Speaker 1: Oh he is bot. It's show tied.
Speaker 2: People say, good money to see this movie. When they
Speaker 2: go out to a theater.
Speaker 3: They want cold sodas, hot popcorn, and no monsters.
Speaker 4: In the protection booth, everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.
Speaker 5: Got at off?
Speaker 1: Turn it.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the projection Booth. I'm your host. Mike White
Speaker 2: joined me once again as mister Federico Bertolini.
Speaker 5: Hello, thank you, great to be back.
Speaker 2: Also joining us is mister Ranjit Sandhu.
Speaker 4: H do you do?
Speaker 2: We are kicking off a new sci fi July with
Speaker 2: one of the granddaddies of science fiction films, Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
Speaker 2: Co written with his wife, Thea von Harbo, the film
Speaker 2: tells the story of future city Metropolis, which is run
Speaker 2: by industrialists Joe Federson. The potential power behind the throne
Speaker 2: is mad scientist Rotwang. Meanwhile, Joe's son, Frader, is a
Speaker 2: playboy who happens to meet the hero of the workers, Maria.
Speaker 2: It's the story of Freder and Maria that propels the narrative,
Speaker 2: which explores class relations, mysticisms, science, and a whole lot more.
Speaker 2: We're going to do our best to spoilis nearly century
Speaker 2: old film. Haven't seen Metropolis? Please do so now you
Speaker 2: will not regret it. So, Federico, when was the first
Speaker 2: time you saw Metropolis? And what did you think?
Speaker 5: It was sitting at my desk in high school on
Speaker 5: a laptop that was about like twenty inches and it
Speaker 5: was the twenty ten restoration that had just came out,
Speaker 5: and I heard about the fine in Argentina, the sixteen
Speaker 5: mil so I was like so excited. It was all
Speaker 5: over the internet. I went out and I found it
Speaker 5: and I loved it. It had such a poll in culture.
Speaker 5: It was just Metropolis was this thing, you know up
Speaker 5: here in the heavens that everything almost tried to and
Speaker 5: people emulated and copied and stole off of endlessly. So
Speaker 5: it was nice to finally go back to the original
Speaker 5: and to see what all the fuss was about.
Speaker 2: And Rian, Geet, how about yourself?
Speaker 4: There's a story behind how I first came to see this.
Speaker 4: In high school, everyone who knew me knew that I
Speaker 4: was the only kid who liked silent movies, which made
Speaker 4: me the village idiot. So autumn of nineteen seventy six,
Speaker 4: eleventh grade, three kids burst into the classroom beaming smiles,
Speaker 4: telling me excitedly about this great movie they're watching their
Speaker 4: film history class, something called Metropolis and it's silent, and
Speaker 4: it was wonderful Metropolis. I've never heard of this movie, Metropolis,
Speaker 4: but I thought, what a role reversal, other kids telling
Speaker 4: me about a silent movie. And a few months later,
Speaker 4: it was May twenty first, nineteen seventy seven, Saturday night,
Speaker 4: ten pm, K and Emmy Channel five Albuquerque PBS Movie
Speaker 4: Theater that night showed Metropolis, and I decided, what the heck,
Speaker 4: I'm going to watch this. I'm curious now. I watched it,
Speaker 4: and from the moment it started, I was completely mesmerized,
Speaker 4: couldn't take my eyes off the thing. And I did
Speaker 4: and know why because I watched this movie and it
Speaker 4: is so ridiculous, so preposterous, so childish. It's like a
Speaker 4: really bad comic book that an eight year old boy
Speaker 4: would throw in the trash. Why am I hooked on this?
Speaker 4: Why can't I tear myself away from it? And then
Speaker 4: I started obsessing it. Two months later, it popped up
Speaker 4: at a local cinema, Don Panchos, and I knew they
Speaker 4: would crop it in wide screen and went there and
Speaker 4: they cropped it to widescreen, and I watched it and
Speaker 4: this is not the movie I saw on PBS at all.
