Filming Metropolis cost 5,100,000 Reichsmarks, a figure that today, calculating inflation, would be more than 39 million dollars, one of the most expensive in the origins of cinema. Fritz Lang had a large number of extras and about 620,000 meters of film were filmed, reduced to 4,189 for its first cut, later its duration was reduced for international distribution.[4] A total of 27,000 extras were used, it was shot in more than 310 days and 60 nights.[5]​.

The production was mainly handled by Erich Pommer, who at first did not have much faith in the project. He saw it as too expensive both economically and executively, and although Fritz Lang managed to convince him, he was the main producer and executive of the film without still fully believing in it. Lang wrote the script with his wife Thea von Harbou, who was also in charge of writing the novel that would serve as the basis for the creation of the Metropolis script.

After being accepted by the Universum Film AG, "Erich Pommer, Karl Freund, Günther Rittau, Eugen Schüfftan and the sculptor Walter Schulze-Mittendorff joined their respective studios to make the film that had enjoyed the largest budget in the entire history of German cinema."[6]​.

Metropolis became a blockbuster both in terms of budget and the number of participants, with a total of more than 37,000 people. One of the producers, Eugen Schüfftan, was responsible for the special effects. These are considered the most characteristic and representative element of the film, and cost a large amount of time and material due to Lang's great efforts to do justice to the enormous script. However, the film suffered numerous reissues due to censorship and cuts depending on where the film was screened. For example, in its American distribution, various parts of the film were cut because they were considered communist propaganda. "[...] resulted in the filming of 620,000 meters of celluloid, which were reduced to 4,189 meters in the first cut and to 3,170 in its international distribution."[6]​ The third of these cuts had a soundtrack composed by Giorgio Moroder and in which artists such as Queen and Bonnie Tyler, among others, participated.

Schüfftan "created the sophisticated Schüfftan Process",[7]​ which consisted of the use of reflections and counter-reflections used in models to simulate large buildings. Another novelty was the use of the gyroscopic camera, "which allowed panoramic films to be filmed in all directions."[7]​.

Shortly before its official premiere in Berlin (on January 10, 1927 at the UFA-Palast am Zoo), the film was screened for representatives of Paramount, the company that was going to distribute it in the United States, who found it confusing and, above all, long. Channing Pollock&action=edit&redlink=1 "Channing Pollock (writer) (not yet written)") was commissioned to proceed with a new cut to shorten the duration. In addition to making some cuts based on morality, with a view to greater commercial release in the United States (such as the elimination of almost all shots in which the fake Maria is observed performing her erotic dance), Pollock eliminated the crucial plot line about the true nature of the confrontation between Freder and Rotwang, as well as numerous shots of the dramatic flooding of the workers' underground city. From these modifications arose the version released in the United States, at the Rialto cinema in New York, on March 5, 1927, two months after its German premiere, and the one that arrived in Great Britain, with about 115 minutes. In Spain it premiered on May 29, 1927 at the Iris Park Cinema in Barcelona and with the title Metrópolis (The city above the cities), in two installments.[1]​.

Shortly after, the film's production company was left with an enormous debt with its North American partners Paramount and Metro-Goldwing-Mayer, which would be assumed by the nationalist millionaire Alfred Hugenberg (who shortly after invested his money in helping Adolf Hitler come to power) in April 1927. At the helm of the production company he removed Metropolis from circulation in German cinemas and shortened the length of the film from Pollock's edition, largely removing the ideological line that they believed to be “inappropriate” due to communist and religious tendencies. In August 1927 the new 117-minute version reached German cinemas and several European cities. In 1936, due to Nazi censorship, the UFA would make even more cuts, this time lasting 91 minutes. Then came the war and with it the destruction of the original and mutilated negatives of the film, which led to a reduction to an hour and a half of the film created by Lang.[8]​ In 2010, a restored version of the film, based on the copy found in Argentina, recovered 30 minutes that had been cut due to its ideological and erotic charge, and to shorten the footage.[9]​.

