Metropolis (1927)

 Fritz Lang's "Metropolis"

Germany in the 1920s was a time of immense turmoil. The Industrial Age was in full force and its effects were deeply felt. Society at large was becoming increasingly aware of the negative affects of industrialization and began to express these anxieties in various ways. Technological innovations and mass production inadvertently led to a deeper separation of the classes. Laborers became overworked and unpaid. Because of these factors, individuals in society became more and more separated from each other. This led to workers' strikes, labor unions forming, and other means of trying to bridge the gap between laborers and owners of production. With Metropolis, Lang and his wife at the time, Thea von Harbour, created a scenario in which these issues were addressed. They envision a future in which industrialization reaches its designed potential. However, the inherent flaws of the system lead to a breaking point. They construct a city of the future, a Babylon of sorts, and enact a Judeo-Christian story to fit inside the structure of the industrial futurist perspective. 

The opening title cards give us a brief glimpse of the city of Metropolis. However, this monolith of the future is not the first thing Lang shows us. Once the title cards have concluded and the words 'Metropolis' are displayed over the tower overlooking the city, Lang presents a montage of gears and machine pumps. After the indication of a shift change, the images of machine gears and pumps transitions into laborers. These laborers are not presented as workers being paid for their labor. Rather, they are presented as slaves. Not only this, their repetitive, hypnotic movement mirrors the machinery shown before. Lang is suggesting with these visuals that the laborers are more like the gears in a machine than human beings. 

The laborers are not only enslaved gears in a grand machine, but they are also segregated to the lower levels of the city, deep underground. The underground world of the laborers is presented as incredibly hellish, with grim decaying infrastructure and blasts of steam emanating from hot pipes and claustrophobic enclosures. Meanwhile, Joh Fredersen, the city's master, looks down over his city from the highest point of the megastructure at the city's center. This visual representation of Fredersen's location presents a disconnect. His office at the pinnacle of the city visually demonstrates how removed he is from the people below and from humanity itself. The sets of the upper cities are exaggerated and disproportionate, Lang's architecture representing the power of excess. Fredersen's son, Freder, as well as the other upper-class citizens, idles away at sport and leisure in the pleasure gardens in the upper levels of the city. Where the underground levels of the laborers was visually congruent to that of hell, the upper level pleasure gardens of the wealthy is congruent to heaven itself. The environment is visually evocative of the Garden of Eden, with lush plant life, wild and eccentric birds, and bright sunshine. The rich live high in the heavens while the poor live in the depths of hell. 

These visual representations of heaven and hell are the first biblical allusions presented. The city of Metropolis visually represents the Earthly domain, separating heaven and hell. Frederson is presented like the Old Testament God, looking over his Earthly kingdom. Not only this, he is full of wrath and quick to punish, as he demonstrates later in the film when he fires his assistant for not being on top of developing news. If we follow the allegory along, that means that Federsen's son, Freder, represents Christ. As he gleefully frolics in the gardens of paradise, he notices Maria, a young woman who has brought a group of workers' children to witness the lifestyle of their rich 'brothers.' Throughout the film, Maria is visually evocative of the Virgin Mary and in this instance, becomes the reason for Freder to descend down to the Earthly workers to find her. With this, she embodies the Virgin Mary, becoming the vessel for Freder to become the Christ figure. 

Lang makes a point to illustrate the futurist city of Metropolis. The city is presented like the booming industrial cities the world was becoming accustomed to in the 1920s. Large skyscrapers huddled against each other, interweaving highways full of stand-still traffic, fast moving metro trains traversing the landscape, and an added futurist invention of flying cars and planes hovering by the towering masses. According to Lang, "the film was born from my first sight of skyscrapers in New York in October 1924," adding, "I looked into the streets - the glaring lights and the tall buildings - and there I conceived Metropolis." Describing the city, he said, "the buildings seemed to be a vertical sail, scintillating and very light, a luxurious backdrop, suspended in the dark sky to dazzle, distract, and hypnotize," adding, "the sight of Neuyork [sic] alone should be enough to turn this beacon of beauty into the center of a film." The inspiration from New York as well as art direction that draws influences from Art Deco as well as Opera, Bauhaus, Cubist, Futurist, and touches of the Gothic create the now iconic image of the utopian Metropolis. 

Enraptured by the image of the beautiful Maria, Freder goes down to the ground levels to search for her. Through his search, he discovers the woes of the laborers, as they gruel away in their hellish environments. In one instance, a large, towering machine explodes and kills many of its workers. With Lang's expressionist touches, Freder hallucinates that the machine is the biblical Moloch. Moloch is another in a long line of Judeo-Christian imagery and allegory used in the film. Freder sees slaves being fed into the fires of the furnace powering Moloch/the machine. Much like his expressionist pieces previously, Lang utilizes visual imagery to create a symbolic abstraction. Here, he expresses this abstraction in order to articulate Freder's understanding of what is happening. Freder now understands that the laborers are being sacrificed, both through exhausting and grueling work and even death itself. This sacrificing of the laborers helps power the monolithic machine that keeps Metropolis running. 

After witnessing the death of dozens of workers, Freder rushes to tell his father about the incident. However, this is not the news his father cares about most. Grot, foreman of the Heart Machine, brings Fredersen secret maps found in the dead workers' pockets. After learning of his father's cold indifference to the plight of the laborers, Freder secretly rebels against him and decides to help the workers. After returning to the machine halls, Freder spots a worker collapse from exhaustion. Freder decides to help the worker by trading places with him, and operates the clock machine in his place. This action becomes reflective of Christ, as Christ becomes man in taking on a human life. With Christ's taking on of human form, he is able to take on the burdens that come with it, just as Freder takes on the burdens of becoming a laborer. To further cement the allegory, Freder can be seen with outstretched arms, exclaiming, "Father, I never knew ten hours could be so long!" - mirroring Christ outstretched on the cross exclaiming, "Father, why have you forsaken me!" After his shift, Freder accompanies other workers into the catacombs. 