Speaker 4: It's totally different. Why am I seeing a different Metropolis
Speaker 4: here and a different one on PBS? And then both
Speaker 4: versions vanished. I've been able to get a bad copy
Speaker 4: of the PBS version. I have never been able to
Speaker 4: get another copy of the one I saw don Poncious
Speaker 4: And that's what drove me crazy. What is going on
Speaker 4: with this movie? And then I found out it was
Speaker 4: massacred almost from the time it was released. And you
Speaker 4: know that, I get obsessed when I discover that the
Speaker 4: movie's been massacred. I want to know what it was
Speaker 4: originally Like, I grew up watching the Radio Gaga music video.
Speaker 2: That was my exposure to Metropolis. Thank goodness for Queen
Speaker 2: and David Bowie, between the two of them, because Radio
Speaker 2: Gaga gave us gave me a lot of exposure to Metropolis,
Speaker 2: and under pressure gave me a ton of exposure to Nospharatu.
Speaker 2: So I saw Nospharatu in college, absolutely loved it, but
Speaker 2: never saw Metropolis projected on the big screen until I
Speaker 2: think it was the twenty ten restoration, which, oddly my
Speaker 2: mom wanted to go see my mom and her husband,
Speaker 2: and then my wife and I. We went to a
Speaker 2: community college that we had, you know, my mom had
Speaker 2: actually attended that years and years before, and we went
Speaker 2: there and they showed it on a pretty darn big screen.
Speaker 2: No live orchestral accompany, meant just the soundtrack that they
Speaker 2: had with the film, which is, I believe the same
Speaker 2: version that now is on Keno Laura bur It's very
Speaker 2: very similar, if not that exactly. I can't say that
Speaker 2: I'm in love with this film. It's very very interesting,
Speaker 2: and I really appreciate the restoration, and I kind of
Speaker 2: like that the Argentinian footage or the other footage that
Speaker 2: they cut into this looks kind of shitty because I
Speaker 2: can really tell the difference as to what is being
Speaker 2: added versus what was there before. And I know to
Speaker 2: your point, Renjeet, there are so many versions of this movie,
Speaker 2: and it is just wild how many are out there.
Speaker 2: Even last night, I was trying to get a copy
Speaker 2: of it to play for myself, and I said, oh,
Speaker 2: I'll just go out to Amazon and I'll buy the
Speaker 2: version that's out there that's two hours long. That's not
Speaker 2: two and a half hours long. I'm just like, oh
Speaker 2: my god, like I just spent three dollars for nothing.
Speaker 2: Thanks a lot, Amazon, Why the hell do you have
Speaker 2: this two hour version? But regardless, Yeah, I've watched a
Speaker 2: ton this week in preparation for our discussion. Like you said,
Speaker 2: it's mesmerizing. It is very mesmerizing. There's a lot of
Speaker 2: interesting stuff here. Is it fully successful? I don't think so.
Speaker 2: Like you said, there's a lot of comic book ye
Speaker 2: kind of stuff here. I'm not sure if it's saying
Speaker 2: what some people think that it's saying. But I'm very
Speaker 2: excited to kind of unpack this movie just because it
Speaker 2: is so influential. Listening to some of the commentary tracks,
Speaker 2: it's like, maybe you want to stop talking about Blade
Speaker 2: Runner throughout the entire commentary track for Metropolis, maybe talk
Speaker 2: about the film Metropolis instead. But it's been a real
Speaker 2: delight digging into thistually digging into Fritzlang. I mean, the
Speaker 2: guy is so fascinating, especially all the self mythologizing that
Speaker 2: he does, and especially around this time of his career
Speaker 2: with the whole Gerbels and the escape from Germany and
Speaker 2: all those things, and it's like, all right, So yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm very excited to talk to you guys about this,
Speaker 2: just because there's just so much to unpack.
Speaker 5: I'm so glad I'm not the only person. I thought
Speaker 5: I was going to be the only person on this
Speaker 5: recording that had mixed feelings about Metropolis. You know that
Speaker 5: you guys would be like the uber fans, but uh yeah,
Speaker 5: there's like a realistic point to take about Metropolis that
Speaker 5: it's many many things in one and it has an allure,
Speaker 5: but like you said, around you it's like a comic book.