Fritz Lang liked to remember that the story of Metropolis was born on his trip to the United States, in October 1924, seeing the city's skyscrapers and illuminated streets from his boat at night in front of the New York port.[10] Upon returning, Thea von Harbou would start working on the script. This inspiration can be related to the filming in the materialization of the visual ideas rather than the script, since the story was probably very well outlined in July 1924. Von Harbou also wrote a novel that was based on the plot of the film.

En la representación del orden social, Metrópolis se apoya por un lado en el marxismo: hay dos clases sociales claramente diferenciadas y separadas, en las que una explota a la otra sin que haya posibilidades de medrar. La «alienación del trabajo» podría relacionarse con que haya algunas máquinas sin una utilidad reconocible. El personaje del robot María, representado claramente como malvada, lanza a los trabajadores a la lucha, y como resultado destrozan su medio y sustento, empeorando su situación en lugar de mejorarla. La colaboración entre clases sociales, en lugar de la lucha de clases, recuerda sin embargo al nacionalsocialismo y su ideología, pues era la estructura económica corporativista que defendía el programa del partido Nazi; ideology with which Thea von Harbou sympathized,[11]​ contrary to Fritz Lang.[12]​.

Lang later implied that the idea of ​​the heart as a mediator between the hand (the power of work) and the brain (the directing capacity of society) was false and that because of this he no longer liked this film. Behind this opinion was hidden the social situation that was being experienced and not a moral conflict. Although the central thesis of the brain, the hand and the heart belongs to Thea von Harbou, he was responsible for it, at least in part, as the director of the film that it was. Lang was actually much more interested in the technical and architectural aspects of the film than in the political undertones of the plot.

The discreet success of the film among the public of those years can also be explained by this, since the social image developed in the story opposes the barely questioned beliefs in progress that were held at that time. The science fiction genre of silent film presents utopia, generally in a positive way, while Lang draws on the enslavement of biblical times to represent the future. The monumental machines of the underground city provide the lower classes with an undignified life, the human mass is easily manipulated and medieval rites such as the burning of witches are practiced.

From Christianity the parable of the Tower of Babel is taken: in the variant it shows that the architects and the workers spoke the same language but did not understand each other. The figure of Mary, who personifies good, is also rescued, as well as the announcement of the coming of a redeemer and the figure of the false prophet (the robot Mary).

Metropolis is a city of skyscrapers whose art deco architecture is reminiscent of the most modern cities of the time, mainly New York, although skyscraper architecture emerged in the Chicago school "Chicago School (architecture)").

Avenues and train lines are tangled between the buildings. The buildings of the surface city are of a majestic structure, while the workers' city, underground, is simpler, gloomy and gloomy.

Between these two basic spaces there are places with their own characteristic architecture. In the superficial city there is the cathedral, with Gothic lines, and the Rottwang house, an ancient building, also of medieval arts, that resembles more the workshop of an alchemist than the laboratory of a scientist; Lang and Von Harbou agreed to redirect the original idea of ​​providing Rottwang with magical abilities. Furthermore, in the surface city there is a garden that symbolizes the idyllic nature of life for the city directors and a neighborhood of sin portrayed with oriental architecture, traditionally associated with the exotic, the sensual and, from there, the sinful. In the underground city there is also a clandestine area associated with the cavernous spaces where the allegory of the salvation of the workers is represented through the image of the Christians hidden in the catacombs during the times of their persecution.

The original version of Metrópolis underwent numerous cuts and modifications in its editing, especially for its premiere in the United States, which largely distorted the script prepared by Harbou and written by Lang. The discarded footage was considered lost, so the version known for most of the century was not that of its premiere, in 1927. In 2001, the film underwent a thorough restoration in which numerous film libraries worldwide participated, which led to its designation as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.

In 2008, a deteriorated copy of the film, with the original footage, in 16 mm format was found in the Buenos Aires Cinema Museum. This made it possible to make a new montage closer to the original, which began to be exhibited and marketed in 2010.[13]​.