To discover the meaning of his workers' secret maps, Fredersen takes them to his lead inventor, Rotwang. The viewer learns that Rotwang was in love with a woman named Hel, who left him to marry Fredersen and later died giving birth to Freder. Rotwang shows Fredersen a robot he has built to 'resurrect' Hel. In its context, the robot becomes a representation of the growing scientific invention that comes with industrialization. Here, in Metropolis, this robot is the accumulation of a growing innovative power of technology, made real by the Promethean ability of Rotwang to create life itself. This life however is artificial and controlled by a programmer. After demonstrating his scientific capabilities, Rotwang leads Fredersen down to the catacombs to uncover where the maps are leading to. 

Rotwang and Fredersen eavesdrop on a gathering of workers, including Freder (unbeknownst to them). There, Freder finds his mysterious woman, Maria, as she addresses the crowd and prophesizes the arrival of a mediator who can bring the working and ruling classes together. Once again, Lang draws visual parallels to the Virgin Mary through the image of Maria. 

Maria tells the workers the story of the Tower of Babel. Lang visually displays the story as she tells it. The story of Babel is meant to instill in the laborers the understanding of how fallible a societal megastructure is. It is also meant to illustrate to the viewers of the film the inevitable collapse of a society so disparate from each other, either through class, ethnicity, or perspective. The ideas of utopia are not achievable, because a utopia would become so big that it would cause an immense separation of its own citizens, leading to internal collapse. Maria uses the Tower of Babel to illustrate these ideas to the laborers and illustrates that the only solution to this problem is a mediator between the head - the owners of industry - and the hands - the laborers and workers of that industry. 

Upon hearing this sermon, Fredersen orders Rotwang to give Maria's likeness to the robot so that it can discredit her among the workers, unaware that Rotwang will use the faux Maria robot to lead the workers to destroy Metropolis. Rotwang then kidnaps Maria, transfers her likeness to the robot, and sends the faux Maria to Fredersen. Freder finds the fake Maria with his father, and then falls into a prolonged delirium. This delirium is another great use of expressionism employed by Lang. Lang intercuts Freder's nightmarish hallucinations with the robot Maria unleashing chaos throughout the city, as she drives men to murder and stirs dissent amongst the workers. These events are really happening, but Freder's hallucinations are not. The hallucinations are that of the Whore of Babylon, the biblical whore who entices powerful men to succumb to their passions and desires, just as the robot Maria is doing with the rich men of Metropolis, forcing them to fall prey to their lusts and their deadly sins. While the robot Maria sews the seeds of Metropolis's destruction, Lang intercuts these images with Freder's nightmares of the Whore of Babylon to convey the impending doom this technological innovation could unleash. 

The robot Maria leads the workers to the Heart Machine and implores them to destroy it. Unbeknownst to the workers, the destruction of the Heart Machine will cause their underground residence level to become flooded, with their children still down there. Nevertheless, they destroy it. After waking from his delirium, Freder rushes down to the lower levels to discover the real Maria trying to save the workers' children from drowning. Freder with the help of Maria saves the children by evacuating them out of the lower levels to safety. It is with this action that Freder once again fulfills his Christ role. In the Bible, Christ descends to hell to save the innocent from their doomed fates, leading them out of hell into salvation, much like Freder does with the innocent children trapped in their collapsing structure. 

After discovering their children in peril, the workers burn the robot Maria at the stake. Freder engages in a fight against Rotwang, before Rotwang falls to his death. After these events, Freder completes his Christ role by bridging the gap between the head and the hands by deciding to become the mediator - the heart - between the working class and the wealthy class. 

After the film's release in 1927, many viewers hailed the film as a stunning technical achievement. The set pieces and art direction garnished awe as nobody had even seen such immaculate displays of visual scope and scale. Not only were the set designs well praised, but the visual expressionism of the piece was something to behold. Effects expert Eugen Schufftan created pioneering visual effects. Among these are miniatures of the city, a camera on a swing, and most notably, the Schufftan process. The Schufftan process uses mirrors to create the illusion that actors are occupying miniature sets. However, many felt the film was over-bloated, long, and even propagandist. International distributors heavily edited the film to a shorter length for greater profitability, much to Lang's dismay. After a change in UFA's management in April of 1927, the film was halted in its distribution, and the original negative was cut down in length, removing the film's perceived 'inappropriate' Communist subtext and religious imagery. In 1933, after the Nazis took power, Joseph Goebbels told Lang that on the basis of seeing the film years before, Hitler had said he wanted Lang to make Nazi films (which caused Lang to flee the country). 

Metropolis is a masterpiece of its time, as well a masterpiece that transcends time. It takes the industrial issues of the time and maximizes them to epic effect, creating a future where industry and technology rule. This future, he fears, will create a Babylon so big that a collapse under its own weight is inevitable. The solution to this problem, through the film's perspective, takes on a Judeo-Christian perspective. The inevitable rise of industry and technology will create a society so lacking humanity, that an antidote of spiritualty through biblical text is required. In the film, this comes in the form of Freder, the Christ figure who, descends from his heavily paradise to understand the plight of his people below, takes on their strife, saves those who are damned by the collapsing structure, and issues a new order that connects the hands back to the head - with a heart, Freder, or Christ, or love/understanding. At the time in the 1920s, the promises of utopia were dispersed through the varying societal structures: capitalism, communism, and fascism. Through Metropolis, Lang is able to demonstrate the fallacy in these structures and the dehumanizing that can come about with the accelerated progress of technology and innovation.