Speaker 5: There's so many things that just like the tonal shifts,
Speaker 5: just up and down, up and down, you have like
Speaker 5: the most amazing sequences of incredible power next to the
Speaker 5: most like norm just strange kind of cringe stuff, and
Speaker 5: you wonder yourself, how did it end up like this?
Speaker 5: And sure enough you go go in the history and
Speaker 5: you find out why.
Speaker 4: I don't know if either of you has read An
Speaker 4: Drummond's master's Thesis about Metropolis, which is online for free.
Speaker 4: When I read it just a few weeks ago, was
Speaker 4: blown away. I like people who are smarter than I am,
Speaker 4: and Drummond is probably twenty times smarter than I am.
Speaker 4: She knew the history of German politics and the German
Speaker 4: labor movement and its influence from the Bolshevik Revolution. She
Speaker 4: was able to unpack a lot of the meaning of
Speaker 4: the movie. In Germany in the nineteen twenties, labor unions
Speaker 4: were not what we have now in the United States,
Speaker 4: and businesses were not what we have now in the
Speaker 4: United States. Businesses were brutal. And what we see in
Speaker 4: Metropolis with all these men working furiously on these synchronized
Speaker 4: gears that don't do anything and have no meaning, with
Speaker 4: steam coming up for no reason. That was about how
Speaker 4: workers retreated ten hours a day, NonStop, no time to
Speaker 4: sneeze and blow your nose, catch a breath. Nothing there
Speaker 4: was relentless. It was tailorism. Frederick Taylor in the United
Speaker 4: States tried to streamline business by doing scientific motion studies.
Speaker 4: How can you do the most amount of work with
Speaker 4: the fewest number of motions as quickly as possible? And
Speaker 4: a lot of business leaders took his ideas, and he
Speaker 4: had good ideas, but they applied them mercilessly. The employees
Speaker 4: literally did not know what they were doing. A guy
Speaker 4: had to make bolts all day long. Make a bolt,
Speaker 4: make a bolt, make a bolt, make them both ten
Speaker 4: hours a day, had no idea what the bolts were for,
Speaker 4: no idea where they were going to be used or why.
Speaker 4: So there was no sense of fulfillment in what the
Speaker 4: worker was doing. So there was an idea that if
Speaker 4: the employees understood what it was that they were doing,
Speaker 4: if there was better communication between management and employees, workers
Speaker 4: would feel more fulfilled. That idea comes through in Metropolis,
Speaker 4: and that specifically explicitly what Metropolis was dealing with. And
Speaker 4: labor unions at the time, as I say, were not
Speaker 4: like they are now. When they got angry, they got
Speaker 4: out their guns, they got out their bombs. There was
Speaker 4: blood in the streets, and some labor union activists organizers
Speaker 4: realized that this is going nowhere. We have to reach
Speaker 4: an agreen with management. Some managers are saying that we
Speaker 4: have to reach out, stretch out our hands, make a
Speaker 4: deal with labor. One of those who said that was
Speaker 4: Paul Silverberg, who sat on the UFA board. UFA was
Speaker 4: the studio that produced Metropolis. He said that as Metropolis
Speaker 4: was being filmed, so this is a lot of the
Speaker 4: context of what the story was about. The head, hands
Speaker 4: in heart communication, the mediator between management and employees. So
Speaker 4: the terms that sound very silly and babyish when we
Speaker 4: watch them now had a lot of resonance in nineteen
Speaker 4: twenty six, nineteen twenty seven, and it was not babyish
Speaker 4: back then. So if you have not read and Drummond's
Speaker 4: Master's Thesis, please read and Drummond's Master's Thesis.
Speaker 2: So much of this film is about labor and the
Speaker 2: use of men as machines, and then there's the man
Speaker 2: machine itself. You know, we're talking about machines having hearts.
