mesmerizing. It is very mesmerizing. There's a lot of
interesting stuff here. Is it fully successful? I don't think so.
Like you said, there's a lot of comic book ye

(08:34):
kind of stuff here. I'm not sure if it's saying
what some people think that it's saying. But I'm very
excited to kind of unpack this movie just because it
is so influential. Listening to some of the commentary tracks,
it's like, maybe you want to stop talking about Blade
Runner throughout the entire commentary track for Metropolis, maybe talk

(08:54):
about the film Metropolis instead. But it's been a real
delight digging into thistually digging into Fritzlang. I mean, the
guy is so fascinating, especially all the self mythologizing that
he does, and especially around this time of his career
with the whole Gerbels and the escape from Germany and

(09:14):
all those things, and it's like, all right, So yeah,
I'm very excited to talk to you guys about this,
just because there's just so much to unpack.

Speaker 5 (09:22):
I'm so glad I'm not the only person. I thought
I was going to be the only person on this
recording that had mixed feelings about Metropolis. You know that
you guys would be like the uber fans, but uh yeah,
there's like a realistic point to take about Metropolis that
it's many many things in one and it has an allure,
but like you said, around you it's like a comic book.

(09:43):
There's so many things that just like the tonal shifts,
just up and down, up and down, you have like
the most amazing sequences of incredible power next to the
most like norm just strange kind of cringe stuff, and
you wonder yourself, how did it end up like this?
And sure enough you go go in the history and
you find out why.

Speaker 4 (10:02):
I don't know if either of you has read An
Drummond's master's Thesis about Metropolis, which is online for free.
When I read it just a few weeks ago, was
blown away. I like people who are smarter than I am,
and Drummond is probably twenty times smarter than I am.

(10:25):
She knew the history of German politics and the German
labor movement and its influence from the Bolshevik Revolution. She
was able to unpack a lot of the meaning of
the movie. In Germany in the nineteen twenties, labor unions
were not what we have now in the United States,

(10:48):
and businesses were not what we have now in the
United States. Businesses were brutal. And what we see in
Metropolis with all these men working furiously on these synchronized
gears that don't do anything and have no meaning, with
steam coming up for no reason. That was about how

(11:10):
workers retreated ten hours a day, NonStop, no time to
sneeze and blow your nose, catch a breath. Nothing there
was relentless. It was tailorism. Frederick Taylor in the United
States tried to streamline business by doing scientific motion studies.

(11:35):
How can you do the most amount of work with
the fewest number of motions as quickly as possible? And
a lot of business leaders took his ideas, and he
had good ideas, but they applied them mercilessly. The employees
literally did not know what they were doing. A guy

(11:56):
had to make bolts all day long. Make a bolt,
make a bolt, make a bolt, make them both ten
hours a day, had no idea what the bolts were for,
no idea where they were going to be used or why.
So there was no sense of fulfillment in what the
worker was doing. So there was an idea that if
the employees understood what it was that they were doing,

(12:20):
if there was better communication between management and employees, workers
would feel more fulfilled. That idea comes through in Metropolis,
and that specifically explicitly what Metropolis was dealing with. And
labor unions at the time, as I say, were not

(12:41):
like they are now. When they got angry, they got
out their guns, they got out their bombs. There was
blood in the streets, and some labor union activists organizers
realized that this is going nowhere. We have to reach
an agreen with management. Some managers are saying that we

(13:04):
have to reach out, stretch out our hands, make a
deal with labor. One of those who said that was
Paul Silverberg, who sat on the UFA board. UFA was
the studio that produced Metropolis. He said that as Metropolis
was being filmed, so this is a lot of the

(13:28):
context of what the story was about. The head, hands
in heart communication, the mediator between management and employees. So
the terms that sound very silly and babyish when we
watch them now had a lot of resonance in nineteen
twenty six, nineteen twenty seven, and it was not babyish

(13:50):
back then. So if you have not read and Drummond's
Master's Thesis, please read and Drummond's Master's Thesis.

Speaker 2 (14:00):
So much of this film is about labor and the
use of men as machines, and then there's the man
machine itself. You know, we're talking about machines having hearts.
You know, this is the heart machine, and you've got
the head machine and all these things. To have the
laborers living below ground in this underground city where it's

(14:23):
very I mean, we'll talk about HG. Wells, but they're
very much the morlocks of the city. And then you've
got the Loi or whatever living above and they're just
living this care free existence. You know, you've got the
Sun's Club, which is this whole thing of it could
be spelt either way with Sun or Son, but you've
got this whole idea of these sons that are just

(14:44):
up there enjoying their lives and playing all of these games.
You've got the fetishization of their bodies. And meanwhile the
rest of the workers are just you know, faceless lumps
most of the time with their shoulders hunched in those
dark uniforms on cut to those suns up there playing

(15:04):
their sports games, you know, very Leney refinstall with some
of these icons and these statues and all these things,
and they're being entertained, of course by what I have
to imagine our prostitutes that are just hanging around the
Sun's Club. They're living this care free life, and meanwhile
the rest of the workers are just living in this

(15:25):
underground dwelling and not really even being allowed to see
the sun apart from possibly when they do their shift change.

Speaker 4 (15:34):
And the quarter's ends. In the Love of the Suns
the Eternal Gardens, that was for me the scariest part
of the movie. They were not allowed to have personalities.
The personalities were prescribed by someone on high. They had
to act a certain way, feel a certain way. That

(15:57):
was very creepy for me, talking about the rich people
at the top and the poor people at the bottom.
That that is such a wonderfully exaggerated way to distinguish
upper class from lower class. They made it very literal.

Speaker 2 (16:13):
Well, it's almost like there's no middle class.

Speaker 4 (16:16):
Yeah, well the middle class there are those are the
little puppets on the sidewalk and the little puppet cars,
and they're the ones who go to the Yoshiwara club
and they have all the fun they so I guess
that's the middle class.

Speaker 2 (16:31):
Though I would say the Yoshiwara the way that they're dressed,
it feels very much you know, you see a lot
of tuxedos and a lot of you know, to me,
it feels more like upper crust than even middle class.
With that, to have the the guy who's in charge,
like I know, later on this year, I'm going to
be talking about the film Megalopolis, which obviously takes a
lot from Metropolis as well. But to have this whole

(16:53):
thing of Joe Frederson lording over everything in his central
office where he's got televisions, he can see whatever he
wants to see, He's got all of his agents, he's
got Joseph fat Is. Does the Thin Man have a
name or is he just the thin Man?

Speaker 4 (17:10):
Does the thin Man or does Smala slim Slim?

Speaker 2 (17:14):
Yes, not to be confused with the Dashall Hammett story
the Thin Man, but would definitely, oh man, he's fantastic
I love Slim. I think that he is wonderful and
just the way that he creeps around and everything. He's
got a great look to him. I think so many
of these actors have great looks to them, and especially
somebody like Joe. We've got the very straight eyebrows and

(17:38):
very little reaction to too much. He just seems disappointed
almost all the time. But as far as the labor
stuff goes, it doesn't feel like he's that much of
the villain of the piece, whereas me as a more
of the ninety nine percent, I'm just like, oh, yeah,
he's the guy in charge. He's the guy who I
would want to see drawn and quarter by the end
of the film. But instead it's more about let's mediate

(18:01):
this stuff. We're looking for the mediator, and really becomes
almost like a Messiah story where you've got, oh, the
Sun is going to be the mediator and he's the person,
and we have to have him anointed by Maria, and
of course having Maria and her name being so close
to Mary, and it just feels, well, it doesn't feel
there are so many biblical things going on in this movie.

(18:21):
That's just so many layers of stuff, and sometimes it
feels kind of like a confusing mix of layers. But
I do enjoy like trying to pull this thing apart
and seeing all of the different stuff as far as
like the Seven Deadly Sins, the Tower of Babel, just
all of these biblical items that you have inside of here,
and it's like, okay, well, how does that relate to

(18:42):
what this overall story is.

Speaker 5 (18:44):
We wouldn't be talking about Metropolis one hundred years later
if it was like a perfect cinema object, if it
said everything it wanted to say, and it was like
you know, A to B, two C and all this
kind of stuff, if it was like sure enough, it
was a masterpiece. Of course, everybody would call at a masterpiece.
But it is a masterpiece. I mean they still call
it a masterpiece despite the problems that it has. And

(19:05):
that aspect of Frader being the messiah sent from on high.
You know, he starts the movie at the Club of
the Suns, almost staring into the camera looking at Maria.
That's like the inciting incident. That's his view into the
other world. He had no idea that his bruughs toil
in such misery, and he goes literally down to the
office to meet his father. He goes to find Georgie

(19:28):
and then he goes even further and it's it's so
on the nose that you kind of roll your eyes.
But then you're thinking, you know, nineteen twenty six, what
is the audience that's getting this. I'm not saying that
the German audience in nineteen twenty seven isn't sophisticated, but
he's casting a wide net so that everybody can get
something out of it. But that aspect to Freder being
the mediator, it's like, how well can you trust, you know,

(19:52):
at the workers at the I don't want to skip
to the end, but like the workers have the right
to be suspicious of the son of the guy that's
literally oppressing them, telling them no, I will mediate between
labor and capital for you. And I mean, Mike, I
have the same idea of you. I just like violence
against the working, the oppressor class, you know, the owners

(20:14):
have to go to the wall, all that kind of stuff.
So Frederson is like, not my kind of person. And
at the end, I'm with you. I want him on
the funeral pier. And they say as much. They say
as much. They literally surround them and they say, look,
that's the guy that's responsible for our suffering. Kill him.
But of course that third way of like trying to

(20:35):
trying to find a balance between the left wing and
the basically the fascism, the quasi fascism. I don't want
to say the film is fascist, but what it presents
is strong ultimate state control over people's lives, trying to
find that middle way. That's the aspect that is the
most controversial, the thing we can talk about the most,
that people will argue about the most, but it's the
thing that unfortunately is kind of like the undoing of

(20:58):
it in some respects Well.

Speaker 2 (21:00):
I did want to talk about as far as the
audiences go, and just a little bit of the background
of the film itself. The idea of this being this
kind of populist, you know, all things for all people
type of film I think, and please Renji feel free
to correct me. I've been reading a lot about that
whole power UFA met contract and the agreement that was

(21:22):
going on between who was a paramount UFA and then
Metro Golden Mayor. I believe it was, and just that
it was this whole idea of the German film industry
being so insular that they're successful at for a while
with the way that they're running things, but then they
start getting these imports of American films and it becomes

(21:44):
this real threat to the German national cinema, and it's like, no,
we need to reach out, we need to start to
get out of just Germany. The imports are kind of
taking things over, and this was really supposed to be
an attempt to bridge this gap and then ended up
blowing up in their faces. I mean, this was kind
of the undoing. This was the Heaven's Gate of nineteen

(22:06):
twenty seven.

Speaker 4 (22:07):
That's a long story. I do not completely understand it.
But the Hollywood studios were practicing gangster capitalism around much
of the world. Germans were doing a nice job of
making German movies and showing them in German cinemas, and
everyone was happy. Hollywood took its movies that had already

(22:31):
amortized and let German cinemas have them for a stretch
of price that they could get any other movie. So
Hollywood movies flooded German screens. German movies could hardly get played.
In the earlier days. There were some imports from several

(22:52):
countries in Europe. Germany among them. I don't know if
they did very well. They did some business, and Hollywood
like to bring them in now and then. It was
almost like free money. But Germans realized that in order
to keep their business going, they had to compete with Hollywood.

(23:12):
The Hollywood capitalists didn't like competition. They didn't like to
hear that sort of talk. Ufer was having financial troubles
because of all this Hollywood interference. They got a good
deal from Hollywood, from Paramount Metro gold Mayor, who would
bail them out and fund their movies, and they were

(23:36):
foolish to accept that offer. It would be better to
just close down the studio than to accept that offer.
They accepted the offer, they very quickly regretted it. Heads
rolled Eric Palmer, who was the only producer that Fitzlang
ever liked. He was on the Alps for a while.

(23:56):
They squeezed him out. They let him back in later. Yeh, yeah,
it was just a bad situation. This was the undoing
of UFA. The person who bailed out UFA shortly after
Metropolis came out was Alfred Hugenberg, who was another gangster capitalist.

(24:20):
He was a German oligarch who supported a certain guy
named Hitler, and he was very much opposed to mediating
with labor. He wanted to rule employees with an iron fist.
And I'm sure he never watched Metropolis, but I'm sure
his assistants told him that you don't want that COMMI

(24:45):
pinko stuff showing in your cinemas. You've got to cut
this thing, and he ordered that it be cut. Anything
that remotely wreaked of communism had to be cut. The
odd thing is, there is no communism in the Moody.
There was something called mercy in the movie. There's no
communism in it, but they slashed it to pieces and

(25:07):
then just treated it like a piece of junk. The
movie did not break the studio itself. There was a
lot of hanky panky with cooking the books. The production
of Faust discharged against Metropolis, the couple of other movie
productions are charged against Metropolis, and Studio Overhead was charged

(25:29):
against Metropolis. Metropolis only cost about two hundred thousand dollars,
and that money all came from Paramount. It didn't even
come from UFA. But when they cooked the books, they
made it look like Metropolis bankrupted the studio. It's just
not true.

Speaker 5 (25:43):
At all, it's a useful thing to take the fall
economic protectionism. And basically, like you said, gangsterism in Europe
reminds me so much of Hitchcock when he struggled to
get his movies made in England and they had trouble
exporting them to the United States. The United States wanted
their movies in England. They wanted to basically destroy the market,

(26:04):
but they didn't want to have to import. They didn't
want like a tit for tat reciprocal relationship. The other
one too, that that brings up to is the CanCon
laws in Canada, I think was its seventies, eighties and
nineties where they had like the economic stipulation that a
certain percentage television had to be Canadian producing Canadian and
were kind of living through a resurgence of that economic protectionism.

(26:28):
And you know, I thought I never lived to see
that get you know, liberalism died of the chopping block.
But so here here we are.

