Metropolis

Thomas Elsaesser

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838717124
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Películas y vídeos

Metropolis is a monumental work. On its release in 1925, after sixteen months'
filming, it was Germany's most expensive feature film, a canvas for director
Fritz Lang's increasingly extravagant ambitions. Lang, inspired by the skyline of
New York, created a whole new vision of cities. One of the greatest works of
science fiction, the film also tells human stories about love and family.
Thomas Elsaesser explores the cultural phenomenon of Metropolis: its different
versions (there is no definitive one), its changing meanings, and its role as a
database of twentieth-century imagery and ideologies.
In his foreword to this special edition, published to celebrate the 20th
anniversary of the BFI Film Classics series, Elsaesser discusses the impact of
the 27 minutes of 'lost' footage discovered in Buenos Aires in 2008, and
incorporated in a restored edition, which premiered in 2010.

1 The Myth of its Origins, The Origins of its Myths

Several self-serving myths, put about by Fritz Lang and his company, the Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (UFA), hang over Metropolis. The myth-making started with the story of how the film came to be conceived: in October 1924, Fritz Lang and his producer Erich Pommer travelled to New York, for the US opening of Siegfried’s Death (1924), the first part of Die Nibelungen (1924), the four-hour disaster spectacle depicting the heroic origins of the Germanic nation out of ‘hate, murder and revenge’. Because of visa difficulties, the two visitors had to stay on board the ‘SS Deutschland’ for an extra night before being allowed to disembark. In the evening, Lang and Pommer went on deck to see the Manhattan skyline for the first time. An idea was born:

I saw a street, lit as if in full daylight by neon lights and topping them, oversized luminous, advertising moving turning flashing on and off, spiralling […] something which was completely new and near fairy-tale like for a European in those days, and this impression gave me the first thought of an idea for a town of the future.¹⁷

But by October 1924, the concept for Metropolis had been in Thea von Harbou’s and Fritz Lang’s minds for nearly a year. Pommer had publicly mentioned it after the Berlin premiere of Die Nibelungen in January 1924, Erich Kettelhut, the art director, had seen a version of the script around May 1924, and a Viennese paper had quoted Thea von Harbou working on ‘the screenplay for their new film Metropolis’ in July 1924. Of course, the script and the film (and the novel and the film) are two different things: the discrepancy between the story and its style has itself been one of the founding oppositions securing much mythic potency for the finished film. Nevertheless, several pieces of (film-) history hide inside this story of the Manhattan skyline as the origin of Metropolis.

Pommer and Lang, embarked for New York, 1924 (Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek Berlin)

The Parufamet Agreement

The trip to the US in late 1924 by Pommer and Lang was indeed crucial for the origin of Metropolis, though more decisive than New York was the subsequent stop in Los Angeles. It made the two most famous men of the German cinema realise why the gap had become so wide between the Europeans and Hollywood, and what obstacles lay in the way of UFA films penetrating the US market. They visited the production facilities of the major studios, they saw the latest film-making technology, they talked not only to executives like Joseph Schenk, Sam Goldwyn and Marcus Loew, but also to directors and actors like Chaplin, Thomas Ince and Mary Pickford. Lang met up again with Ernst Lubitsch, who had made Hollywood his home in 1921, and Douglas Fairbanks told Lang that German films would not sell in America until UFA put more effort into launching its players as internationally recognised stars.¹⁸ Pommer in the meantime was shopping for two Mitchell cameras which were among the four used for shooting Metropolis (the other two were a French Debrie, the standard studio-camera and a German Stachow, the latter more robust, suitable for Günther Rittau’s special effects). On his way back, Lang also visited D. W. Griffith who had just finished making Isn’t Life Wonderful (1924), set (but not shot) in a wintry and hungry post-war Germany, much to the visible irritation of Lang, who probably fancied himself sole owner of the image-bank ‘Germany’.

Other reasons for the US visit had to do with UFA’s parlous state. The German film industry was in crisis. Its blossoming in the early 20s proved short-lived, based as it was on exploiting the trading advantages of a rapidly depreciating currency, which allowed German firms to export their films below cost. After the stabilisation of the Reichsmark in 1924, it was the Americans’ turn to do the ‘dumping’ on the German market with productions that had already returned their investment in the huge domestic market. Pommer knew that his films had to draw level with the Americans as far as production values were concerned, if UFA were to retain even its share of the German box-office. But with increased budgets came the need to make films for export. The success in France of Die Nibelungen had raised hopes that this might be the breakthrough film in the US as well. Pommer was talking in New York and Los Angeles about a distribution deal, where US Majors would import ten UFA films per annum, in exchange for UFA’s first-run houses show-casing twenty American films. The Americans were seriously concerned about maintaining open access to the lucrative German market, the German film industry having successfully lobbied parliament to introduce import restrictions in 1924. After almost a year of negotiations and near-misses, the US Major–UFA deal was finally sealed in December 1925. Known as the Parufamet Agreement (after the three companies involved: Famous-Players-Lasky through their distribution arm Paramount, UFA and the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation), it proved for UFA a Trojan horse as well as a poisoned chalice. In exchange for a US $4 million (16.8 million Reichsmark) loan, UFA agreed to reserve up to 75 per cent of the bookings in its 135 first-run cinemas for its US partners. They, in turn, arguing that the American public was volatile in its tastes, reserved the right to decide where, how and which UFA films to show in their theatres.