Speaker 2: You know, this is the heart machine, and you've got
Speaker 2: the head machine and all these things. To have the
Speaker 2: laborers living below ground in this underground city where it's
Speaker 2: very I mean, we'll talk about HG. Wells, but they're
Speaker 2: very much the morlocks of the city. And then you've
Speaker 2: got the Loi or whatever living above and they're just
Speaker 2: living this care free existence. You know, you've got the
Speaker 2: Sun's Club, which is this whole thing of it could
Speaker 2: be spelt either way with Sun or Son, but you've
Speaker 2: got this whole idea of these sons that are just
Speaker 2: up there enjoying their lives and playing all of these games.
Speaker 2: You've got the fetishization of their bodies. And meanwhile the
Speaker 2: rest of the workers are just you know, faceless lumps
Speaker 2: most of the time with their shoulders hunched in those
Speaker 2: dark uniforms on cut to those suns up there playing
Speaker 2: their sports games, you know, very Leney refinstall with some
Speaker 2: of these icons and these statues and all these things,
Speaker 2: and they're being entertained, of course by what I have
Speaker 2: to imagine our prostitutes that are just hanging around the
Speaker 2: Sun's Club. They're living this care free life, and meanwhile
Speaker 2: the rest of the workers are just living in this
Speaker 2: underground dwelling and not really even being allowed to see
Speaker 2: the sun apart from possibly when they do their shift change.
Speaker 4: And the quarter's ends. In the Love of the Suns
Speaker 4: the Eternal Gardens, that was for me the scariest part
Speaker 4: of the movie. They were not allowed to have personalities.
Speaker 4: The personalities were prescribed by someone on high. They had
Speaker 4: to act a certain way, feel a certain way. That
Speaker 4: was very creepy for me, talking about the rich people
Speaker 4: at the top and the poor people at the bottom.
Speaker 4: That that is such a wonderfully exaggerated way to distinguish
Speaker 4: upper class from lower class. They made it very literal.
Speaker 2: Well, it's almost like there's no middle class.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well the middle class there are those are the
Speaker 4: little puppets on the sidewalk and the little puppet cars,
Speaker 4: and they're the ones who go to the Yoshiwara club
Speaker 4: and they have all the fun they so I guess
Speaker 4: that's the middle class.
Speaker 2: Though I would say the Yoshiwara the way that they're dressed,
Speaker 2: it feels very much you know, you see a lot
Speaker 2: of tuxedos and a lot of you know, to me,
Speaker 2: it feels more like upper crust than even middle class.
Speaker 2: With that, to have the the guy who's in charge,
Speaker 2: like I know, later on this year, I'm going to
Speaker 2: be talking about the film Megalopolis, which obviously takes a
Speaker 2: lot from Metropolis as well. But to have this whole
Speaker 2: thing of Joe Frederson lording over everything in his central
Speaker 2: office where he's got televisions, he can see whatever he
Speaker 2: wants to see, He's got all of his agents, he's
Speaker 2: got Joseph fat Is. Does the Thin Man have a
Speaker 2: name or is he just the thin Man?
Speaker 4: Does the thin Man or does Smala slim Slim?
Speaker 2: Yes, not to be confused with the Dashall Hammett story
Speaker 2: the Thin Man, but would definitely, oh man, he's fantastic
Speaker 2: I love Slim. I think that he is wonderful and
Speaker 2: just the way that he creeps around and everything. He's
Speaker 2: got a great look to him. I think so many
Speaker 2: of these actors have great looks to them, and especially
Speaker 2: somebody like Joe. We've got the very straight eyebrows and
Speaker 2: very little reaction to too much. He just seems disappointed
Speaker 2: almost all the time. But as far as the labor
Speaker 2: stuff goes, it doesn't feel like he's that much of
Speaker 2: the villain of the piece, whereas me as a more
Speaker 2: of the ninety nine percent, I'm just like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: he's the guy in charge. He's the guy who I
Speaker 2: would want to see drawn and quarter by the end
Speaker 2: of the film. But instead it's more about let's mediate
Speaker 2: this stuff. We're looking for the mediator, and really becomes
Speaker 2: almost like a Messiah story where you've got, oh, the
Speaker 2: Sun is going to be the mediator and he's the person,
Speaker 2: and we have to have him anointed by Maria, and
Speaker 2: of course having Maria and her name being so close
Speaker 2: to Mary, and it just feels, well, it doesn't feel
Speaker 2: there are so many biblical things going on in this movie.