What happened was that in the month following its premiere (January 1927) the distributor Adolfo Z. Wilson bought a copy in its original version, approximately two and a half hours, to be released in Argentina, which was actually done in May 1928. Subsequently, this copy became part of Manuel Peña Rodríguez's collection. In 1959, a screening was organized at the Cine Club Núcleo, in Buenos Aires. In the late '60s, Peña Rodríguez donated the copy to the National Endowment for the Arts; and he in turn transferred it to the Cinema Museum in 1992. However, for about 40 years, no one knew it was there.

In 1988, one of the attendees at the 1959 screening told Fernando Martín Peña the details of the two and a half hour duration of the film. This made Peña think that unique material could have been preserved there, since the versions known at that time had a much shorter duration. He tried to have access to the film archives of the Cinema Museum, without success until 2008, when Paula Félix-Didier took over its direction. Together they reviewed the copy, and confirmed their hypothesis of having the original 1927 version. They then contacted the owners of the film rights, the German Murnau Foundation.[14]​.

A new restoration then began. About 25 additional minutes contained in the Buenos Aires copy were added to the already restored 2001 version, which were also digitally restored. However, the quality of this added footage is inferior, because the Buenos Aires copy survived by chance. «The new version (observes Peña) has the narrative complexity that characterizes other silent works by Lang. It gave him back the rhythm he had thought of, his architectural sense of assembly. Now the movie is much better."[15]​.

The new restored version premiered at the 2010 Berlin International Film Festival; and then in other festivals and venues around the world, including New York. The Murnau Foundation delivered a restored copy to the Buenos Aires Cinema Museum and another to Fernando Martín Peña. The film has been re-released in the Museum of Latin American Art in Buenos Aires numerous times since 2011.

In 2019, a dubbed, colorized version was released on YouTube, with new music and sound effects by sound engineers Garrett Guynn and Andrew John Holt.[16]​[17]​.

The original soundtrack was written by composer Gottfried Huppertz and conceived for a large symphony orchestra. The soundtrack is influenced by the music of Richard Strauss and Richard Wagner, combining classical orchestral timbre with touches of modernism that serve to describe the Workers' City. the movie.

There are also a large number of alternative music for the film. In 1975, the BBC published an electronic composition for the film created by William Fitzwater and Hugh Davies.[19] In 1984, Italian producer Giorgio Moroder wrote a pop soundtrack that featured the collaboration of different musicians of the time, including Freddie Mercury and Bonnie Tyler. The now defunct silent film group Club Foot Orchestra premiered its version of Metropolis in 1991. The Montenegrin musician Rambo Amadeus wrote a score in 1994 that was premiered by the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra and published on record four years later.[20] In 2000, producer and disc jockey Jeff Mills created a soundtrack as an audiovisual project, presented at the Museum of Music in Paris, at the Royal Albert Hall in London and the Vienna International Film Festival. In 2005, the group The New Pollutants performed a show called Metropolis Rescore, which included a screening of the film accompanied by music written by Benjamin Speed. In Spain, the Galician band Caspervek Trio" released its soundtrack for the film in 2014, with future performances in Hungary, Latvia and the Netherlands. In 2015, the discjockey Clusterhead") presented an electronic version of the film in Madrid.

Contenido

Esta película se convirtió en una fuerte influencia para posteriores producciones de ciencia ficción, sobre todo aquellas que tratan de distopías. Entre las películas que le son deudoras, podríamos mencionar una propuesta tan célebre como Blade Runner de Ridley Scott. Ambas han marcado los grandes conceptos de arquitectura y diseño visual en cuanto al cine ambientado en ciudades distópicas del futuro.[21]​.

Adaptations

An eponymous musical based on this film was released in 2002.[22][23] The music was written by Joe Brooks, the lyrics by Dusty Hughes, and it was directed by Jerome Savary.

An anime film called "Osamu Tezuka's Metropolis" loosely adapts Lang's original story, premiered in Japan in 2001 and was directed by the acclaimed Japanese director known as Rintaro with a script by Katsuhiro Otomo, creator of Akira.

The best published titles of analysis and history of the film correspond to German-speaking authors") and it will not always be possible to find translations into Spanish.

