Metropolis

Metropolis is a film nearly everyone has heard of but very few have seen, let alone paid enough attention to appreciate. It’s a shame, really, when one considers the grand accomplishment that this film is, the technical feats it pulls off to build and immerse the viewer in its world, its achievement in being the first feature-length science fiction film, and how it tells its story despite existing in the early days of filmmaking when the language of cinema had yet to be defined in narrative films.

For decades, filmmakers have been hiding themes in the visual landscape of their movies to subtly help the audience infer certain aspects of the world in which the characters live. In Star Wars (1977, dir George Lucas) the stormtroopers wear white armor over a black fabric layer, implying that while they pose as a force for good, they are actually the facade of an evil regime. Meanwhile Han Solo wears a black vest over a white shirt to imply exactly the opposite—though he acts like a scoundrel and rogue smuggler who only ever looks out for his own interests, he is actually helping the rebels defeat the Empire. In Marriage Story (2019, dir Noah Baumbach) Nicole visits an attorney’s office that is white and pristine and where the divorce lawyer curls up on the couch with her, gives her cookies, and comforts her as she cries. Meanwhile Charlie’s attorney’s office is in a high-rise with windows facing east so that in the afternoon, the natural light that enters the office is indirect, making the office feel expensive but also dark and unwelcoming. The challenge for the filmmakers of Metropolis was how to tell a grand story of two separate worlds, one of luxury and sunlight and another far beneath the earth, while relying very little on language to communicate this disparity to the audience. How do you tell a story with as little dialogue as a silent film (intertitles are used somewhat sparingly) that still communicates its messages of oppression, demonic machinery, and revolution? Metropolis accomplishes this by relying heavily on allusions to literature and historical events with which the audience would surely be familiar, in particular Biblical stories and the French Revolution.

Before the writing and music, however, we must turn our attention to the film’s set design, a veritable masterpiece of German expressionist cinema. Part of what makes it so wonderful is how it conveys the film’s themes in a purely visual medium. We first see the workers as they change shifts, slowly marching in organized lines along an underground tunnel, through giant gates, and onto an enormous elevator down to an entire subterranean city where they work. They are dwarfed by the sets to remind them (and us) of how little they are compared to the relentless mechanical beasts that control them, instead of the other way around. The scale of the sets also exists on the upper levels of the Metropolis, constantly reminding the audience of the immensity of the city and making even the upper elites feel small in their own homes and offices—doors that tower over the people who walk through them, memorials that loom over their visitors, staircases with no end in sight. It’s in the mastery of sets like those in Metropolis that missteps in other films become more apparent. I think of Downsizing (2017, dir Alexander Payne) where thousands of people are shrunk to a height of five inches, and yet almost nothing in the sets of the tiny towns reminds the audience (or the characters) that they’ve been downsized. Matt Damon’s apartment looks like a normal apartment. Tiny details we would find in normal houses aren’t painted onto walls like they are on models at our scale. Occasionally normal-sized objects are placed next to the characters for some sense of scale, but it’s rare instead of a constant reminder like it is in Metropolis.

Metropolis (1927, dir Fritz Lang). Freder descends a staircase outside his father’s office. See the immense scale of the set and the lack of human presence. What does this tell us about the city? What does it tell us about Freder’s father?

When Freder first ventures into the workers’ city, the machine before him transforms into a temple to Moloch, the long lines of workers silently marching into the demon’s gaping mouth as two guards stand by and usher them to their deaths. The steep stairs of the machine are designed to remind the audience of Aztec temples, similarly designed with steep staircases to assist with speedy human sacrifices. The guards are dressed to resemble the priests of ancient Egypt, the type who would have warned the Pharaoh about Moses’ plot to free the Jews from their slavery. On another thematic note, this long march to Moloch is paralleled with a long march of the workers to the cathedral at the conclusion of the film.

Metropolis (1927, dir Fritz Lang). The machine turns into Moloch and a long line of workers ascend the steep stairs to be devoured.

Metropolis (1927, dir Fritz Lang). The guards at the mouth of Moloch bear a striking resemblance to the Egyptian priests who would have overseen the slavery of the Jews.