Speaker 2 (26:38):
I think that the rumors were or the historical view
of Metropolis is that guess a bankrupt to the studio.
Nobody watched it, Nobody had liked this film. It was
just a complete disaster. And as far as I know,
that's not the case. Like this was a smash hit
for a while in different in different markets, but it

(27:00):
was really lambasted and just like, oh no, no, this
is the one that has ruined the entire industry.

Speaker 4 (27:07):
In fol Taire, I think you said history is a
bag of tricks. We play on the dead right when
you start digging into the primary sources, you discover that
a lot of what's in the history books does not
hold up.

Speaker 2 (27:20):
And also kind of wound into this whole thing is
the idea of it was too long two and a
half hours or whatever. The final running time was way
too long, and we're just going to chop this thing
to pieces and we're going to make a much more
interesting and better film, stronger film out of this. And
just the reason why we have the two and a

(27:42):
half hour version of this is basically because of a mistake.
It's because of movie collectors. You know, we talked to
Dennis Bartak on the show a long time ago about
his book A Thousand Cuts and just the idea of
what role movie collectors can play in preserving films. I mean,
Federico and I were just getting back from a festival
all about film preservation. It's so important that we have

(28:04):
these collectors out there, really who had these unique versions
of these films, so that they're able to actually bring
them back together. I mean, that's why we have this
two and a half hour version. It's still missing pieces.
There are definitely inner titles in here that explain, well,
this is when you know Freder breaks Maria out of
rot Wang's prison, and they all right, great, you know,

(28:25):
I would love to see those things, but for now,
we're not going to. But someday we might. And that's
the thing is that over the years we have seen
smaller renovation through restorations of this film throughout I can't
even reckon I mean, Ranjie, you're talking about two versions
that you saw within a matter of weeks that were different.
Just imagine how many of these versions. And we haven't

(28:48):
even talked about the Moroder version. We'll talk about that
later on in the program. But just all of these
different things. And a lot of that was because they said, oh, well,
the version that played was terrible, and we need to
make a better film lot of this, and they hired
here in the US, they hired a playwright, Channing Pollock
was it, who recut the film, and that became the

(29:08):
version that so many people saw for so long. Though
now you know Federico was asking me for a copy
of it, I'm like, I can't find it. I can't
find that particular cut of it, which is kind of
good that we're moving past this, but those historical documents
should really exist as well.

Speaker 1 (29:24):
You know.

Speaker 2 (29:24):
It's kind of like the whole original kind of Star
Wars things. It's like, I want that to exist. I
don't care if George Lucas wants us to see this
whatever version because he's made several different versions of films
as well. I want that original document to exist. So
I want the original document of Metropolis to exist. I
also want all of those different cuts that have come

(29:45):
about over the years, like give me that Blade runner
box where you had the five different versions of it,
and since then, fan editors have done their own versions
of these things, Like I want that stuff preserved as
much as I want the original version that was shown
in nineteen twenty seven and to still be around.

Speaker 5 (30:01):
I wanted to thank you Ranjit personally over the are
that you actually sent me a copy of It's on YouTube. Unfortunately,
it's what it's like sixteen frames per second and it's
terrible quality. But it is the New Zealand copy correct, right,
the Australian version that is similar to the American but
it's not the same, which is just absurd. You know

(30:22):
that you really can't get the exact copy. Like I
said when I talked about the first time that I
saw it, I saw it in the quote unquote full
restored version, and like you might, I'm hoping and I
know somewhere, you know, there's the footage. I just know
that someday Metropolis will be as near complete as it
can get. But I always wanted to see the American

(30:44):
version because I'm one of those people that always loves
to watch like different cultures make the same. And the
thing that I remember about Metropolis hearing about it was
that it was three hours long. You know, people said like, oh,
it's three hours long. It bombed at the cinemas, just
like you said, they fell for the trap. And sure
enough I looked into it and I found out that
of course they would play it at a different speed

(31:04):
and so take longer, it would last longer. But when
I first watched it, I was completely captivated, like just
you know, it got into your mind, and yeah, I
didn't think about the length. I tend to not think
about like movie lengths. It's just like, once you're in
the movie, you're in the movie. That's it done. But
for two hours twenty five minutes now, and then the

(31:26):
original release was one hundred and fifty three minutes. That's
like Prisoners by Move. You know. It's a bunch of
films like Dark Knight, you know, just these movies that
everybody loves but they don't want to say, like, oh,
it's too long. You know. I think the problem too
is that it's silent and all that kind of stuff.
You know, Oh it's hokey, it's old. I don't want
to deal with it. But two and a half hours long,

(31:49):
it moves like nothing. Even if the guy at the
time in Germany made that joke in the newspaper about
how like it's like an hour in and then it
cuts and it's says the end of the end of
the overture or the prologue, and you're just like, it's
almost like a comic thing of just like what and
then you have the intermetso oh gosh, no, no, no's

(32:11):
it moves like nothing else.

Speaker 2 (32:13):
The other thing that doesn't help is the acting. I
really like a lot of the acting that happens in here.
I really like Maria. I think that she does a
wonderful job. But the guy that plays Frader just something
about him, and I don't know if it's the character
or if it's the actor that I just kind of
chafe with. And like everybody else, I love every single

(32:36):
moment that rot Wing is on screen. I love when
josephat is on screen. I've already talked about the Thin
Man and just how much I enjoy his character. Even
you know grot the Guardian of the Heart Machine. It's like, yeah,
these guys are great. But then when it comes to Freighter,
I don't know if it's that Luke Skywalker going to

(32:57):
Tashi station to pick up some power converters kind of
thing or what it is, but it's just like, get
this guy off the screen. He sucks. I just don't
like I.

Speaker 4 (33:06):
Do like him. That was not the actor's fault. I
think that was Fritz's direction. He wanted this juvenile to
be in the lead, so he got a juvenile, and
Gustav slowly played it like a juvenile. If didn't want that,
he wouldn't have done that.

Speaker 5 (33:27):
In mcgilligan's biography of Lang, which is excellent. I love
that we're talking about a movie that was covered by
mcgillingen because like reading his work is just so easy,
you know, it just like flows like nothing else. But
it talks about Gustav Rolick and it says that was
it was von Harbu who actually decided that if somebody
else was in the role, and that she actually picked

(33:48):
him out of a lap and she picked him for
his good looks, youthful ernest. But I'm with you, Mike,
there is something to be said about those silent actors
who go they cast to the back row. It's almost
like they come from theater and they're not adapted well
to that kind of act. And I think he is
the weak link and if you can get over him,

(34:09):
and if you can take him as kind of like
a naive child, like Ranjit was saying, possible, I mean
the cast is so you know, it's just one actor
out of however many, he's a speed bump. You just
get over him.

Speaker 2 (34:23):
It is interesting too that he's the one that has visions.
You mentioned Villeneuve earlier, and it's almost Dune is a
great Messiah story, and this is very much a Messiah story,
and people forget that Paula Tredes was what's sixteen in
the story. I mean, this feels like even though he
looks older than sixteen, he feels like a sixteen year old,
he feels like a younger character. And he is the

(34:46):
one that has these visions. He sees the machine as Moloch,
this demon who's just eating all of the workers and
just feeding upon the bodies of slaves. Later on, it's
almost as if he sees Maria when she's in the
club doing her dance. But there's some great cross cutting

(35:07):
that's going on there. And also I want to say
that he's the one that sees the seven deadly Sindents
come to life, and so it's like he's the one
that can see what's behind the veil. Like I think that,
of course these things are symbolic, but I want to
say that he has seen the world for more of
what it is than what the rest of everyone in

(35:28):
the cast is seeing what the rest of Metropolis sees.
They see a machine, whereas he sees a demon, and
he sees what's really going on with these things, even
if it's more metaphorical terms. All right, let's go ahead
and take a break, and we'll be back after these
brief messages.

Speaker 6 (35:47):
Seven the sixth Sense, Sweet sixteen nine songs, seven Brides
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(36:07):
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Speaker 2 (36:31):
All right, we are back and we are continuing our
talk about Metropolis.

Speaker 4 (36:36):
Beda is in the eternal garden with this programmed Crotazan.
And then suddenly, as though subconscious is rising to consciousness,
the door opened and there's reality it's Maria, this poper children.

(36:56):
As soon as she comes out, she locks eyes with them,
as though she knew he was going to be standing
right there, and she knew she had to make contact
with them. Somehow, The guards shove them all back through
the door and they disappear. Trede chases them, obviously down

(37:17):
because they work below the surface of the earth. So
he's down below the surface of the earth in this
bizarre factory with machines that are just fantastical gadgets that
have no relation to anything in reality. He has that
vision of the moloc machine. He runs out out of

(37:43):
the frame, down the stairs to a limousine that's waiting
for him. Did that limousine know to be waiting for
him right there? And then we see the puppet limousine
leave and is driving down a ramp from something like
the twenty fifth story of a skyscraper. Where was he?

(38:05):
Was he under the ground or was he at the
twenty fifth store of a story of a skyscraper? And
that's when I get the impression that this is fits
and the other people making the movie telling us, calm down,
this is dream imagery. Don't worry too much. We're playing games.

Speaker 2 (38:27):
Just go with us.

Speaker 4 (38:29):
What do you what's your opinion of that.

Speaker 2 (38:32):
I love the idea of the him continuously going down
and down and down. I mean this, I'm surprised that
in a lot of the commentary that I heard or
articles that I read, that Orpheus never came up when
it came to this discussion, because this feels so much
like an Orpheus story of the descent into the underworld
and can having your quest and trying to bring back

(38:52):
the love. You know, he's constantly searching for Maria. So yeah,
I think that's really very astute as far as, yes,
how does he get from below ground to way up
above ground and then have to continue to descend, And
really when it comes to his father, I would imagine
his father is at the pinnacle when it comes to
all of this. It feels like he should be the

(39:12):
person that's at the tippy top of all this. And
the idea of the Tower of Babble keeps coming up,
and we've got you know, think it's really more based
on the Briigle painting than what you would read in
the Bible. But I love this whole idea too, of
having you know these and I guess there are archangels

(39:33):
kind of looking at the Tower of Babel and just
talking about, like, you know, the hubris of man. And
again the hubris doesn't get punished, Like I'm surprised that
the tower, as in the biblical story, just doesn't get destroyed.

Speaker 1 (39:45):
You know.

Speaker 2 (39:45):
It feels more like, oh, yeah, we're okay with this now,
because it's it's commerce related. It's not you know, I mean,
at the same time, it is man's hubris. It's man
trying to reach the levels of the gods with that
out going through more of a spiritual journey. It's just
I've got the money, I'm going to build the tower
in order to make it to the heavens.

Speaker 4 (40:07):
I was at the very end. You do see the
ruins of the tower with that logo painted in the
sky above it, great as the Creator and great as Man.
So do you see that? And of course Maria changes
the whole point of the story of the Tower Babel,
which in the Book of Genesis just about this big

(40:29):
it's just a few lines.

Speaker 2 (40:31):
All the big stories are just a few lines. It's
like what I read about Noah's Ark, It's like, all right,
couple paragraphs. You're not gonna hole lot.

Speaker 4 (40:38):
The meaning in the Book of Genesis is not the
meaning that Maria gives to it. She gives to it
the meaning that the critics of Taylorism would give to
the way factories are run.

Speaker 5 (40:52):
The tower was like a super major bone of contention
during production. They started out with the sketches and it
looked like the spiral from the story the Interstitial One,
and Lang himself said, I don't want it to look
like that. I wanted to be modern, and they added
the crossbars and kind of like there were supposed to
be airplanes like landing on it, and I think you
can see a few little model airplanes landing on it.

(41:13):
But you were talking around you about how it's like
a dream city. You don't know where you're going to
end up. You could think that you're at street level,
but you could be basically up in the clouds. And
about the cities in China that are built in the
side of like hills. You know, they're built in like
river valleys, and they have all of these stairs and elevators,
and so it's like you never know where in relation

(41:36):
you are to the ground, and you could be like
living on the eleventh floor, but there are people living
far far below you, and you could go to work
far far above you. I wanted to answer the question
talking about like the vision, the sense of Freda being
the one that has these like apocalyptic visions, because there
generally are apocalyptic the sense of like gays like this

(41:58):
film has an absolute rock solid understanding of the camera
I as being an analog or the viewer's eye, you know,
the lens to the eye. And Ranjie you mentioned Maria
opening the door and immediately looking at Frader, but she's
not looking at Frader. She's looking us as Freders, as

(42:18):
the embodiment of him. And one thing I love about
certain films and films of this era too, is that
they're not afraid to, like Spike the lens, to have
actors just peer straight into your soul. And this film
has so so many scenes like of incredible pathos and
power that would come off really not great if they
weren't done that way. Like I always think about the

(42:40):
one where he goes to the chapel that they have
in the catacombs, and there's that scene where everybody leaves
and Freder comes up to basically receive blessing but also
throw his heart and soul to Maria, and you see
him clutch his heart, and that's very you know, one
oh one, just over the top acting is just I
need to show everybody that I'm in lie, so I

(43:00):
clutch my heart. But he's gazing directly into the camera
as if we are the object of his love, and
so that transference from the actor to the viewer. And
then you cut to Maria. I mean Maria not only
like Maria herself, but the false Maria also has incredible
scenes of gazing directly into the camera, like the dance

(43:21):
you were talking about, the dance that she does, and
the dance itself is like that's the seduction. Like you
literally had the Madonna at the beginning goading you to
fall into this you know, this great I don't want
to say lie, but this great promise of religion. And
then near the end of the movie you have the
horror of Babylon gazing from the cinema screen asking you

(43:42):
to fall into temptation and talking about like the men
there and the gaze of them, I mean to the
point where they cut all their eyes out and they
basically fill the screen like it's almost like the argus
of Pinopti's the ogre that with a thousand eyes just
gazing back at you. It's just that that that image
just lag. I don't know, it's just the kettle hot.

(44:05):
Like all the production design of the cinematographer is just gaze.
It's so much about Gaye.