Filming Metropolis cost 5,100,000 Reichsmarks, a figure that today, calculating inflation, would be more than 39 million dollars, one of the most expensive in the origins of cinema. Fritz Lang had a large number of extras and about 620,000 meters of film were filmed, reduced to 4,189 for its first cut, later its duration was reduced for international distribution.[4] A total of 27,000 extras were used, it was shot in more than 310 days and 60 nights.[5]​.

The production was mainly handled by Erich Pommer, who at first did not have much faith in the project. He saw it as too expensive both economically and executively, and although Fritz Lang managed to convince him, he was the main producer and executive of the film without still fully believing in it. Lang wrote the script with his wife Thea von Harbou, who was also in charge of writing the novel that would serve as the basis for the creation of the Metropolis script.

After being accepted by the Universum Film AG, "Erich Pommer, Karl Freund, Günther Rittau, Eugen Schüfftan and the sculptor Walter Schulze-Mittendorff joined their respective studios to make the film that had enjoyed the largest budget in the entire history of German cinema."[6]​.

Metropolis became a blockbuster both in terms of budget and the number of participants, with a total of more than 37,000 people. One of the producers, Eugen Schüfftan, was responsible for the special effects. These are considered the most characteristic and representative element of the film, and cost a large amount of time and material due to Lang's great efforts to do justice to the enormous script. However, the film suffered numerous reissues due to censorship and cuts depending on where the film was screened. For example, in its American distribution, various parts of the film were cut because they were considered communist propaganda. "[...] resulted in the filming of 620,000 meters of celluloid, which were reduced to 4,189 meters in the first cut and to 3,170 in its international distribution."[6]​ The third of these cuts had a soundtrack composed by Giorgio Moroder and in which artists such as Queen and Bonnie Tyler, among others, participated.

Schüfftan "created the sophisticated Schüfftan Process",[7]​ which consisted of the use of reflections and counter-reflections used in models to simulate large buildings. Another novelty was the use of the gyroscopic camera, "which allowed panoramic films to be filmed in all directions."[7]​.

Shortly before its official premiere in Berlin (on January 10, 1927 at the UFA-Palast am Zoo), the film was screened for representatives of Paramount, the company that was going to distribute it in the United States, who found it confusing and, above all, long. Channing Pollock&action=edit&redlink=1 "Channing Pollock (writer) (not yet written)") was commissioned to proceed with a new cut to shorten the duration. In addition to making some cuts based on morality, with a view to greater commercial release in the United States (such as the elimination of almost all shots in which the fake Maria is observed performing her erotic dance), Pollock eliminated the crucial plot line about the true nature of the confrontation between Freder and Rotwang, as well as numerous shots of the dramatic flooding of the workers' underground city. From these modifications arose the version released in the United States, at the Rialto cinema in New York, on March 5, 1927, two months after its German premiere, and the one that arrived in Great Britain, with about 115 minutes. In Spain it premiered on May 29, 1927 at the Iris Park Cinema in Barcelona and with the title Metrópolis (The city above the cities), in two installments.[1]​.

Shortly after, the film's production company was left with an enormous debt with its North American partners Paramount and Metro-Goldwing-Mayer, which would be assumed by the nationalist millionaire Alfred Hugenberg (who shortly after invested his money in helping Adolf Hitler come to power) in April 1927. At the helm of the production company he removed Metropolis from circulation in German cinemas and shortened the length of the film from Pollock's edition, largely removing the ideological line that they believed to be “inappropriate” due to communist and religious tendencies. In August 1927 the new 117-minute version reached German cinemas and several European cities. In 1936, due to Nazi censorship, the UFA would make even more cuts, this time lasting 91 minutes. Then came the war and with it the destruction of the original and mutilated negatives of the film, which led to a reduction to an hour and a half of the film created by Lang.[8]​ In 2010, a restored version of the film, based on the copy found in Argentina, recovered 30 minutes that had been cut due to its ideological and erotic charge, and to shorten the footage.[9]​.