Metropolis also evokes memories of the French Revolution. At the beginning, Freder is partying in a garden where beautiful women are wearing dresses in the rococo style of fashion—wide and structured hips, heavy and intricate ornamentation—and when the mechanical woman leads the workers to destroy the heart machine, we hear in the musical score the beginning of La Marseillaise, the French national anthem written after the overthrow of the monarchy. This reliance on historical events helped the filmmakers of Metropolis tell the film’s story with as little dialogue as possible, and we can understand it an entire century later—Metropolis is a society that is split between the extremely wealthy elite and the underclass of manual workers who are treated like the machines they tend to for ten hours at a time.

I cannot simply discuss the purely physical nature of the scenery. Many of the sets, despite their large scale, are somewhat minimal—bare walls and large dark spaces that contain nothing. Expressionist filmmakers used light and shadow as part of the scenery just as much as they used the physical sets themselves. Maria is chased through the underground tunnels and the camera actually moves with her as a bright light follows through the darkness (keep in mind how large and cumbersome cameras were at the time and you realize how impressive that really is). Later she climbs a staircase and the camera follows only her shadow as she ascends, instead of the actress. In an era when film technology was very primitive, where actors’ faces had to be painted white and their facial details redrawn over the foundation so their expressions could register on camera, German expressionists used these technical limitations to their advantage and created a unique film style that defined the silent film era.

Of course, the best set design in all of cinema is nothing without a compelling story to tell within it. But the complex themes of the film’s story had to be communicated to the audience (German and global) while using minimal dialogue. Thea von Harbou, the film’s screenwriter as well as the author of the novel from which the film was adapted, heavily employed Biblical allusion to convey the film’s message and themes. I do mean Biblical allusion, though the film also contains a handful of summaries of stories from the Old and New Testaments. Maria tells a congregation the story of the Tower of Babel and Freder listens to a priest briefly describe the whore of Babylon from the book of Revelation. These bits of exposition aside, the film is replete with religious imagery and details: Freder instructs a cab driver to take him to the New Tower of Babel. It is Freder who, through Maria, is introduced to the children of the underworld, then dons the clothing of a laborer to experience the life of a worker. He saves the children from a dangerous flood caused by the shortsightedness and rage of their parents, then fights Rotwang (the inventor and creator of the mechanical temptress) to the death. Finally, Freder, the son, introduces his father (the ruler of Metropolis) to the chief manual laborer, the operator of the heart machine. A final title card reminds us of the film’s central message—the mediator between the head and the hands must be the heart.

Metropolis (1927, dir Fritz Lang). The mechanical woman poses as Maria and mirrors the Whore of Babylon from the Book of Revelation.

And yet Metropolis clearly shared some struggles with many early silent films. The language of cinema had not yet been fully formed, and it shows in the cinematography. The blocking in some scenes is not properly executed and it’s confusing who is where in the scene; some reaction shots do not make clear where the actor who is reacting is in relation to the other characters, or if an entirely new scene in a new location is starting. These limitations aside, which are to be expected from the work in a medium without a fully developed language, Metropolis excels in its creative storytelling and cinematography, all while breaking ground in the new genre of science fiction.

The success of Metropolis in withstanding the test of time is a result of its incorporation of Old World Biblical themes into its story with a futuristic setting. Just as the workers and the management of Metropolis must be mediated by the heart, the creative vision of the artist can only be communicated to the viewer if it is mediated by well-known ideas and literary/visual language. Even something as brand new as Metropolis relies heavily on the historical context of Europe and Biblical knowledge of its audience to communicate its story and immerse its viewers in its brave new world. How out-of-place does the witch burning scene appear to a modern audience unfamiliar with this treatment of witches in Germany’s history? How indecipherable is the film to a culture without a knowledge of the most well-known stories from the Bible? Even that which is new does not exist without the old. In many ways, this is the message of Metropolis. The leadership of the city, bathed in its luxury and blinded by opulence, cannot properly run the Metropolis without knowing and understanding the manual labor that has run human civilization since our earliest nomadic days. The future cannot exist without the past, the head cannot survive without the hands, and the mediator for both must be the fountain of human emotion—the heart.