Speaker 2 (44:11):
That dance sequence and the reaction of the men and
the eyes. That is my favorite section of this film.
It is just so avant garde and so beautiful to
look at, and I love just the oh god, the
one shot where it's like all of the eyes and
it feels like four or five different planes of different

(44:33):
sections going on. Some are just eyes. You've got Maria,
You've got all of these things happening all at the
same time. And then when you see and thank god,
it's the you know, the the restored or like, it's
not the Argentinian footage, it's the you know, the footage
that we've had before, and how gorgeous that footage looks.
And when you get to a shot like that, it just, oh,

(44:55):
it just melts my heart to see that because it's
so beautiful and so striking and just fits in with
the rest of this film so much. Like you're saying,
like the gaze and everything. Here are all of these
eyes looking at us and Maria looking at us. And yeah,
the things that that the actress that that plays Maria,
that she does with her eyes, the whole thing of

(45:15):
like one eye open, one eye closed kind of thing.

Speaker 4 (45:19):
I love that stuff.

Speaker 2 (45:20):
And she is so striking and I love that they
have her as both you know, Madonna and whore throughout
this whole thing. And it takes so long. Like I
think a lot of people kind of like me, think
that the robot transformation of the creature that Rotwang builds
to Maria, to the false Maria, that that happens way

(45:40):
earlier than it does because it's it takes placed pretty
far into the film. It's really his whole thing of Oh,
I'm going to disrupt the whole labor thing. I'm going
to film into revolution with this false Maria. And the
whole thing that he does is like, well, if you
can't buy her as Maria by her as a person,

(46:02):
you know, this whole thing is over with. But I
we should probably talk a little bit about the whole
rivalry between rot Waning and Joe and especially all of
the stuff that goes on with the mother with Hell,
because that the whole thing with Hell. It just there mentions,
you know, of the wife, but her name being I

(46:23):
guess too offensive for America. I just can't buy that
Hell was too offensive for Americans in nineteen twenty seven.
But maybe it was. Maybe we were way too prudish
with that. But come on, guys, it's a Norse goddess's name.
It means light. It's not literal Hell. There's no double
hockey stick on there, It's just one hockey stick.

Speaker 4 (46:45):
Yeah, no, no, All the instances of the time are
perfectly okay with things like that.

Speaker 2 (46:50):
Right, I mean, this is pre code.

Speaker 4 (46:53):
If they were worried about it, all they had to
do is put a little parenthetical. Hell was a Norse
goddess of the city of the Dead, and incidentally the
catacomb where Maria preaches. Did you notice that Josefat refers
to that as the city of the dead. That makes

(47:13):
a little bit of a parallel there between Hell and Maria,
So there's sort of doppelgangers. What I found odd is
rivalry between Lotvang and Yow for Hell. You do know
that Telfon Habu was previously married to the actor who

(47:37):
played Lotvang and then married Great Slang, so she was
massed flit Slang when they were making this movie. But
they were apparently still good friends, I guess with her
first husband, and Flitz loved to cast him and he
was wonderful And in this Movietang is just another version

(47:59):
of Doctor Morbusa, which the Donald few years earlier. If
you remember, Doctor Morbusa is one of my favorites. That
the rivalry there that seemed to be a joke about
what had happened in their personal lives.

Speaker 5 (48:16):
McGilligan says that they were married for ten years, they
were married for one year, and then they waited to
get divorced for not it was like a It was
a partnership, a creative partnership, and there was no real
love in it. In some sense that Lang was, you know,
he had the wandering eye, constantly looking for new engineers,
somebody you know, more precious, more pure for his for

(48:37):
his taste. But Mike, you you keep mentioning the woman
who plays Maria. But I think, like we got to
talk Brigitte Helm. This film would not work without her performance,
and this is her first on screen role and she
hated acting. She did not want to do this. I mean,
she she did. This is like a famous story of

(48:58):
him going to see her and asking her, you know,
she was on set and he said like, do you know,
do you want to be an actor? Actress? And she said,
I want anything but and her mother like was apoplectic
because her mother was the standard stage mother pushing her
daughter into it. But not only is this her first role,
not only is she incredible as Maria, but she's playing

(49:20):
five separate roles, like she's the machine man, the creative man,
the seven Deadly Sins. I don't know how she played
seven deadly sins, but she played death too. And she
plays the false mother. That's a tall order for anybody,
let alone somebody who was still growing at the time.
Hence the costume like biting into her and her having
it to be there for hours and hours hours. I mean,

(49:43):
this is just a toward of force performance from her.
And you mentioned the eye thing, you know, closing one
eye to show that she's a false Maria, that she's
a temptress. And her makeup, the makeup and design of
her is just incredible too. At the very end, you
see her in the worker City and she's saving children.
I don't know how asexual, like, how how motherly you

(50:04):
can get besides literally saving children from drowning. And her
they're wearing the same costume, and her costume is straight
laced and tight, and it's like a bodice. You cut
to the false Maria. False Maria has bags under her eyes,
disheveled hair, and the same costume, but it's like undone.
So you're seeing more and more and more of her body,
more and more of her cleavage, and it's just, you know,

(50:27):
production design is just tw tiny little things. And bridget Helm,
I mean, despite her not liking acting, which I don't
blame her at all, she did an incredible job well.

Speaker 2 (50:38):
And the whole idea too, of doubling and having the
two Marias. But then, like you said, all of the
different parts that she's playing, and then you get even
the very obvious doubling, but the whole idea of Georgie
the worker that exchanges places with freighter, and the whole
idea of them switching their hats and uniforms and you know,

(51:04):
losing the job pers that that Freder wears throughout so
much of this, and I really like that, and I
like to that the number. Georgie has a number that
he's one one eight one one, So we've got that
nice palindromic number, and you've got all the dumbles from
one side to the other with that as well. I
think that's great that they're doing these things and you've
got like kind of the like Slim versus Joseph, Fat

(51:27):
Joe versus rot Wang, like all the characters seem to
have their other person other than just mentioned Georgie taking
the place. But really we know that Freder is the one,
like Neo, right, He's the one when it comes to
this stuff. And I love the machine that he's running
that this whole idea of this big it looks like

(51:48):
a clock face with three hands and just moving the
hands around and the lights will light up and he
keeps moving his arms around toward Georgie is there just
wiping his head off because such labor intensive stuff. And
it's like, like you said Earlierrojie, it's like, what the
hell does this machine do? We have no freakin' idea,
And that became like a real stumbling block for somebody

(52:10):
like an HG. Wells, where he's like, well, they don't
explain what these machines do, and it's like, do they
need to do we need to have an explanation as
they like, what the what's being produced? I mean it's
basically they're producing the guffins. You know, there's there's nothing
to this, you know, it's just this is the point
of it is the labor. It's not what they produce.
The labor is the production. It is just all about

(52:33):
that and having that ridiculous machine. And you know, like
I said earlier, when I was growing up and watching
the Radio Gaga video and having Freddie Mercury there, you know,
moving the arms around and stuff, and just like, what
the hell is he doing?

Speaker 4 (52:47):
What is here?

Speaker 2 (52:49):
I have no idea. As a little kid, I was like,
all right, that's kind of cool, I guess, But then
seeing it in context of this film, it's like, oh wow,
this is wild. I like that. You know, it's this
very brazil world. This would so much influence Brazil where
it's like we don't know really what we're working at.
We just have to work to work.

Speaker 4 (53:10):
It looks sort of like a clock with three hands.
Did you notice at the beginning that one of the
very first things we see as a clock, it's a
ten hour clock and above it is a twenty four
hour clock. So in those days in Germany people had
ten hour shifts, but apparently in the movie ten hours

(53:32):
is the equivalent of our twelve hours. They expanded the hours.
It's a twenty hour day.

Speaker 2 (53:39):
Frederico, you mentioned China and the idea of like building
into nature and everything, and when I saw that ten
hour and twenty four hour clock, I kept thinking of
how they treat time in China these days. Right now,
there are no time zones in China. China is one
time zone. So it's really crazy when you think about
the people that are all the way to the east

(54:00):
coast of this because China's, you know, about as big
as America, if not bigger. I mean talking about continental
United States. All the way on one side of it,
it's seven am. All the way on the other side
of it, it's seven am. The sun could rise around
five or ten, doesn't really you know, like that was
one of the things when the Communists came in, They're

(54:21):
just like, yeah, nope, we control time. That is one
of the things that we do. They're making the trains
run on time. Was very easy since it's one big
time zone. And yeah, I just found that very fascinating
that controlling time is one of those rights that a
fascistic government is going to impose. That we are the
ones that tell you how long a day is and

(54:42):
how long a shift is. Like you were saying, renji,
the expansion of the ten into twelve hours, because that's
just the way that things work.

Speaker 5 (54:50):
Sorry, the tyranny too of time being your mast I
think about like the development of why time came around,
like timekeeping devices was for monks so that they can
know where that when their prayers were, and so it
started with religion, and then it moved into the workplace,
and you think about it's like, okay, if you're a
peasant in that you know, what is it ten hundreds
all this kind of stuff. You got up with the sun,

(55:12):
you worked, you broke in the middle of the day,
you worked, and then you went home and you slept,
or sometimes you woke up in the middle of the
night and you did a little bit of work and
then you went back to sleep. And it's that primordial
aspect of time is the only thing that we have.
And so if a state can control it, like you
bring up Brazil, but obviously the other big thing is

(55:34):
nineteen eighty four with coming into your thoughts. You know,
it's like your time, your thoughts, just the things that
are so absolutely personal you just can't deal with it
and run g eat to you. I never thought that
they stretched ten to twelve. I always thought it was
an evocation of the decimalization of time from it was
after the French Revolution they tried to do the Republican

(55:55):
time and it was like it was like a terrible,
terrible thing. Nobody liked it because everybody was so used
to the twelve hours that stuff. I thought of it
as an eva that Mike. I just wanted to point
out that technically the machine in Metropolis does have a name.
It doesn't have a point, but it's explained terribly. It's
not done in the in the film, but it's done

(56:18):
in the novel that Harbor wrote. It's a Potter noster,
which is the pattern noster lift, which is almost like
the chain buckets that you see in the movie, where
you get on them and then you get off at
the at the stop that you want, at the floor
that you want. They're like super prevalent in Germany, Vienna,
they have a few in England, they're kind of dangerous,
people get like limbs, you know, all this kind of stuff.

(56:39):
But Potter is Latin for our Father, and there's this
whole religious aspect to it, and it's in the novel
by Harbor of just like a potternoster to the and
those three blades essentially, and that Christ imagery when Freder
is basically crucified on his own machine and he calls
out for his own father. I mean, it's so on

(57:00):
the youth. I mean, it's like one of the last
things Jesus says is like my.

Speaker 4 (57:04):
God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Speaker 5 (57:10):
It's right there in the movie, right there for you.

Speaker 2 (57:13):
The pottern Maaster. I need to go back and try
to re listen to the commentary that's on the Masters
of Cinema Desk, because it's I don't know what the
hell was going on with that. I like David Collott,
I like or call it. I like John the Rosenbaum,
of course I like him Alott, he's been on the
show before. But that commentary is recorded so poorly or

(57:35):
presented so poorly. I hear the music so much louder
than I hear the voices, and I'm just like what
the hell, guys, And it sounds almost like Collot's like
three feet away from the microphone and rosenbombs across the room,
and I'm just like, what are you guys doing? What
the hell? But I swear at one point they're talking
about the pottern Noster and Klot's like, oh, yeah, that

(57:57):
thing's impossible, like it doesn't exist or something like it's
a science fiction invention. I'm like, uh, yeah, I've seen
that in so many movies. Now, like, this is a
real thing, guys.

Speaker 4 (58:08):
I love this.

Speaker 2 (58:08):
Elevator, yes, which is also it's great, but it's also
another instance of something that's very old fashioned.

Speaker 4 (58:16):
And also physically implausible.

Speaker 5 (58:18):
There's no way you could actually build such a thing
and have it work in.

Speaker 4 (58:22):
A real building.

Speaker 2 (58:24):
That is not science fiction. That's a genuine article. And yeah,
we don't seem to use those here in the States.
I've never actually seen one in real life, but I've
seen it in plenty of movies and almost all German movies,
and I was just baffled by that take on it
that it wasn't even a real thing. But yeah, I
love that take of our Father and just the whole

(58:45):
father imagery that goes through this whole thing, going back
to the whole rot Wing versus Show thing. The one
thing that I've found very surprising is that there's no
real resolution of their relationship in this as opposed to
the book that actually has more of a resolution. And
I wanted to say, what was it that it was?
It was it Joe's mother that had a letter from

(59:08):
Hell and gives it to him at the end of it,
and it basically is a letter from Hell saying like,
I've always loved you, I really never liked Rotlong. Your
whole thing of me falling in love with him. It
was a complete lie, like no, I've always been you know,
your woman kind of thing. And Joe's mother refused to
give it to him until he had a change of heart,

(59:30):
and so I guess, like the worker Revolution is what
caused that change. So I'm like, okay, but that's not
really found in this. There's not real real resolution between
those two characters.

Speaker 4 (59:42):
And it was a nice sending the book, very brilliant
because all the way as you're reading the book, you
think this is a story of Reda and Maria, and
then right at the end you discovered, no, it wasn't
their story. It was a story of you all all alone.
It was beautiful, but how do you film that? So

(01:00:02):
they never filmed an ending for the movie. They just
stopped it, which is rather unfortunate. But after I saw
the movie about fifty times, I realized why they had
stopped it there. And then I just put my face
in my hands and I thought, oh, guys, no, no,
that was the wrong idea.

Speaker 5 (01:00:22):
Before I forget, I should mention that the potternoster left
in Germany is actually named after the rosary beads that
go into a chain that when you pray you spin
them and so it looks like that, and so they
named the chain lift after it. But now that it's
just something else.

Speaker 4 (01:00:38):
Yeah, very few of them left. I'd love to ride
one someday, but I don't travel anymore because my cat
told me not to, so I'll never see about their
nosk with.