Fritz Lang liked to remember that the story of Metropolis was born on his trip to the United States, in October 1924, seeing the city's skyscrapers and illuminated streets from his boat at night in front of the New York port.[10] Upon returning, Thea von Harbou would start working on the script. This inspiration can be related to the filming in the materialization of the visual ideas rather than the script, since the story was probably very well outlined in July 1924. Von Harbou also wrote a novel that was based on the plot of the film.

En la representación del orden social, Metrópolis se apoya por un lado en el marxismo: hay dos clases sociales claramente diferenciadas y separadas, en las que una explota a la otra sin que haya posibilidades de medrar. La «alienación del trabajo» podría relacionarse con que haya algunas máquinas sin una utilidad reconocible. El personaje del robot María, representado claramente como malvada, lanza a los trabajadores a la lucha, y como resultado destrozan su medio y sustento, empeorando su situación en lugar de mejorarla. La colaboración entre clases sociales, en lugar de la lucha de clases, recuerda sin embargo al nacionalsocialismo y su ideología, pues era la estructura económica corporativista que defendía el programa del partido Nazi; ideology with which Thea von Harbou sympathized,[11]​ contrary to Fritz Lang.[12]​.

Lang later implied that the idea of ​​the heart as a mediator between the hand (the power of work) and the brain (the directing capacity of society) was false and that because of this he no longer liked this film. Behind this opinion was hidden the social situation that was being experienced and not a moral conflict. Although the central thesis of the brain, the hand and the heart belongs to Thea von Harbou, he was responsible for it, at least in part, as the director of the film that it was. Lang was actually much more interested in the technical and architectural aspects of the film than in the political undertones of the plot.

The discreet success of the film among the public of those years can also be explained by this, since the social image developed in the story opposes the barely questioned beliefs in progress that were held at that time. The science fiction genre of silent film presents utopia, generally in a positive way, while Lang draws on the enslavement of biblical times to represent the future. The monumental machines of the underground city provide the lower classes with an undignified life, the human mass is easily manipulated and medieval rites such as the burning of witches are practiced.

From Christianity the parable of the Tower of Babel is taken: in the variant it shows that the architects and the workers spoke the same language but did not understand each other. The figure of Mary, who personifies good, is also rescued, as well as the announcement of the coming of a redeemer and the figure of the false prophet (the robot Mary).

Metropolis is a city of skyscrapers whose art deco architecture is reminiscent of the most modern cities of the time, mainly New York, although skyscraper architecture emerged in the Chicago school "Chicago School (architecture)").

Avenues and train lines are tangled between the buildings. The buildings of the surface city are of a majestic structure, while the workers' city, underground, is simpler, gloomy and gloomy.

Between these two basic spaces there are places with their own characteristic architecture. In the superficial city there is the cathedral, with Gothic lines, and the Rottwang house, an ancient building, also of medieval arts, that resembles more the workshop of an alchemist than the laboratory of a scientist; Lang and Von Harbou agreed to redirect the original idea of ​​providing Rottwang with magical abilities. Furthermore, in the surface city there is a garden that symbolizes the idyllic nature of life for the city directors and a neighborhood of sin portrayed with oriental architecture, traditionally associated with the exotic, the sensual and, from there, the sinful. In the underground city there is also a clandestine area associated with the cavernous spaces where the allegory of the salvation of the workers is represented through the image of the Christians hidden in the catacombs during the times of their persecution.

The original version of Metrópolis underwent numerous cuts and modifications in its editing, especially for its premiere in the United States, which largely distorted the script prepared by Harbou and written by Lang. The discarded footage was considered lost, so the version known for most of the century was not that of its premiere, in 1927. In 2001, the film underwent a thorough restoration in which numerous film libraries worldwide participated, which led to its designation as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.

In 2008, a deteriorated copy of the film, with the original footage, in 16 mm format was found in the Buenos Aires Cinema Museum. This made it possible to make a new montage closer to the original, which began to be exhibited and marketed in 2010.[13]​.