Speaker 2: That's just so many layers of stuff, and sometimes it
Speaker 2: feels kind of like a confusing mix of layers. But
Speaker 2: I do enjoy like trying to pull this thing apart
Speaker 2: and seeing all of the different stuff as far as
Speaker 2: like the Seven Deadly Sins, the Tower of Babel, just
Speaker 2: all of these biblical items that you have inside of here,
Speaker 2: and it's like, okay, well, how does that relate to
Speaker 2: what this overall story is.
Speaker 5: We wouldn't be talking about Metropolis one hundred years later
Speaker 5: if it was like a perfect cinema object, if it
Speaker 5: said everything it wanted to say, and it was like
Speaker 5: you know, A to B, two C and all this
Speaker 5: kind of stuff, if it was like sure enough, it
Speaker 5: was a masterpiece. Of course, everybody would call at a masterpiece.
Speaker 5: But it is a masterpiece. I mean they still call
Speaker 5: it a masterpiece despite the problems that it has. And
Speaker 5: that aspect of Frader being the messiah sent from on high.
Speaker 5: You know, he starts the movie at the Club of
Speaker 5: the Suns, almost staring into the camera looking at Maria.
Speaker 5: That's like the inciting incident. That's his view into the
Speaker 5: other world. He had no idea that his bruughs toil
Speaker 5: in such misery, and he goes literally down to the
Speaker 5: office to meet his father. He goes to find Georgie
Speaker 5: and then he goes even further and it's it's so
Speaker 5: on the nose that you kind of roll your eyes.
Speaker 5: But then you're thinking, you know, nineteen twenty six, what
Speaker 5: is the audience that's getting this. I'm not saying that
Speaker 5: the German audience in nineteen twenty seven isn't sophisticated, but
Speaker 5: he's casting a wide net so that everybody can get
Speaker 5: something out of it. But that aspect to Freder being
Speaker 5: the mediator, it's like, how well can you trust, you know,
Speaker 5: at the workers at the I don't want to skip
Speaker 5: to the end, but like the workers have the right
Speaker 5: to be suspicious of the son of the guy that's
Speaker 5: literally oppressing them, telling them no, I will mediate between
Speaker 5: labor and capital for you. And I mean, Mike, I
Speaker 5: have the same idea of you. I just like violence
Speaker 5: against the working, the oppressor class, you know, the owners
Speaker 5: have to go to the wall, all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 5: So Frederson is like, not my kind of person. And
Speaker 5: at the end, I'm with you. I want him on
Speaker 5: the funeral pier. And they say as much. They say
Speaker 5: as much. They literally surround them and they say, look,
Speaker 5: that's the guy that's responsible for our suffering. Kill him.
Speaker 5: But of course that third way of like trying to
Speaker 5: trying to find a balance between the left wing and
Speaker 5: the basically the fascism, the quasi fascism. I don't want
Speaker 5: to say the film is fascist, but what it presents
Speaker 5: is strong ultimate state control over people's lives, trying to
Speaker 5: find that middle way. That's the aspect that is the
Speaker 5: most controversial, the thing we can talk about the most,
Speaker 5: that people will argue about the most, but it's the
Speaker 5: thing that unfortunately is kind of like the undoing of
Speaker 5: it in some respects Well.