Speaker 2 (01:00:49):
Got to listen to that cat. I dislike this idea.
You know, we're talking about all of these things that
have kind of glombed onto Metropolis over the years. And
I'm sure Renchie you crazy, because I know you're You're
very particular when it comes to facts and figures and
all these things, you know, seventeen frames a second versus
sixteen frames kind of thing. And you hear all of

(01:01:10):
these stories that just get attributed to Metropolis where it's like, oh, yeah,
Fritz Lang went to New York City and saw the
lights and that's what's inspired him for Metropolis. It's like, well,
actually there was a treatment that he wrote all these
years ago, or a script that he wrote that was
very much like Metropolis, and don't forget that they tey
Von Harbo was working on this book and the script,

(01:01:32):
and it feels very two thousand and one to space
outussy as far as the idea of when was the
script versus the book? And was the script being written
at the same time as the book? And I don't
know if anybody's really pulled that thing apart to say
like this is what happened when kind of thing. But
it wasn't a trip to New York City that made
Metropolis happen. I mean, the trip to New York City

(01:01:52):
was what twenty four or twenty six, and it's like, yeah,
this was already in production, so like calm your jets
kind of thing. The the other thing that I really
hate is this idea and I think this maybe came
from our dear friend Louis Bnwell, where it's like, all
the good things in the movie are Fritz Lang, all
the bad things in the movie are Taevan Harbo, and

(01:02:13):
she was this horrible, cheesy person that just added all
the schlock to it. And it's like, no, she came
up with a lot of these ideas on her own,
or they worked together as a team. It wasn't just
you know, And it feels to me very misogynistic as
far as like, oh, yeah, the woman comes up with
all the bad ideas, the guy comes up with all

(01:02:33):
the great ideas, and it's as simple as that. And
it's like, no, there's a little bit more shading to
the story.

Speaker 4 (01:02:41):
Yeah, and even it's stood up for and defended on
Harbor for all the rest of his days. He was
apparently still fond of her even after he divorced her.

Speaker 2 (01:02:54):
Even after she became a Nazi.

Speaker 4 (01:02:56):
Yeah, she wasn't shoving people in.

Speaker 2 (01:02:59):
The Auburn unlike that imagery of Moloch, which just seemed
to really presage what was going to happen in Germany
in a few years.

Speaker 5 (01:03:08):
I feel like you guys are bearing the lead here
with thea von Harbor. I feel like that's a super
important part of the story. And the thing that I
always love to bring up about Metropolis was like, I
don't want to be that guy. You know, it's like,
did you know that it was written by a Nazi?
You know, all this kind of stuff, because that's that's
that's coming afterwards, that's that's the crisis during the war.
But the aspect of him leaving Germany and leaving his

(01:03:31):
white behind, you know, quasi wife, you know, all this
is that shock of Oh I didn't know that, but
it kind of explains some aspects of the story. I
don't want to say that I fell for it hook
line and sinker, but I did believe for the longest
time that Harbor was the one that inserted all of
the I don't want to say fascist imagery, but the

(01:03:52):
quasi fascist imagery, the reef install stuff you were mentioning
at the beginning, kind of like trying to find a
way to meld the two, because I think it's it's
an idiotic prospect to try in bridge fascism and socialism,
like you make basically a demon baby in the middle.
There's no way, there's no way you're gonna square that circle.

(01:04:13):
But Harbu being a member of the Nazi Party, living
through the war, staying there and then being blacklisted and
then struggling to get work after the war and dying
pretty is tragedy. But like Ron said, I mean, he
was in an interview with Bogdanovic. I think he mentioned
that he was fifty percent responsible for everything wrong with Metropolis.

(01:04:35):
He did defend her, even after he was no longer
say what you will about long like his imperious ways
on set, all this kind of stuff, But he had
his moments.

Speaker 2 (01:04:47):
Was he the one that called her a Nazi bitch?
Or was that somebody else?

Speaker 4 (01:04:50):
Oh, I don't remember who called her that. He never
called her that.

Speaker 2 (01:04:55):
Okay, because I seem to remember hearing that at some
point that that was attributed to him. I guess I
think it's even in something that Rosenbaum wrote. But I'm
just like, yeah, it didn't seem from that back down
of his interview. I was like, yeah, it doesn't sound
like he harbors that many bad feelings. I mean, the
whole idea of you know, the way that Lang's first

(01:05:15):
wife ended up and what happened with the escape from Germany,
and all that stuff. Like I talked about the whole
self mythology that Lang was just steeped in. I love.
There's a book by Howard A. Rodman called What Is
the Destiny Express It is kind of a fictionalization of
that time in Lang's life. Really great book, but it
also then helps muddy the waters as to what's real

(01:05:38):
and what's not, what's a theory versus what's true. I
don't know again if we'll ever find out all of
the things around there, but yeah, they highly recommend that
book if people are interested in reading some good fiction
around this.

Speaker 4 (01:05:52):
And I am not at all convinced that they had
a wife prior to the fun Harbor. I have no
reason to believe it. It sounds like the story that
Fitz came up with after he read a newspaper article
about something vaguely similar. I had to put it into
a movie script, didn't work on it, told a few

(01:06:13):
people the idea, then it got blown out of all proportion.
I don't think there was a previous wife. If I
were to live in Germany for two or three years,
I think i'd like to research that. But I'll never
go to Germany. And you know why, that darn yead.

Speaker 5 (01:06:28):
That was Tom Gunning the films of Fritz Lang. He
said that, So it's not even it's not even like
a media personality or you know, like a filmmaker that
called her a Nazi bitch is.

Speaker 2 (01:06:39):
Just oh so he's the one that called her a
Nazi bitch. M hm okay, because when I look at
the Rosenbaum thing, it says a Fisher attributable acclaim by
many to the Harbowlange collaboration with the good do to
Lang and the bad due to quote that Nazi bitch.
But there's not a footnote to this. All right, thank

(01:07:01):
you for putting that in there. I've always been a
student of the way that other races are portrayed, especially
Asian people are portrayed in films. I mean to have
the nightclub, the very lascivious nightclub called Yoshiwara, which is
a reference to the red light district in I think

(01:07:22):
it's Tokyo. Yeah, to just greatantly call it, yeah, the
Yoshiwara club. And then one of those deleted images that
we have from the Argentinian cut is three faces that
are kind of overlaid, cross dissolved kind of thing of
there's a black person, a woman's face in the middle,

(01:07:45):
and then an Asian face on the other side, and
I'm not sure if they are. The woman in the
middle is definitely a woman, but I don't know if
the Asian person or the black person are men or women.
I don't know if they're female and pers at the
time or not. But I find that othering and the
whole idea of Yoshiwara being this den of iniquity to

(01:08:08):
be fascinating. I always appreciate seeing, you know, like I
was shown broken blossoms and a woman in film class
years ago, and it's like, oh, the way that Griffith
would like, you know, all the bad things we're going
to put onto the Asian people. You know, we gotta
we're okay. Us white people are okay, but all the

(01:08:28):
bad things come from the Asian, you know. You see
that even in like The Big Sleep with Geiger's den
and the Asian imagery having the camera behind the Buddha
heead statue, all of that stuff. So to see that
here again, and then to see the way that black
bodies are used just as ornamentation, like when Maria does

(01:08:49):
her big dance and that she's lifted up onto this
dais and the what's holding the dais? And are all
these black men with it literally on their back. I'm
just like, wow, that's that's such powerful imagery. And it's
that introduction of Yoshiwara which really takes us more into
and it's just kind of a some imagery that's happening

(01:09:11):
when Georgie is in the back of that limousine and
it's almost like again he's picturing what's going on there
because a leaflet ends up in the car. But it's
very shortly after that that imagery that we get to
rot Wang and really start to see more of him,
and we get to see more of like the Hell
statue and things, and again rot Wang just being this

(01:09:34):
fascinating character, and I love this whole idea of him.
I don't know what happened when Frader was born, but
that Hell died in childbirth, it sounds like. But then
also something to do with Hell is why rot Wang
only has the one hand.

Speaker 4 (01:09:53):
When he was making the robot, burned his hand at
burned his wa and in the book he says that
was because of the mixture of eighty old oil. I
can't remember the name of it, but what is that?
And I looked it up and there's nothing in the dictionary,
nothing on Google, so maybe she just made that up.

(01:10:15):
But fixing that oil with quicksilver, which is mercury, So
that's explained there. In the movie, they just delied over it.
Wasn't it worth losing my arm to recreate?

Speaker 1 (01:10:27):
Hell?

Speaker 4 (01:10:28):
Yeah, he's essentially an alchemist, Marcer a wizard, not a scientist.

Speaker 2 (01:10:35):
The whole thing about the house that he lives in,
I think it's in the book they talk about how
a magician had lived there and then after the magician died,
Rottling took over the house and you see the inverted pentagram.
I mean it goes into so many of these spiritual
in magic and just all of these more ethereal realms

(01:10:57):
and the hard machines that we have, And that's kind
of mix again of the scientific plus the fantastic. Even
when in the intro, like you had a note Renjie
where you're like, I don't really consider this a science
fiction film. I consider the science fiction film just because
there's a freaking robot in it. But there are so
many things around magic and stuff, and like, you know,

(01:11:19):
how would rot Wing's hand even work. You know, it
feels like it shouldn't even be there, but again, you
know it's I see this being such an influence. Of course,
Maria is so an influence on C three PO. You
see those Ralph mcquarie drawings and you're just like, oh, yeah,
totally this is Maria. And then you see you know,

(01:11:39):
the fake hand and stuff, and you're just like, okay, yeah,
that's Luke Skywalker. I mean, hands are always in danger
in Star Wars film Star Wars films. I mean it's
even like Return of the Jedi we're going to talk
about later on this month, and it's when Luke chops
off his own father's hand, which I always see as
being kind of a a more of a castration type

(01:12:02):
of thing. I mean, for me, like the whole chopping
off of Luke's hand is so like he chops off
his son's dick basically, and the whole idea of like
rotwying having this mechanical hand. It's it's so to me, like, yes,
he's not a full human being anymore, he's missing something
super vital from him, and that to me, the hand

(01:12:23):
really influences what happens inside of Star Wars. But just
as a real quick aside. I love the idea of
rotwaying and the performance of rotwaying so influencing Nick Cage
in Moonstruck. Yes, Cage himself was like, yes, Like when
he holds up his hand and.

Speaker 3 (01:12:42):
I lost my hand, I lost my bride, Johnny his hand, Johnny,
it's says, bride, you want.

Speaker 1 (01:12:48):
Me to take my heartbreak put her away, and forgot.

Speaker 2 (01:12:51):
He was pulling directly from Metropolis. So I'm like, that's brilliant,
Nick Cage, thank you so much.

Speaker 5 (01:12:57):
I lost my hand. I lo's my bride. I love that.

Speaker 2 (01:13:03):
I had no idea.

Speaker 5 (01:13:04):
That's so interesting. Yeah, I mean Cage is a pick.
You know, he researches. I mean that's the funny thing.
I mean we're getting sidetracked, but that's the funny thing
is everybody thinks he's like, you know this surface levels whatever. No,
he's a Coppola, Like he has the artistic background, he
has the teaching all that kind of stuff. And you
guys are talking about Rank. I mean, can we just

(01:13:26):
talk about him in general. It's just rog The actor
is just electric, just like the scene of him during
the transformation, Like there are things that you have to
put into a movie. You have to have shot to shot,
you have to have conversations, and then you have to
have you know, exposition. You do it some way. There's
a scene in this where it's his scientific laboratory and

(01:13:49):
it's all the bubbling stuff and you're thinking to yourself, well,
this is before Frankenstein. This is before a lot of
things that would go on to be influenced by this.
And it's just him paling around pressing dials and knobs.
But the way that he walks, the way that he moves,
the artificiality of every part of him. It's not just
the hand, it's like his his piercing gaze, you know,

(01:14:12):
the eyes, like even when he's at the nightclub and
he just points to the curtain of the false marine
about to open. And his relationship to Yo Frederson Jofriederson
is literally the god of this world. At the beginning,
when we're in the office with him and the numbers
are coming down and he's holding forth with all of
his minions, one of them messes up, done out, he

(01:14:35):
loses his job because he's, you know, so perfect. He's
the master of Metropolis. They even rename him John Masterson.
In the American release, which is just you know, a thing. Besides,
but rot Wang is the only one that can stand
up to him, and I think that most importantly. The
interesting thing about that is in the novel they talk

(01:14:55):
about how rot Wang like invented Metropolis, he gave him
the technology necessary to build it. That Yo Fraderson is not,
you know, the luminary, all encompassing genius. He did need
rot Wang, And it's this melding between science and you know,
you know, one needs the other to survive and to exist.
And that battle over Hell. I don't know how you

(01:15:17):
watch this movie without Hell. I don't know how you
watch this movie without Yoshiwara, I have to say. I
mean I watched the twenty ten restored version, so I
only have that to go on. But they're like fundamental
aspects to the story. Is the battle over a dead
woman and rot Wang resenting Freder for taking both of them.
You know, they resent Freighter the Sun and that it's incestuous.

(01:15:39):
It really is incestuous. And I just wanted to like
bring up to that aspect the Youngian aspects too, of
like the the top, middle and below, where you have
like Yo Fraderson is like the super ego, he's all
the way at the top. He's asexual, he's almost like celibate.
He has no time for that. He only has time
for work. Then you have like freder As the egg

(01:16:00):
as the ego, who's like, you know, flitting in between
all this kind of stuff. And then you have Maria,
who technically I suppose in her like vaunted, you know,
pious mother mary Way is also super ego, but she's
in the depths and she just has that aspect of
pure Id when she turns into the false Maria and
she does the dance.