Some of the troubles that were to make Metropolis a notorious case (and casualty) are probably attributable to the Parufamet Agreement, under whose terms it was one of the first major productions. It explains, for instance, the supposed profligacy of Lang and the open-ended sums he seems to have had at his disposal. To Pommer, his carte blanche for Lang was justified in view of the prize to be bagged, the prospect of a major hit in the US. But just how big a risk UFA’s star producer was taking can be seen when the figures are put in perspective. The company’s net profits in 1924–5 were 3.1 million Reichmark; at that time, the average production cost of a feature film was 175,000 Reichmark. Metropolis was originally budgeted for 800,000 Reichmark, but its final bill – UFA argued, but Lang disputed – was nearer 4.2 million Reichmark, half of the entire production budget of 1925–6. The rest had to be spread across the other twenty-two films made that season.¹⁹ The gamble cost Pommer his neck, and already in January 1926, long before the film was finished, he had exchanged his place on the UFA board for a producer’s office at Famous-Players-Lasky, no doubt a move also facilitated by the visit in 1924.

Thea von Harbou

Back in Berlin, Thea von Harbou was also working on Metropolis. Besides being Lang’s wife, a celebrated novelist in her own right and UFA’s top screenwriter, Harbou was a contract writer for the Scherl-Verlag, one of Berlin’s three publishing empires, owned and controlled by press-tsar and ultra-conservative would-be politician Alfred Hugenberg. For Harbou, both Die Nibelungen and Metropolis were book tie-ins, a practice UFA had pursued with Fritz Lang films since Dr Mabuse (1922) (loosely based on Norbert Jacques’s serialised novel, published by the rival Ullstein Verlag). Most likely, while Lang was in America, von Harbou was writing the novel rather than working on the screenplay. However, there is room for doubt which came first, or rather, how many different versions of each she was working on at any one time.²⁰

Metropolis was serialised in Das illustrierte Blatt from August 1926 onwards, six months prior to the film’s premiere.²¹ But correspondence dated 22 February 1926 indicates that the Scherl desk editor asked von Harbou to tone down the film references in the story and rewrite the material more like a self-contained novel. What is also on record is that throughout 1924, von Harbou was busy reading herself into the literature of futuristic civilisations: two French novels and one English were consulted, Jules Verne’s The Five Hundred Millions of the Begum, Claude Farrère’s Les Condamnés à mort and H. G. Wells’ When the Sleeper Wakens. Nearer home, Georg Kaiser’s theatre trilogy Koralle, Gas I and Gas II, Ernst Toller’s play about a failed worker’s revolution, Maschinenstürmer, Ernst Ludwig’s Zwischen Himmel und Erde (for the showdown on the Cathedral roof-top), Max Reinhardt’s and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Das Große Welt-Theater (for the macabre Cathedral ‘Dance of Death’), and another play by the mid-nineteenth-century playwright C. D. Grabbe were also within reach. She was nothing if not thorough, employing a permanent personal secretary-typist, to whom she dictated scenes or chapters, usually while knitting to maintain concentration.²²

Von Harbou’s novel and the film-script differ in many respects.²³ But given that the shooting script has not survived, and that the film as it has come down poses enough textual and editorial conundrums of its own, attempts to pin down exactly the relation between the two were for a long time little more than guess-work or intertextual inference, often ending up by ridiculing von Harbou for her appalling prose.²⁴ Today the novel is indeed almost unreadable, yet it perfectly blended Expressionist pathos with the mass-circulation formulas of the time, in its genre of bestselling awfulness no different from other (male and female) popular novelists such as Karl May, Norbert Jacques, Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer or Hedwig Courts-Mahler.

Preceded by the motto: ‘This book is an event braiding itself around the insight that the mediator between brain and hands has to be the heart’ and dedicated to ‘Friedel’ (Fritz Lang), the novel opens with Freder, the son of the master of Metropolis, playing the organ in his studio. Floods of tears are streaming down his face as he re-lives the scene of his first meeting with Maria, the sim...