Speaker 2: I did want to talk about as far as the
Speaker 2: audiences go, and just a little bit of the background
Speaker 2: of the film itself. The idea of this being this
Speaker 2: kind of populist, you know, all things for all people
Speaker 2: type of film I think, and please Renji feel free
Speaker 2: to correct me. I've been reading a lot about that
Speaker 2: whole power UFA met contract and the agreement that was
Speaker 2: going on between who was a paramount UFA and then
Speaker 2: Metro Golden Mayor. I believe it was, and just that
Speaker 2: it was this whole idea of the German film industry
Speaker 2: being so insular that they're successful at for a while
Speaker 2: with the way that they're running things, but then they
Speaker 2: start getting these imports of American films and it becomes
Speaker 2: this real threat to the German national cinema, and it's like, no,
Speaker 2: we need to reach out, we need to start to
Speaker 2: get out of just Germany. The imports are kind of
Speaker 2: taking things over, and this was really supposed to be
Speaker 2: an attempt to bridge this gap and then ended up
Speaker 2: blowing up in their faces. I mean, this was kind
Speaker 2: of the undoing. This was the Heaven's Gate of nineteen
Speaker 2: twenty seven.
Speaker 4: That's a long story. I do not completely understand it.
Speaker 4: But the Hollywood studios were practicing gangster capitalism around much
Speaker 4: of the world. Germans were doing a nice job of
Speaker 4: making German movies and showing them in German cinemas, and
Speaker 4: everyone was happy. Hollywood took its movies that had already
Speaker 4: amortized and let German cinemas have them for a stretch
Speaker 4: of price that they could get any other movie. So
Speaker 4: Hollywood movies flooded German screens. German movies could hardly get played.
Speaker 4: In the earlier days. There were some imports from several
Speaker 4: countries in Europe. Germany among them. I don't know if
Speaker 4: they did very well. They did some business, and Hollywood
Speaker 4: like to bring them in now and then. It was
Speaker 4: almost like free money. But Germans realized that in order
Speaker 4: to keep their business going, they had to compete with Hollywood.
Speaker 4: The Hollywood capitalists didn't like competition. They didn't like to
Speaker 4: hear that sort of talk. Ufer was having financial troubles
Speaker 4: because of all this Hollywood interference. They got a good
Speaker 4: deal from Hollywood, from Paramount Metro gold Mayor, who would
Speaker 4: bail them out and fund their movies, and they were
Speaker 4: foolish to accept that offer. It would be better to
Speaker 4: just close down the studio than to accept that offer.
Speaker 4: They accepted the offer, they very quickly regretted it. Heads
Speaker 4: rolled Eric Palmer, who was the only producer that Fitzlang
Speaker 4: ever liked. He was on the Alps for a while.
Speaker 4: They squeezed him out. They let him back in later. Yeh, yeah,
Speaker 4: it was just a bad situation. This was the undoing
Speaker 4: of UFA. The person who bailed out UFA shortly after
Speaker 4: Metropolis came out was Alfred Hugenberg, who was another gangster capitalist.
Speaker 4: He was a German oligarch who supported a certain guy
Speaker 4: named Hitler, and he was very much opposed to mediating
Speaker 4: with labor. He wanted to rule employees with an iron fist.
Speaker 4: And I'm sure he never watched Metropolis, but I'm sure
Speaker 4: his assistants told him that you don't want that COMMI
Speaker 4: pinko stuff showing in your cinemas. You've got to cut
Speaker 4: this thing, and he ordered that it be cut. Anything
Speaker 4: that remotely wreaked of communism had to be cut. The
Speaker 4: odd thing is, there is no communism in the Moody.
Speaker 4: There was something called mercy in the movie. There's no
Speaker 4: communism in it, but they slashed it to pieces and
Speaker 4: then just treated it like a piece of junk. The
Speaker 4: movie did not break the studio itself. There was a
Speaker 4: lot of hanky panky with cooking the books. The production
Speaker 4: of Faust discharged against Metropolis, the couple of other movie
Speaker 4: productions are charged against Metropolis, and Studio Overhead was charged
Speaker 4: against Metropolis. Metropolis only cost about two hundred thousand dollars,
Speaker 4: and that money all came from Paramount. It didn't even
Speaker 4: come from UFA. But when they cooked the books, they
Speaker 4: made it look like Metropolis bankrupted the studio. It's just
Speaker 4: not true.