Speaker 2 (01:16:21):
Well, I think that's also brought up by the levels
of the city. You know, the super ego above and
the layer where the workers live is probably pure id.
You know, there's in somewhere in the middle. We've got
the ego to balance those things out, but to have
those layers, I mean, whenever I see things happening in
an attic or things happening in a basement and a

(01:16:43):
horror film, I'm just like, okay, And you know, kind
of to your point, there are a lot of science fiction,
there's a lot of mysticism in here, but there's a
little bit of horror as well. I mean, the idea
of the demons and Moloch, you know, eating these slaves
to the machine is very horrific and gosh, just the
idea of going down in those catacombs, and it's it's

(01:17:06):
fascinating to me that I think in the version that
we've seen, you know, not the restored version. I think
in the Americanized version of this, they cut out this
whole idea of having to go to rot Wang in
order to look at that map and see what's happening
on the map. Because two of the people that die

(01:17:27):
early on in the film have this drawing of a
map inside of their thing. And then when Frader is
wearing the uniform of Georgie, he finds the exact same
map as well. And Joe, meanwhile, at the exact same time,
is going to rot Wang saying, you know, what is this? Well,
where is this part of the city. It's like he

(01:17:47):
doesn't even know his own city. And that's the catacombs
where Maria is, and I think there's you know, skeletons
and all these kind of like horror show things. I
want to say that there's it's very similar to set
in The Nevable Nee Below, which I cannot pronounce, So
I apologize, and I apologize to everybody for all my
horrific pronunciations of German words. It just does not roll

(01:18:11):
off the tongue for me very well at all. Thank you.
I just need to hire you to say that whenever
I refer to that movie.

Speaker 4 (01:18:20):
Yeah, there's imagery in its long movies that pops up
again and again, and he improves it from film to film.
It's under watch his silent movies. I only like his
silent movies off there for his talkies.

Speaker 2 (01:18:34):
Yeah, the talkies are interesting to me, kind of like
you were saying, Federico, as far as seeing how things
are reflected back to us. You know, how the American
version of this film is different than the German, different
than even the key we year the Australian versions. To
see Lang working in the American system, it's interesting to

(01:18:55):
see how his germanness gets translated through in American life,
you know, and to see what a German filmmaker is doing.
I mean, I love like a Billy Wilder where it's
like seeing how he reflects American culture back to us,
and just things like Double Indemnity where it's like, yes,
people are really super Venal and just will do anything

(01:19:18):
to fuck over each other just to get you know,
Fred mcmuurr will do anything to get laid by Felix
Philis Dietrichson. Great, you know, and I think that's very
fun to watch how other cultures reflect back to us.

Speaker 5 (01:19:32):
Yeah, and Mike, you are the perfect person to back
me up on this because you were there at Nitrate
when they played You and Me right nineteen thirty six.
Ron Jay, you say you don't watch the American versions
of Fritz Long films, and I have to say, you know,
I haven't seen many Fritz Long films, but I think
two years ago we saw You and Me, and then
this year we saw You only Live once. The nineteen

(01:19:55):
thirty seven they called it a proto war. I don't
know what they're talking about. That's war. One of the
most amazing noras I've ever seen. And Long is just
on a different You can say all you want about
him come to America and not comparing to the German films,
but he is a master in like a child's playground.
It's the same thing that happened with Murnow when he

(01:20:16):
came here. It's the same thing. It's the same thing
that happen with Lubitch, same thing with happened with them
all is that they hone their skills absolutely to the
peak that they could in Europe, and then the economics
set in, and then they came to America because America
had the production facilities, They had everything. I mean, I
was reading the interview with Fritz Long and he was

(01:20:38):
talking about how in order to get light on the
sets when they made Metropolis, they used coal furnaces. They
didn't like I mean, they had electricity in some aspects,
but when they were shooting in the Zeppelin hanger for
the Tower of Babel sequence, they had coal furnaces to
do and light reflectors, and in between takes because it
was so cold, all the extras huddled around the coal furnaces.

(01:20:59):
So it's just like when Wang comes to America, he
has that aspect too, of like, it's no longer a
strong man. You know, the German national character is Siegfried.
It's basically a demigod. And then when he comes to
America he has to learn no, it's America is the
land of the common man, and I have to give
it to Long. He said, he came here and he
started reading newspaper comics. He read them every single day.

(01:21:23):
He read thousands of them, because he said they're not
high art, but they speak to the people, and they're
so popular. And you can tell, you can tell aism
in his American works, that he has a sensibility that
is so so sharp about America.

Speaker 2 (01:21:39):
A lot of people will call this an expressionistic film,
because that, of course is what it was, kind of
stock in trade of a lot of UFA films, was
the idea of expressionism. And I don't necessarily see a
lot of expressionistic things inside of Metropolis, other than really
some of the set design, of course, But really when
it comes to the altar that Maria has and all

(01:22:03):
of those crosses behind her, because it's not just one
big cross, it's several crosses, and they're different sizes, different shapes,
they're not all standing upright, some are tilted, and just
all of those crosses, to me, feel like the most
expressionistic part of this film. This is not Caligari, with
the painted sets and the very outward mental projections of things.

(01:22:29):
If there was anything, I would say maybe some of
the title cards. And I like that the title cards,
so many of them, especially at the beginning of the film.
They're in a triangle shape, and it really, to me
represents that whole heart, hand and head type of triumvirant
that we have, even when it comes to the Tower
of Babel. Very very triangular when it comes to that.

(01:22:50):
And I never really realized how much the Tower of
Babel was the inspiration for Minas Tirif in the Lord
of the Rings movies until I was rewinded this and going, oh, yeah,
that's that's or sorry, I said, minister as I meant Gondor,
the White City of Gondor is so Tower of Babel.
As far as this designed, this same who is it

(01:23:13):
Breugel painting of the Tower Babyl. It's like, oh, okay,
I can see that. And I don't know if that
was in Tolkien. It's been a while since I've read
Returned the King, but definitely when it came to the
Peter Jackson versions, it's like, yeah, there it is.

Speaker 5 (01:23:26):
That.

Speaker 2 (01:23:27):
Basically that's the Tower of Babel right there, and the
way that you kind of go up the stairway to
the top and to the steward of Gondor. I really
appreciate the whole triangular thing, and I want to say
that some of the bodies towards the end are also
in a triangle shape when it comes to post flood
and all that. And to go back to what you're saying, Frederico,

(01:23:47):
as far as the coal and all that, to hear
the miserable conditions, especially during that flood, and how people
are just not having a good time. I mean, you
mentioned the idea of the the outfit that Maria is sorry,
I forget the actress's name that she's in, and the

(01:24:07):
way that it would cut into her legs and things
that it was not meant to be sat in. But
then Lang had her sitting in it for who knows
how many takes. Yeah, it sounds like this was just
a miserable production to be on in that it took
what was it three hundred days or something to make
this film just seems like it went out forever.

Speaker 4 (01:24:27):
I'm glad you brought up triangles, because that's why they
ended the film without ending it. It's all the way
through from the very first shot you see all the
buildings in the background and drawing of Metropolis, the cluster
of buildings closest to us is in the shape of
a triangle. Then we go to the pistons up and down,

(01:24:49):
upper class, lower class, upper class, lower class. The only
way we can see the pistons move is because they
have cones, sections of cones stuck on them. Then when
the children rush up to Maria during the flood, they
all have their hands up and as they rush toward her,
they form a triangle. At the club, when the robot

(01:25:13):
does her dance, all the men rush up to her
with their hands up. They form a triangle. And you're right.
The triangle is the three parts head, heart and hands.
And at the end, when you have y'all on one side,
grow up on the other. In the middle, he grabs

(01:25:33):
their two hands. He forces them to shake hands. The
very frame we're all hands touched. They've completed the triangle
cut end of movie go home, no doubt there.

Speaker 2 (01:25:49):
Even the whistle to get back to work, and everything
is in a triangle shape. And the idea of the
movie being in three parts right there with a triangle
as well, in three very uneven parts too. I mean,
I also, like you said, Frederico, I laugh out loud
when they go okay end of overture, and you're like, wait,
what what type is? This was the overture. How much

(01:26:10):
longer is.

Speaker 5 (01:26:10):
This going to go on? Every time I watch it,
I always forget that they do the musical moment for
the third act and it actually says the tone that
it's supposed to be. They say furioso, you know, like
it's sheet music. It's just incredible. I mean, maybe we
can take a moment now, or we can wait until
later to talk about the Hubert score, because I do

(01:26:31):
kind of want to, like mention you know, just how
modern it is, because when I first put it on
and the title started, like the music starts halfway through
the credits, and then it hits that triumphant absolute peak
when the when the beautiful titles, the hand drawn titles
in animated titles come up and the lightmotifs that are

(01:26:53):
so Lugnerian that come from like, you know, Nibologian, all
that kind of stuff, the German background of how you
write the music, and then that developed into film music itself.
And I had, I guess, the opportunity to watch Metropolis
live score by a musician and it was at a Wurlitzer,
but it was technically not piped. It was like a

(01:27:13):
digital like a mixture. And I talked to him afterwards,
and I mentioned how much I love the hooprit and
he said, but it's so terribly repetitive, don't you find it?
It tires you. And it's like, I don't know, it's
like the fundamental basis of modern film music. It's just
like you could take the score out of this movie
and put it to any movie and it would work.

(01:27:34):
And the score is like so much of the emotional
power of it. For me, all the themes get me
every time every time I watch it.

Speaker 2 (01:27:43):
The use of the Marseillees is fascinating, especially because last
film that you and I talked about, Federico is Casablanca,
that plays such an important role in there. But to
have the it's almost like an off to Marseilles that
plays through here. It's almost like it reminds me of
watching King Solomon's Minds, the Richard Chamberlain version, which was

(01:28:07):
and I know King Solomon's Minds came way before Raiders
of the Lost Arc, but then you watch the film,
which is after Raiders, and it feels like the main
theme of King Solomon's Minds is like that da da
da da da du you know, like we're playing with it,
but we can't do the theme. We have to do
like a few notes off, and the Marseille is when

(01:28:29):
it comes up during the revolution in the third act
or the third movement of this. It's so close but
not quite there. It's just a little off key kind
of thing. But it's definitely so reminiscent that you're just like, oh,
I get it. This is the French Revolution, this is
a revolutionary theme. Okay, I got it. But that for
me was the only sour note where it was like

(01:28:51):
literally a sour note where I was like, ah, why
can't you guys just play the damn song? You know?
But instead it's like a little twisted Yeah, it's like
it's not quite there. Maybe the twisting is the point,
but it just every time you hear it, it's kind
of like the Yosemite Sam when he hears bugs Bunny
playing that song wrong. Every single time he's like.

Speaker 3 (01:29:10):
No, no, rabbit, Oh you stupid rabbit.

Speaker 2 (01:29:21):
Like that, I wanted to kind of run in there
and do that, probably only to have the piano explode
my face and have keys instead of teeth.

Speaker 5 (01:29:36):
Afterwards, you were on such a role that I didn't
want to interrupt you and say like, hey, Mike, it's
technically the Internationale.

Speaker 2 (01:29:42):
It's the communists.

Speaker 5 (01:29:44):
Yeah, it's technically it's technically the communist anthem, the world anthem.

Speaker 2 (01:29:49):
Thank you. It sounded so much like Marcelle is the Internationale.

(01:30:17):
The Metropolis score by Gottfried Hoopert's La Marseilles.

Speaker 5 (01:30:42):
Written by Eugene Potier who was a French communist, and
he wrote the words and he had it to the
melody of the Marciells. So you're not wrong. It is
technically the Marciells too. But I think it is a
very deliberate artistic decision because the revolt of the workers
is fomented by basically the creation of the depth. So

(01:31:03):
if they played the Internacionale in nineteen twenty seven Berlin,
there would be people sitting in that theater who sing
that song at their political meetings and they would take
umbrage with that. So I think by tuning it a
little bit out of whack, it's saying, Okay, we know
that what they're saying is the slogan of the Communist party,

(01:31:25):
you know, smash the smash, the means of production, take
over everything, all this kind of stuff. But it's it's twisted.
So that's why we're able to like demonize them and
make them, you know, fools that leave their own children.
You know, they're just in a frenzy that go to
buy a thing. I think it's a very deliberate artistic decision.

Speaker 2 (01:31:46):
All right, let's go ahead and take a break and
we'll be back after these brief messages.

Speaker 7 (01:31:58):
Hello everyone, this is Malcolm mc I just want to
say that this is a request to listeners of the
Projection Booth podcast to become patrons of the show via
Patreon dot com, PA t eo n dot com slash

(01:32:19):
Projection Booth.

Speaker 2 (01:32:21):
That's pretty simple. I think you can do that.

Speaker 8 (01:32:24):
It's a great show and Mike he provides hours of
great entertainment. So now it's time to give back my
little drovies. Settle down and take a listen and have
a sip of the old Molocco and then.

Speaker 4 (01:32:38):
You'll be ready for a little of the old in out,
in out real horror show. Bye bye.

Speaker 2 (01:32:47):
All right, we're back, and we were talking about.

Speaker 4 (01:32:49):
Metropolis mcgilligan's book and something in it that really knocked
the wind own. So it's was attending Los Angeles County
Museum retrospective of his work in nineteen sixty nine. Long
appreciated the retrospectives, but also enjoyed finding details to complain about.

(01:33:12):
He didn't like the musical score the La Museum used
to accompany one of his silent films. I don't like
music with my films. They were made to be silent.
They should stay silent. Anytime there is music, somebody obstructs
my rhythms.

Speaker 5 (01:33:30):
Why on earth.

