Cinema
Metropolis
Fritz Lang · 1927
Synopsis
In the giant city of Metropolis, the masters live in the towers and gardens above, while the workers, housed underground, serve the machines. Freder, son of Joh Fredersen, who rules the city, one day sees a young woman, Maria, enter the gardens with workers' children. He goes down in search of her, witnesses the explosion of a machine that kills men, and takes the place of an exhausted worker. His father, alerted by maps found on the dead, goes to consult the inventor Rotwang, who shows him the automaton he has built.
Context
The film is based on the novel that Thea von Harbou published in 1925 and for which she wrote the screenplay. Shooting lasted seventeen months, in 1925 and 1926, and cost more than five million Reichsmarks, weighing heavily in Ufa's financial difficulties. Presented on 10 January 1927 at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo in Berlin in a version of about two and a half hours, it was poorly received and was re-released in August in a shortened version; nearly a quarter of the film disappeared at that point. A copy found in 2008 in Buenos Aires made it possible to restore most of the missing scenes.
Who it is for
A silent film of about one hundred and fifty minutes in its restored 2010 version, which restores most of the scenes cut in 1927.
Prizes and reception
The first film inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register, in 2001, in the reconstruction made that year.