What happened was that in the month following its premiere (January 1927) the distributor Adolfo Z. Wilson bought a copy in its original version, approximately two and a half hours, to be released in Argentina, which was actually done in May 1928. Subsequently, this copy became part of Manuel Peña Rodríguez's collection. In 1959, a screening was organized at the Cine Club Núcleo, in Buenos Aires. In the late '60s, Peña Rodríguez donated the copy to the National Endowment for the Arts; and he in turn transferred it to the Cinema Museum in 1992. However, for about 40 years, no one knew it was there.

In 1988, one of the attendees at the 1959 screening told Fernando Martín Peña the details of the two and a half hour duration of the film. This made Peña think that unique material could have been preserved there, since the versions known at that time had a much shorter duration. He tried to have access to the film archives of the Cinema Museum, without success until 2008, when Paula Félix-Didier took over its direction. Together they reviewed the copy, and confirmed their hypothesis of having the original 1927 version. They then contacted the owners of the film rights, the German Murnau Foundation.[14]​.

A new restoration then began. About 25 additional minutes contained in the Buenos Aires copy were added to the already restored 2001 version, which were also digitally restored. However, the quality of this added footage is inferior, because the Buenos Aires copy survived by chance. «The new version (observes Peña) has the narrative complexity that characterizes other silent works by Lang. It gave him back the rhythm he had thought of, his architectural sense of assembly. Now the movie is much better."[15]​.

The new restored version premiered at the 2010 Berlin International Film Festival; and then in other festivals and venues around the world, including New York. The Murnau Foundation delivered a restored copy to the Buenos Aires Cinema Museum and another to Fernando Martín Peña. The film has been re-released in the Museum of Latin American Art in Buenos Aires numerous times since 2011.

In 2019, a dubbed, colorized version was released on YouTube, with new music and sound effects by sound engineers Garrett Guynn and Andrew John Holt.[16]​[17]​.

The original soundtrack was written by composer Gottfried Huppertz and conceived for a large symphony orchestra. The soundtrack is influenced by the music of Richard Strauss and Richard Wagner, combining classical orchestral timbre with touches of modernism that serve to describe the Workers' City. the movie.

There are also a large number of alternative music for the film. In 1975, the BBC published an electronic composition for the film created by William Fitzwater and Hugh Davies.[19] In 1984, Italian producer Giorgio Moroder wrote a pop soundtrack that featured the collaboration of different musicians of the time, including Freddie Mercury and Bonnie Tyler. The now defunct silent film group Club Foot Orchestra premiered its version of Metropolis in 1991. The Montenegrin musician Rambo Amadeus wrote a score in 1994 that was premiered by the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra and published on record four years later.[20] In 2000, producer and disc jockey Jeff Mills created a soundtrack as an audiovisual project, presented at the Museum of Music in Paris, at the Royal Albert Hall in London and the Vienna International Film Festival. In 2005, the group The New Pollutants performed a show called Metropolis Rescore, which included a screening of the film accompanied by music written by Benjamin Speed. In Spain, the Galician band Caspervek Trio" released its soundtrack for the film in 2014, with future performances in Hungary, Latvia and the Netherlands. In 2015, the discjockey Clusterhead") presented an electronic version of the film in Madrid.

Contenido

Esta película se convirtió en una fuerte influencia para posteriores producciones de ciencia ficción, sobre todo aquellas que tratan de distopías. Entre las películas que le son deudoras, podríamos mencionar una propuesta tan célebre como Blade Runner de Ridley Scott. Ambas han marcado los grandes conceptos de arquitectura y diseño visual en cuanto al cine ambientado en ciudades distópicas del futuro.[21]​.

Adaptations

An eponymous musical based on this film was released in 2002.[22][23] The music was written by Joe Brooks, the lyrics by Dusty Hughes, and it was directed by Jerome Savary.

An anime film called "Osamu Tezuka's Metropolis" loosely adapts Lang's original story, premiered in Japan in 2001 and was directed by the acclaimed Japanese director known as Rintaro with a script by Katsuhiro Otomo, creator of Akira.

The best published titles of analysis and history of the film correspond to German-speaking authors") and it will not always be possible to find translations into Spanish.