Speaker 4 (01:33:31):
Would he say that the silent filk Roberston with music?
But then that makes me wonder. That was nineteen sixty nine.
I don't know if you've seen the PBS version of Metropolis.
I put it on my website. It opens my website
so you can watch it. It's damaged, but it'll give

(01:33:51):
you the idea. There was no music in it. They
use the East German restoration performed solo at Katyanka. It
was the very first film restoration ever released, not just
for Metropolis, but of any movie ever. It was the

(01:34:12):
very first respiration ever to be shown through the pubblic
so it was revolutionary in that sense. It made absolutely
no impression when it was first shown, but over the
next couple of years it gained some traction, and people
got the idea that maybe it's a maybe it would
be good to start restoring all movies. But they ran

(01:34:32):
it on BBC two nineteen seventy five. They got a
thirty five millimeter full aperture print. They ran it at
twenty frames per second. Why they chose that speed, I
don't know. It looked nice though, and there was no music.
The accompaniment was electronic sound effects. That's the version I

(01:34:54):
saw on PBS Movie Theater in May nineteen seventy seven.
Now I'm quite to a purists when it comes to silent movies.
I want to see them presented the way they were
originally presented, with this sort of music that would originally
have accompanied them. This one I forgave because it worked perfectly,

(01:35:16):
And I am wondering. Fitzlong was still alive in seventy five,
and the East German ARC guy was in contact with him.
Did somebody ask him what sort of music would you
like on this? And did he say I don't want
any music on it? And did they then suggest, well,

(01:35:37):
what if we put electronic sound effects? And he said, okay, fine,
I don't know, but it worked beautifully. You should watch it.

Speaker 2 (01:35:45):
Your website is that the RJA Buffalo dot com. I
will point people to the right place.

Speaker 5 (01:35:50):
I went to your site. I love it. It's very interesting.
Like I told you, I wish I had seen it
months ago so I could peruse it in more detail
in preparation for this. But Ronja, you pulled down McGill
again physically first, So I'm gonna hit you with my
McGilligan story. You know, I love that his assistant Long's assistant,
Gustav Putka. Is that how you say p U T

(01:36:12):
T c h e er. He was basically the slim character.
He was on set all the time, but he was
also the court jester. They would make fun of him,
kind of to diffuse tension on set. They'd play practical
jokes on him. They did horrible, awful things. He led
a terrible life. But there was one stipulation in his

(01:36:34):
contract Long at the beginning of production of every single
film with Gota Vienna, and they'd have a perfectly cut
suit made for him, tailored absolutely, and he would put
it on at the start of the day and he
would take it off at the end of the day.
Basically essentially ceremonial work clothes and put Kerr. His reward
for having to put up with Long, dealing with all

(01:36:55):
of this stuff day after day after day, was he
got that suit at the end of production, the end
of every production, he got a little piece of Long,
and I I just love that. It's just weird German stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:37:07):
We talked a little bit about the music, but we
really haven't talked about the effects, which are absolutely amazing.
And that's one of the things that I think is
why we still talk about this movie today is just
how audacious this film is and just how wonderful it
all comes together. The use of the models, the use

(01:37:29):
of you know, I mentioned the title cards. The title
cards are wild because they are not just title cards,
you know, like we think of title cards and like
people will be like, oh, well, yeah, Alfred Hitchcott got
to start making title cards and most people yawn and
be like, okay, great he could type. You know. It's
like no title cards were part of the experience, and

(01:37:49):
the title cards for a movie like this so important.
I mean to have animations of title cards, you know,
the idea of the upper and lower having the title
cards animate on the screen and having those words telling
us the story, but also telling us the story through
the shape, through the form of things to have, you know,
even just the use of the title of Metropolis when

(01:38:12):
the title comes on screen, beautiful animation and just really stunning,
and that they even use animation in the movie itself.
I mean, I think Frederico, you were going to call
out the whole idea of the way that Death's scythe
is being animated across freighter when he's having his visions,
and it's just wonderful that they do that. It's just

(01:38:34):
a slight little thing, but it makes such a difference.

Speaker 5 (01:38:38):
No, it's incredible. Ronjit, I wanted to ask you, what
is the German phrase they use for the great United
work geselschef Kunst or something like that they had, like
a German industry had for where they would combine all
of the arts into one like great and it's something kunst.
I know, it's like a great art, But yeah, I
did want of you guys have been talking about the

(01:38:59):
triangles and the title, and I've just been like itching
to talk about the fact that they cut from the
film itself into the titles and then the titles cut
back into the It's so naturalistic, it's done so expertly,
and that's why the film works so well. I mean,
it's two and a half hours long, like a've blabored saying,

(01:39:19):
but it moves so well because the titles allow you
to breathe and they get you in. And this is
like the Tower of Babbel sequence. They have these beautiful
glass light bars all around the to kind of tell
you this is a separate story of Maria's. You know,
this is like a biblical story. This is something different.
And when the Tower of Babbel comes up on the titles,
it's dripping light. I mean, honestly, it should be dripping blood,

(01:39:42):
but you know, we'll take it. And this, I mean,
I die every single time I mentioned this, every single
time I talk about Metropolis, is that there's one shot
when the workers are in the elevator and we start
at the top with the human actors in the elevator
for the set, and then they moved down. Then we
cut and we're in the model shot, and rather than

(01:40:04):
doing some kind of like optical they just have a
hand drawing of the workers Like this is one of
the few films I've seen where they have just artists
work straight in front of the camera and I live
for it every time. The opening titles are just art.
It's the blending of music, technical draftsmanship, art, anime, all

(01:40:27):
of that model shots and stop motion. I mean, it
goes on and on and on and on.

Speaker 2 (01:40:33):
Well, the music is really what helped with the restoration
as well, because so many of those cues, like every
scene has its own cue, and those notes, I think,
what was it Like the scripts were missing for a while,
some of them were reprinted or pages were reprinted, I think,
but like, I don't think that there was a complete
version of the script for a while when they're trying

(01:40:54):
to put stuff back together. But it was the music
cues that helped guide the hand of the restoration people
to say where things were supposed to be properly, just
because it was such a complete score. I mean, the
whole idea of showing a silent movie without any music
really hurts my heart because that's how I saw a
lot of silent films in one of the film classes

(01:41:15):
I took in college, where professor Ukatake was like, no, no,
silent films were never shown with accompaniment or soundtracks. I'm like,
what are you talking about. So watching Strike with no
music whatsoever, It was one of the weirdest experiences I've
ever seen. I love you, Sergey Eisenstein, But my god,

(01:41:37):
there's a reason why there was a score to that movie.
It's not supposed to be shown absolutely silent, because I
had a hard time keeping my eyes open, no matter
how wonderful the montage was. The eyes were closing without
the music to give me a little jug and I
hate it.

Speaker 4 (01:41:54):
Went in the seventies and I would go see silent movies.
Usually they were the most horrible sixteen millimeter print, a
bridge to blotchy flickery and no music all. So you
really have to have a strong stomach to get through.

Speaker 2 (01:42:14):
That strong stomach and a lot of caffeine.

Speaker 4 (01:42:17):
I didn't that be.

Speaker 5 (01:42:18):
You did another one. I found out what it's called.
It's called a gesumpt Kunstvek. It's a synthesis of the arts.
I'm sorry you guys had to expense I filmed that way.
I'm kind of glad I'm younger than you guys, because
i've you know, dealt with restorations primarily. But I have
had my my times, you know. I watched I Think Earth,

(01:42:40):
What is it that that Russian posts to the Soviet movie.

Speaker 4 (01:42:45):
Yeah, wonderful movie.

Speaker 5 (01:42:46):
Yoh, Ukrainian, thank you very much. Oh, I'm sure it's
a wonderful, beautiful movie. I watched it in a giant
movie theater on a DVD with like terrible music and
a child crying in the back. So with silent movies,
it's so important to get the music. It's just like
they say that the music and sound effects are basically

(01:43:07):
half of the emotional power of film, but in silence
it might as well be like sixty seventy percent, because
if you have a terrible a terrible time, then you're
not going to enjoy the film at all.

Speaker 4 (01:43:19):
No, I've noticed that the best silent movie with a
bad music score is unwatchable. The worst silent movie with
a good music score is perfectly watchable.

Speaker 2 (01:43:31):
Yeah, And going back to the special effects again, talking
about like the double exposures that they had, and just
I mean everything is done with such care, like you're saying, Federico,
as far as the marriage of the visuals, the title cards,
the special effects, the music, everything's just seemed so well
planned and it doesn't feel like there is a real

(01:43:55):
misstep as far as the way that we're putting this together.
It just feels like there's so much gill that comes
in from these German crafts, people that just make it,
just make it shine, make it sane. And even just
the art style of things. You're talking about again the
title cards, but also the title of Metropolis itself. Just

(01:44:16):
that use of the Bauhaus or is it art Deco.
Just the style of the stuff looks so good. You're
in Joe's office and you can see lines in the
background where it's like, Okay, there's something going on. These
aren't just flat walls. Everything is made with purpose, and
even in like a you know, a cave scenario, the

(01:44:39):
catacombs that they're in, everything looks very well put together.
I just love the production design of this movie and
the special effects of this movie. I mean, again, I
won't say it's a perfect film, but it's sure put together,
very very well.

Speaker 5 (01:44:56):
I always go to Blade Runner as my pick for
like a film that the production design is almost better
than the story. You know, it kind of has like
a similar aspect. I mean, I love the story Blade Runner.
I love the story of Roy Baddick, but that aspect
of yeah, everything is just designed to within an inch
of his life and then you see Blade Runner, then
you watch Metropolis and it's like, oh, okay, so you

(01:45:16):
now I understand, you know, and people kind of labor,
people kind of like talk over the fact, you know,
all the kind of this time around was the first
time activist art in general, like there's not a lot
of adorment on walls in terms of like you know,
paintings or like prints. There's a few, but generally they're
they're kept for the upper classes, which is in keeping

(01:45:37):
with you know, Europe at a certain point in time.
You know, the workers barracks are completely bare. There's stone,
there's no adornment, there's no nothing. I mean, there's not
even like windows or anything. It's just straight cut. But
In's visions when he's in bed and he sees the
dance and Slim is at the foot of his bed.
If you look closely on the wall, there's a single

(01:46:00):
i want to say, maybe like a watercolor, like a
like a ukiyoe, like a woodblock print of like Japanese art,
and you were talking about orientalism and the Yoshiwara stuff,
and it's just running under the surface constantly, like all
the design like Bajau's the Vienna Secession movement too was
like a very important like influence on this, like not

(01:46:20):
only Clint but his contemporaries too. There's an incredible book
I don't know, Ranja, if you, I was lucky enough
to find it in my library catalog. It's called German
Film ar Charchitecture nineteen eighteen to nineteen thirty three. It's
in German and English both at the same time. Thank
you very much for whoever decided to do that was

(01:46:41):
published in twenty nineteen by a gallery and they have
the original production drawings for the Tower of Babel. They
have depictions of Metropolis itself, they have how they're going
to set up. This is where I learned that the
production designers on Metropolis actually dictated the shot composite, which
I had no idea what it previously On Niva Longan,

(01:47:04):
the production designers actually drew where the camera would be placed,
the platform, the height, the actors where they would be
placed in the frame. And then they show the drawing
and the film and it's the same image. And they
even have most incredibly, they have hands scrolled out drawings

(01:47:26):
of Metropolis, like the city center, the shot of the
cathedral where Fritz long actually dictated. He said, I don't
want a standard office building here, I want a cathedral.
And he just wrote straight on straight on the paper
and he said, this is what I want. I want
the cathedral. And it's like you have the cathedral that
is old and you have Rotwang like lair, and those

(01:47:49):
are the two kind of like you know, talking about
the German expressionist things where it's like kind of tips
over into old Germany. You know, this is quote unquote
modern Germany or way into the future, but then we
kind of dip dip into the past and it becomes
a totally different film. I just wanted to mention in
Passing if we don't get to it, that the scene

(01:48:10):
of Rotvang chasing Maria in the catacombs, it could be
from a movie from last year, Like it is the
most startling, startlingly contemporary like editing feat I've seen in ages,
and every time I watch the movie, it takes me,
it takes my breath away. That's probably my favorite part

(01:48:30):
of the entire movie because Rodvang has the lighting is
intentional where he has the light in his hand and
so you see the light move as the gaze of
the cameras and you try to find Maria and her
face of bridget Helm, just afraid of what this man
is going to do to her, and it's oh, it's
so good.

Speaker 2 (01:48:49):
Well rot Wang, there's a lot of spirals when it
comes to rot Wang. There's a it looks like a
Neon sculpture on his desk that is a spiral. When
Fader opens up the door to rot Wang's place, which
is protected by a pentagram on the door, it's like
supposed to be sealed that way, but he manages to
get in. I think the door opens almost magically for him.

(01:49:12):
And there's these two spirals that are hanging down and
there again there's this Neon shape. When he goes down
to find rot Wang, he's coming down a spiral staircase.
You know, it's very much associated with that character. And
I don't know if it's supposed to be like, oh,
he's twisted or something. You know, usually when I see
a spiral staircase, it's a symbol of you know, going

(01:49:34):
to the lower depths. You know, like you see spiral
staircases and Hitchcock films all the time. You know, think
of Scotty going up to the top of the tower
and vertigo kind of thing. You know, there's just all
of this spiral stuff. And then that also plays into
the Tower of Babble. Like I was talking about, how
it feels like you go up and up and up
going around these spirals. It's very Guggenheim ask, you know,

(01:49:56):
with the way that that's almost like a Nautilus shell.
Oh sorry again with the spirals, the up and down
of the stuff across Maria's body, and especially across the
false Maria across the robot. I find that fascinating to
the almost Leleu esque dress of the straps across Maria,
the real Maria when you see her in the chamber.

(01:50:18):
But it's very interesting that he's associated with that. And
then going back to also the idea of the expressionism
versus not expressionism. The I love that when rot Wang
is taunting and not necessarily torturing Maria, but he's got
her in that room. In the attic again an attic

(01:50:39):
that the shadows on the wall are not just painted
on shadows, that these are real shadows created by light
from a light source. So it's not that caligary effect
of you know, painting the shadows onto things that it's
an actual thing, like when she moves in front of that,
you see those shadows on her dress that it's actually there.

(01:51:02):
The one thing that we haven't talked about during this
whole thing, too, is the use of the moving camera.
We don't have too many shots of a moving camera,
but when those shots come around, they're very striking to me.
I think the very first time you see it is
when the explosion is happening in the factory and the
way the camera kind of swoops in on freighter, and

(01:51:24):
then there's also a swoop in later on when he
is in rot Wang's place and he goes to reach
for I don't remember what it is, but I just
remember the camera moves and it's almost following his more
like emotional state than his physical state. But it is
supposed to be his hand reaching out for this.

Speaker 5 (01:51:42):
That's my single favorite shot of the whole movie. What
is it, Ronja? It's a piece of address, right, I
think it's a scarf.

Speaker 4 (01:51:49):
I'm not sure. I looked at it again and I thought,
I think that's a scarf, but I can't. I won't
swear to it. But that startled me when I saw
the restoration because i've seen other versions of the movie before.
There was no camera movement in that sed and then
they do this new restoration and the camera moves. Where'd

(01:52:12):
that come from? That's the American negative. They didn't put
the German version of the export version. Oh okay.

Speaker 2 (01:52:19):
The other thing that's so strange about this is, I
know it's something that happened in other films. This wasn't
unique to Metropolis. But this idea of shooting with multiple cameras.
And when I say multiple cameras, of course we think,
you know, shot reverse shot, We're going to shoot with
two cameras. No, I'm talking more more of a Tommy
Wiseou type of thing. Where are you shooting with multiple

(01:52:42):
cameras that are standing next to each other and one
might be closer, one might be farther. You get a
slightly different angle of course, just because of the geometry
of the space. And there's a great documentary about the
restoration of the film, the whole finding of the Argentinian
print and all this where they show a picture and

(01:53:02):
this could be from Metrupolis, could be something else, but
of three cameramen standing next to each other, and then
they do a side by side comparison of here's what's
in one version, Here's what's in the other version, and
you can see that the framing is slightly different. Some
of the takes are actually different.

Speaker 1 (01:53:18):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:53:18):
So it feels very much like that new is that
the documentary about Brian Eno, where it's like it's never
the same movie twice. Every single time you see it,
it's different. And so this idea of and I imagine
if you tried to catalog and maybe you've tried to
do this right cheap, but if you tried to catalog
what's going on in these different versions of it, it

(01:53:39):
feels like you would lose your mind. It feels like
you can't what started talking to you.

Speaker 4 (01:53:44):
I Tom Bob Sadi, who's another expert on the movie.
He and Michael Orgon have done marvelous work on this movie.
I Tom did the first few minutes of Netropolis's German version,
US version Export version side by side, and you could

(01:54:04):
see they never match. And I've caught that myself and
people would gripe about the Blu ray release of the
Georgia Morauder version. You know, why are they using this
old print when they could have just substituted the new
restoration well, you can't substitute it. It's all different.

Speaker 2 (01:54:22):
Take all right, let's go ahead and take a break
and we'll be back after these brief messages.

Speaker 9 (01:54:32):
You obviously love podcasts, but are you also a fan
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don't miss the award winning weekly podcast, The Hollywood Outsider,
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(01:54:54):
Hollywood Outsider dot com. All right, we are back and
talking about Fritz Lang's Metropolis. The Marauder version is interesting.
Can't say I'm a big ban of it, obviously.

Speaker 2 (01:55:09):
Since that came out in eighty four, it was very
much a thing when I was younger. I would have
been twelve years old when it came out, so I
always associated this film with the Marauder version, and I
remember the TV commercials, I remember discussions on in articles
and things about this version. I only finally watched it

(01:55:32):
just recently for this discussion. I don't think that the
pop music really works very well at all in it.
I actually would have rather have had more of When
I think of Georgia or Morouder, I think of the
work that he was doing with Donna Summers and just
the idea of the more electronic type of thing that
he was doing. I would rather have had something like

(01:55:54):
that or give me, you know. And of course there
have been you know, you're talking Federico's far all of
the different scores and things, and there have been like
the Ally Orchestra has done a score. There's so many
different versions of the score for this. If you look
on Wikipedia, they're just like scads and scads of people
that have done scores for this. Moroder, as far as

(01:56:17):
I know, he really pushed as far as like doing
yet another edit of the film and then doing some
interesting things as far as still frames or like images
that they had from the film and then he would
try to animate those. Almost reminded me of like a
Alan Parsons project music video with the way that he
would move the images along and he would have like,

(01:56:38):
you know, the Yoshiwara logo in the back and kind
of go through the window to show us that thing.
It was interesting as far as that goes, Like, Yeah,
the pop music itself just didn't fit with the rest
of the film. Sometimes it felt like the songs was
just kind of fade out, fade back in later on,
and I'm like, no, no, just give me a whole
electronic score. Give me Ahex Twins version of Metropolis. I

(01:57:02):
would like to see that personally.

Speaker 5 (01:57:04):
Give me Wendy Carlos any day. Oh my goodness. Can
you imagine what this would be like with Wendy behind
the synth board? Oh a dream? No. I was just
like you. I was like, oh, Georgia Moroder, who I
know from the you know the two Frenchmen. What are
the deaf Punk? I know them, you know Backfilled? But

(01:57:25):
I like Moroder. I watched it and I was like
I turned it on and I was like, wait, why
are people singing? Like why? Why is this pop music?
I don't want this. I want synth music. It's just like,
this is not what I signed up for. I will
say I do love Blood from a Stone, the one
song from this that I actually can stand of them working.

(01:57:47):
I think it's kind of haunting and beautiful. You know,
Moroder hint like he tinted the film, and he did
what he could to restore it at the point of
the footage that was extant, and at the end of it,
I said, you know, it's not for me, but I
really respect him for putting up the money. You know,
he put up his own money to make a restoration
of the droplets and share it with people, and that

(01:58:09):
just it's a testament to the continuing like power of
the film that somebody would be willing to do and
show it to people, so that people could take it
within themselves and carry it and show it to more people,
even if it has you know, the Bonnie Tyler songs.
At least you've seen a version of Metropolis. You'll see
another in ten seconds.

Speaker 4 (01:58:29):
When the version was first announced, friend of mine and
I were talking about it. We've both seen it on PBS,
and the press release was saying that this was going
to be the most complete ever. George and Mark Well
to travel the world to find every piece of missing film,
put it all back together, and the result is something

(01:58:49):
like eighty three minutes. My friend and I looked at
each other and said, eighty three minutes what we saw
in PBS it was more than two hours.

Speaker 5 (01:58:58):
Oh, what seemed that most complete.

Speaker 4 (01:59:01):
Well, he did find some interesting footage. He did put
it back in. I'm glad the quality was much better
than what we saw from Thunderbird or Griggs, that's for sure.
But I went to see it at at Paseo in
Santa Fe. I said, before I see this, I want
to talk to the projectionist. Go on up. Back in

(01:59:24):
those days, they let you go to the booth. So
I go to the booth. He's running it in wide
screen one point eight five to one. Why are you
running in wide screen? The distributor sent us this lens
in this aperture, but I don't know what to do
with it. I don't know what they're for, so I
just left him on the shelf. My god, is the
Academy aperture. This is what you're supposed to use. It's

(01:59:44):
an Academy reduction. But anyway, he didn't switch it, so
I I'm not gonna watch this. So I waited years
until it popped up at University of Buffalo and there
was one projectionist there I liked and he trusted me.
I thought, okay, there are about four projections there, one
and four chants. He'll be there tonight, So I went

(02:00:07):
he was there. I had Howard reached into my pot.
Use these apertures bring down the tall screen, and so
I got to see the full image, as probably the
only time that was ever shown at a cinema without
being cropped. I watched it, and this tells me a

(02:00:28):
lot about me, and it will tell you a lot
about me. I watched the whole movie, and when it ended,
I thought, I thought there was going to be singing
in this. I didn't hear any singing. I heard lots
of loud music. I didn't hear any singing because I
was so concentrating on the images, I didn't notice that
many of one was singing on the ground track. But

(02:00:51):
what I did notice about the movie is that this
is not what I saw on PBS. This is not
what I saw don ponchos. This is some other version
of the movie. I wish I could put the three
side by side to see what the differences are. I
can't put my finger on what the differences are. And
I've seen them such great different times. I you know,

(02:01:12):
it's not like I watched one and then an hour
later I watched another, and I saw one months later,
I saw another more than a decade later, I saw another,
and so I could. I couldn't remember what the differences were.
I just knew they were very, very different. But yeah,
I have nothing against the moral de version, so long

(02:01:32):
as people know it's not the original. It's what Georgio
Moroder paid his dues paid for the paid the licenses
to do with the film. It's a Georgia Morada film.
It's not a fitzlan film anymore. And if you like
a Georgia morad film, fine, if you'd rather see the

(02:01:52):
fitz long version that's available too, I'm okay with it.
It did not get a big release because it didn't
get a good distributor. Well I don't know where you
two saw it, but it did not play at the
big houses, led at the mom and pops.

Speaker 2 (02:02:10):
I'm just glad that Freddie Mercury was involved with that
Moroda version because there was a deal that was made
that then Queen could use the footage, the better footage
that you know, because he did, like you said, put
his money into it. There was some restoration that was happening.
They were able to use that footage for that Radio
Gaga video, which I think is pretty great. And that

(02:02:33):
was my introduction, and that was so strange that music
videos for years have been kind of an introduction for
some people to classic silent cinema. Will you talk about
I keep going back to Caligari. There's a great video
for Living Dead Girl by Rob Zombie or White Zombie.
I don't remember if it's a solo or a band
act that is all Caligari or even And I'm not

(02:02:57):
a fan of this band at all, but Smashing Pumps
one of their videos was basically a redo of a
trip to the Moon, So it's like, okay, this is
a good way at least to introduce people. So like
Moroder and that version of his thing. At least it's
a way to get people introduced to old classic cinema.
And yes it's very boulderized, but at least it's there

(02:03:21):
and it's a way for people, hopefully to go. I'm
interested in finding out more about this.

Speaker 5 (02:03:27):
Speaking about vulgarized, I just wanted to bring up thing
about there's a version on YouTube now of a four
k sixty frames per second of Maria's The False Marias
Like Dance, and I don't know if either of you
guys got a chance to look at it. Even in passing.
It's it's interesting because it's almost like culture wants to
pull Metropolis with it. It's like it changes for the

(02:03:49):
times and people now they want it to be in color,
and they want it to be the speed that they
like and at the resolution that even if it's you know, bastardized,
even if it's not whatded I mean you say Long
didn't want any music. I'm not going to go that far.
I'm not going to watch Metropolis without music. I can't
do it. Don't make me.

Speaker 4 (02:04:08):
But watch the PBS person.

Speaker 5 (02:04:10):
Watching that version that like four point three million people,
four point three million views on YouTube. It's like one
of the most popular videos. And it's talking about like
the striking aspect of the filmmaking itself, reaching from the
past and grabbing you. It's that it's just completely universal,
and you know, seeing that transposed to the metrics of

(02:04:31):
our time of what film and what basically internet media
is supposed to look like, it's the it's almost Metropolis
itself saying, you know, I'm going to be here for
a long time. If we're coming up on one hundred years,
there is no doubt in my mind that one hundred
years from now the image of the false Maria in
that chair with the rings around her will be where.

(02:04:53):
You know, it might be in a book, it might
be on the internet, it might be an art you're
talking about music videos. I mean, it just rolls on
and on and on. And that's how silent cinema survives.
And I'm so happy the Metropolis survives because so many
films of that era just completely got butchered and destroyed,
lost and fires everything, and we have, you know, lunatics

(02:05:15):
and film fanatics to thank for keeping it, you know,
the Argentinian Film Archive, all just it just it just endures.

Speaker 2 (02:05:25):
Oh yeah, we've been talking about this movie for what
two and a half hours now or two ten. I
could talk about it for another four hours if we
needed to, because there's so much about this. This is
tip of the iceberg kind of stuff. And yeah, it's fascinating.
You're talking about the way that culture pulls along with it,
that influence. You know, we've mentioned so many films that
have been influenced by this, so many music videos. I

(02:05:49):
know that I think it was the might have been
the Rosenbomb and commentary, or might have been another commentary
that I heard where they're talking about was it Express
Yourself the Madonna where it's like, yep, here we go.
Here's another influence on Metropolis. And we haven't even talked
about the two thousand and one anime version, which I

(02:06:09):
was reading more about that, and it was based on
manga from was it the forties, but it was definitely
older than the two thousand and one date. But that
two thousand and one version apparently takes takes a different
track than the Are Attacked than the manga and really

(02:06:29):
feels like it's more like beholden to Metropolis itself, but
then also with a lot of Blade Runner inside of there,
because it's not just a society of a few replicants
are few robots, but it's many, many robots. And this
whole idea of the robot underclass, I mean very I
robot again with an influence very this idea of the servants,

(02:06:54):
you know, the planet of the apeseness of it, where
you've got that underclass of difference and then the way
that the difference gets played out, and some of that
was I'm not a big anime guy, obviously, We've only
done a few anime films on this podcast over the
last fourteen years, but it was decent and it was interesting.
I'm not a big fan of the character design where

(02:07:15):
they look very cartoonish and things, but yeah, I found
some of it to be kind of interesting and just
a new way of looking at the material.

Speaker 4 (02:07:24):
I suppose I haven't seen it. Michael Lorgan told me
I should see it, but I've never seen it. I
guess I will someday. My understanding from a press release
is it was based on just one single still from
the Metropolis movie and that's all that the artists ever
saw of Metropolis. I don't know if that's true.

Speaker 5 (02:07:46):
I really would love to hear your thoughts on the
Metropolis version, because, like Mike says it, it feels like
a blend, and I think you'd get something out of it, absolutely,
because I mean, I wanted to ask you, Runjit, how
many times have you seen Metropolis?

Speaker 4 (02:08:01):
I never counted, but probably close to fifty now, but
usually in different versions.

Speaker 5 (02:08:10):
Mike, have you seen anything fifty times?

Speaker 2 (02:08:12):
I probably have seen the ORIGINALT Star Wars at least
fifty times, and probably Black Shampoo as well.

Speaker 4 (02:08:18):
I've probably seen the General about one hundred times, but
again that's because I was trying to research why every
sixteen millimeter, eight milimeter, thirty five millimeter print, every VHS,
every laser was different, And so I bought them all
but bankrupt and I compared themalhel and I learned a

(02:08:41):
lot that way, that the history of how the prints
migrated over a century that would interest absolutely nobody except me. Yeah,
most movies I can't even get through once. But Metropolis,
I think I made it probably fifty times by now,
or close to it. But I've seen the Museum Modern
Art version, the Australian version that I sent you the

(02:09:06):
links to that on YouTube. I saw the nineteen sixty
three German version with Mulis score. I saw the nineteen
sixty five version with the Cornard Elcher score. I saw
it the BBC two version which was shown on PBS
with the Electronics score. Yeah, this goes on and on.

(02:09:26):
Every time. It's something different, and it's edited differently, and
different scenes are missing a lot of them. They don't
even have Malhias dance in the middle. It's gone censors did.

Speaker 2 (02:09:40):
It is fascinating to watch that restored version where you
can see the difference between the quality of the print
and see a few extra shots of Maria's dance, and
especially to see the guy who gets really jealous of
his friend, and then they cut to him having a
duel with his friend, and like the duel was in there,
looks like, but then the shot of him looking at

(02:10:03):
his friend jealously was not in there. And it's like,
it's so fascinating to try to peel back these layers
and just say who made these decisions and why were
these decisions made? So obviously Maria's bear back, Oh that
might be too titillating, you know, but like why the look,
why was that cut? Why are some of these reaction

(02:10:24):
shots cut? And it's just I love watching these kind
of film mode where you can say, like, oh, okay,
what was the logic behind removing all of hell? You know?
And obviously, like we're saying it can't be censorship. Is
it just we're gonna remove that subplot? And that seems

(02:10:44):
much more logical to me, is we're going to remove
all references to the mother. And then when you start
removing references to mothers, then you start talking about like
feminist film theory and all these things, And I just
love that there are so many different ways of looking
at this. I like that Rosenbaum really comes to things
from more of a Freudian point of view. I love

(02:11:04):
to read films that way, and you know, talking about
the id in the underground and all these kind of things.
But there are so many different ways to to you know,
skin this cat, sorry Ranjie, to skin this cat that
it's just wild to be able to see. Like well, Marouder,
he removed a lot of the use of the montage
and things, and you know, within the American version is

(02:11:25):
much more straight shot, reverse shot kind of stuff, and
like Lang's original montage and montage being so important, especially
in silent cinema, but still, you know, montage is one
of like my favorite things. I love the use of editing,
and I love the power of editing to be able
to see those edits right there in your face. Watching

(02:11:46):
that restored twenty ten was a version of it. It's
just great. And it seems amazing that it's gone fifteen
years and we haven't had yet another update of this.
It feels like we're maybe on the brink of yet
another discovery because there are still versions out there, there's
shot differences, there's all of these things I would almost

(02:12:09):
love to see, like the every single different version of
this that there's available. I mean, where's the box set
of here's all of these different versions.

Speaker 4 (02:12:19):
If anyone is rich enough and foolish enough, and rich
enough and richer enough under that, I would like to
be in charge of that and if you go, Oh,
they pulled it down from YouTube, but I caught it
and I embedded it on my site, the Patescope nine
point five millimeter version from I think nineteen thirty five.

(02:12:42):
It has a couple of seconds in Maria's dance that
are missing even from the latest restoration, And for this
I wanted to prepare. I wanted to intercut them and
put them back in. See you don't have the time.
Someone needs to do that. I'm sure more of the
film will pop up. I'm almost convinced that there's a

(02:13:05):
complete print incost film a fund that's mislabeled and that
I hope ticks up before I broke what that's.

Speaker 2 (02:13:14):
The heartbreak for me is watching that Metropolis Refound documentary,
and unfortunately the only version I was able to find
was a horrible quality and really tough to watch. But
I still got the story out of it, and to
watch them talk about oh, yeah, we originally had this
on nitrate and because of night End. Of course, Frederico,

(02:13:36):
you're very familiar with all the stories of nitrate. I
know you are as well, Ronjie. The idea of how
dangerous the stock is. We were going to transfer all
of these night Trates prints to thirty five, Oh you know,
it would cost way too much, so we have to
transfer it to sixteen. I'm like, oh God, that just

(02:13:57):
hurts so much to hear. And you see the loss
of the quality and the different aspect ratios and all this,
and you're just like, oh, somebody just to make a
cost seeming thing. And when they were talking about how
it was stored and it wasn't stored correctly, and you're
just like, you see all of these mistakes from the past,

(02:14:18):
just adding up to where we're at now and just
going Yep, because people were fucking cheap or they couldn't
store the nitrate film, this is what we're ending up with.

Speaker 4 (02:14:29):
That made me so sad. In what's his name, Fernando Pana,
I can't remember. He'd been a little booklet how he
Found Metropolis, which is difficult for me to read because
it's in a language I don't speak, but I got
through it courtesy of Google Translator and other little tools.

(02:14:50):
He mentioned that just before they destroyed the print, they
gave it one final screening in thirty five millimeter at
a brand new cinema on a panoramic screen, which probably
means one point eight five to one wide screen. You
can't watch it. Run a full aperture movie at one

(02:15:12):
point eight five and see anything that's cutting off half
the image. The film by then was shriveled, so a
guy went up to the projection booth and put his
fingers at the top of the gate to hold the
rails in tightly so that it wouldn't buckle as much.
That's why I got so scratched. If they had just

(02:15:34):
left it alone, not shown it, donated it to a
German archive, we'd have the movie. And they when they
printed it through sixteen millimeter, they didn't even print it
through the proper gate, so they pumped it to the
Academy aperture and lost the top on the side. Knuckle heads,

(02:15:57):
something more is going to pop up, I'm certain.

Speaker 1 (02:16:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:16:00):
I remember that story about the guy pressing it and
him saying, I held my finger there for two and
a half hours and people are like, wait, no, the
movie's not two and a half hours long. He's like no, no,
I held it for two and a half hour. It's like, well, yeah,
because there was that version of the film two and
a half hour long version.

Speaker 4 (02:16:19):
When they gave the sixty milimeters dupneg to the archive,
they just cataloged it and put it on the shelf,
wouldn't let anyone see it. But I thought, wait a minute, guys,
you know how long it should be, and you can
see how much film there is on the reels. Doesn't
it dawn on you that there's an extra thirty forty
minutes of film on these reels. It didn't dawn on them.

(02:16:41):
They didn't check it against anything. They just put it
on the shelf and wouldn't let anyone look at it.
Wonderful world of film restoration.

Speaker 5 (02:16:49):
I have to feel like I have to be the
one to defend the Argentinians from onslaught.

Speaker 2 (02:16:55):
You know, Oh, I'm not saying anything bad about them.
I'm just saying, like the that those things that happened
then still have resonance today. And it's like, oh, okay.

Speaker 5 (02:17:06):
Mike, you weren't there for the talk this year? At Nitrate,
where you with the archivists from Buenos Aires, right, I
remember you weren't know.

Speaker 2 (02:17:12):
But I remember watching that noir that they showed, and
that was marvelous.

Speaker 5 (02:17:16):
You guys call them knuckleheads, and I completely understand the
anger of a lot of silent film fans. Ronja. You
mentioned d why didn't they give it to the bundest
film Archive? Why didn't they give it to the Germans?
Hurt and just in general with film archiving in that
part of the world. I don't know if if you
guys have been to South America, but it's almost like
traveling back in time. The economic principles down there just

(02:17:36):
do not function at that level. I mean in Uruguay
they had a leftist film archive that was made during
the Junta years and it was destroyed for political reasons.
It's just a totally different ballgame, like art is superfluous.
I mean, the people that run that film archive, they're
not even federally funded through Argent. It's just like a museum.

(02:17:57):
We can lament the past. I'm lad that we have it,
like you guys have saying, but there is that aspect too,
where Metropolis was found, like in the two thousands, and
they got a lot of funding from ZDF and art
and a bunch of like German film archives that are
all credited at the end all over the world. But
still to this day they're struggling to get funding to

(02:18:17):
save their films, the films that they still have. And
you can like say, well, you know, you should have
kept your nitrate, you know, climate controlled vaults, all this
kind of and it's like, have you ever been to Brazil.
It's not going to happen with a with a country
under a military dictatorship. It's just you know, the Western

(02:18:38):
the Western powers they have they have the money to
put into art as soft power and propaganda, but South
America doesn't have the power projection to be worth that well.

Speaker 2 (02:18:48):
And that there was so much doubt from the Germans
when the Argentinians contacted them and said, hey, we have
this longer version of Metropolis, and they're just like didn't
respond like to the original query or anything. It took
a guy going to Spain and meeting with a person

(02:19:10):
who knows a ton of you know, like basically Spain's
Renji Sandhu and saying like, hey, here's this and let's
sit down and we're gonna watch a dupe that I
created on VHS and see the differences. And then even
when they took it to then that finally opened up
doors and got them to go to actual like Berlin

(02:19:32):
or wherever in Germany and show it there. And they
were showing either a VHS or DBDR at that point,
and they're just like m hmm, yeah, oh yeah, there's
a slight difference here. Oh there's a slight difference there.
And they're not seeing a lot of stuff in the
first few reels. And then finally it starts to kick
in and they're just like everybody sits up in their chairs,
so they're like, oh, okay, this is interesting, you know.

(02:19:56):
Then they finally start to believe him. And it just
felt like kind of like you're saying, Federico, and this
is not the attitude I want to have, which is
all these these simpletons in Argentina. No, they're doing a
fantastic job. And yes, under very bad circumstances. I mean,
the Perone regime was not very kind to anyone, much

(02:20:20):
less film restorationists or film keepers, and so yeah, and
it's really only again going back to what I was
saying at the very beginning thanks to this guy who
was had kept a copy of this. It was kind
of like that, hopefully, one of these days we're going
to see the copy that was sent from of Magnificent
Amberson's during the editing phase down from Brazil to Orson

(02:20:43):
Wells when he's you know, that's the theory and hopefully
one of these days is going to pan out. They
said this version down to Argentina, this guy's like, oh,
I fucking love this movie. This is fantastic. And then
I love too that he changed the ending, that he
took a little bit of the early part of it
Tropolis and put it at the end to show the
city still or has been restored, and basically like, now

(02:21:07):
we have our happy ending. So we do have a
slightly different end to that version of it, just because
the guy was like, no, no, let's give this a
happier ending.

Speaker 4 (02:21:18):
They also had a thirty five nitrate of Pandora's Box
that they incinerated at the same time they incinerated Metropolis.
Oh my god, that would have the extra eight minutes
in it, and that might have the proper English broadside

(02:21:38):
posted up rather than the German translation, and they incinerated
it and I will.

Speaker 2 (02:21:43):
Never see it. So many things lost like tears in
the rain.

Speaker 5 (02:21:49):
Never say never.

Speaker 2 (02:21:51):
All right, guys, we're going to take another break and
play a preview for next week's show right after these
brief messages.

Speaker 10 (02:22:01):
Ruthless Invaders, you will accept me as your master. A
defenseless planet, Battle beyond the Stars alone, you that escapes
on a last ditch mission five third fire, you.

Speaker 2 (02:22:20):
Fight, and you've got a Snowball's chancing.

Speaker 10 (02:22:23):
Here, Gathering a daring band of mutants, aliens and space
adventurers in a journey that begins at the edge of
the universe and ends in a desperate gamble.

Speaker 1 (02:22:40):
They'll be able to us.

Speaker 2 (02:22:42):
It won't make any difference.

Speaker 10 (02:22:45):
A Battle beyond Time, Beyond Space, Battle beyond the Stars
starring Richard Thomas, now, Robert Vaughan, John Saxophone, George Patard.

Speaker 4 (02:23:08):
About thirty seconds doing that.

Speaker 10 (02:23:12):
The Battle beyond the Stars in Fading your space soon.

Speaker 2 (02:23:18):
That's right. We'll be back next week when they look
at Battle Beyond the Stars. Until then, I want to
think my co hosts Federica and Renjeet, so Ranjeet, what
is keeping you busy these days?

Speaker 4 (02:23:28):
Trying to recover my senses? After eight tragic years. That's
about it. Not doing anything publicly right now well, and.

Speaker 2 (02:23:39):
I highly recommend that people go to RJ Buffalo dot
com and read some of your writing and especially all
the work that you've done documenting all of this stuff,
especially around Metropolis the general. So many good things, and Federico,
what's keeping you busy, sir?

Speaker 5 (02:23:56):
I got a super eight film camera and I've been
losing my mind with it a little bit shortly, so
I've been shooting a lot of stuff. I don't know
if you saw me at Nitrate, but I have a
bunch of stuff. I have a YouTube channel it's just
my name Federik Colbertolini this. I also have an Instagram
that's a little bit more difficult. You can find me
under my name Federik Olbertolini, but it's at Duels decorum

(02:24:18):
Es propetri dulsa dicorm I'm also kind of in the
planning phase. I really want to do kind of like
a breakdown of this year's Nitrate with my friend to
like talk about the movies and keep it as kind
of like a memo, and especially the last film. I
really want to go into that and get people's like
discussions because everybody at the festival was talking about it,

(02:24:41):
but it's in like scattered, tiny little discussions, so it'd
be nice to pull it all together. So, Mike, if
you get a message for me asking for your thoughts
on nitread as a whole and specific films in particular,
don't be surprised.

Speaker 2 (02:24:55):
Thank you so much folks for being on the show.
Thanks everybody for listening. If you want to hear more
of me shooting off my I'll check out some of
the other shows that I work on. They are all
available at Winningwaymedia dot com. Thanks especially to our Patreon community.
If you want to join the community, visit patreon dot
com Slash Projection Booth. Every donation we get helps a
projection booth. Take over the world, Shoot supp.

Speaker 1 (02:26:44):
Shoot shot.

Speaker 11 (02:26:47):
Stop step stop Stop Stop, Student sperience, supposing student exposor

(02:28:30):
stop SPTT STOTT Sweet.

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Exchange to those not.

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Expect to spot Expect.

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School is a

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Fudd Around And Find Out