Speaker 5: At all, it's a useful thing to take the fall
Speaker 5: economic protectionism. And basically, like you said, gangsterism in Europe
Speaker 5: reminds me so much of Hitchcock when he struggled to
Speaker 5: get his movies made in England and they had trouble
Speaker 5: exporting them to the United States. The United States wanted
Speaker 5: their movies in England. They wanted to basically destroy the market,
Speaker 5: but they didn't want to have to import. They didn't
Speaker 5: want like a tit for tat reciprocal relationship. The other
Speaker 5: one too, that that brings up to is the CanCon
Speaker 5: laws in Canada, I think was its seventies, eighties and
Speaker 5: nineties where they had like the economic stipulation that a
Speaker 5: certain percentage television had to be Canadian producing Canadian and
Speaker 5: were kind of living through a resurgence of that economic protectionism.
Speaker 5: And you know, I thought I never lived to see
Speaker 5: that get you know, liberalism died of the chopping block.
Speaker 5: But so here here we are.
Speaker 2: I think that the rumors were or the historical view
Speaker 2: of Metropolis is that guess a bankrupt to the studio.
Speaker 2: Nobody watched it, Nobody had liked this film. It was
Speaker 2: just a complete disaster. And as far as I know,
Speaker 2: that's not the case. Like this was a smash hit
Speaker 2: for a while in different in different markets, but it
Speaker 2: was really lambasted and just like, oh no, no, this
Speaker 2: is the one that has ruined the entire industry.
Speaker 4: In fol Taire, I think you said history is a
Speaker 4: bag of tricks. We play on the dead right when
Speaker 4: you start digging into the primary sources, you discover that
Speaker 4: a lot of what's in the history books does not
Speaker 4: hold up.
Speaker 2: And also kind of wound into this whole thing is
Speaker 2: the idea of it was too long two and a
Speaker 2: half hours or whatever. The final running time was way
Speaker 2: too long, and we're just going to chop this thing
Speaker 2: to pieces and we're going to make a much more
Speaker 2: interesting and better film, stronger film out of this. And
Speaker 2: just the reason why we have the two and a
Speaker 2: half hour version of this is basically because of a mistake.
Speaker 2: It's because of movie collectors. You know, we talked to
Speaker 2: Dennis Bartak on the show a long time ago about
Speaker 2: his book A Thousand Cuts and just the idea of
Speaker 2: what role movie collectors can play in preserving films. I mean,
Speaker 2: Federico and I were just getting back from a festival
Speaker 2: all about film preservation. It's so important that we have
Speaker 2: these collectors out there, really who had these unique versions
Speaker 2: of these films, so that they're able to actually bring
Speaker 2: them back together. I mean, that's why we have this
Speaker 2: two and a half hour version. It's still missing pieces.
Speaker 2: There are definitely inner titles in here that explain, well,
Speaker 2: this is when you know Freder breaks Maria out of
Speaker 2: rot Wang's prison, and they all right, great, you know,
Speaker 2: I would love to see those things, but for now,
Speaker 2: we're not going to. But someday we might. And that's
Speaker 2: the thing is that over the years we have seen
Speaker 2: smaller renovation through restorations of this film throughout I can't
Speaker 2: even reckon I mean, Ranjie, you're talking about two versions
Speaker 2: that you saw within a matter of weeks that were different.
Speaker 2: Just imagine how many of these versions. And we haven't
Speaker 2: even talked about the Moroder version. We'll talk about that
Speaker 2: later on in the program. But just all of these
Speaker 2: different things. And a lot of that was because they said, oh, well,
Speaker 2: the version that played was terrible, and we need to
Speaker 2: make a better film lot of this, and they hired
Speaker 2: here in the US, they hired a playwright, Channing Pollock
Speaker 2: was it, who recut the film, and that became the
Speaker 2: version that so many people saw for so long. Though
Speaker 2: now you know Federico was asking me for a copy
Speaker 2: of it, I'm like, I can't find it. I can't
Speaker 2: find that particular cut of it, which is kind of
Speaker 2: good that we're moving past this, but those historical documents
Speaker 2: should really exist as well.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: It's kind of like the whole original kind of Star
Speaker 2: Wars things. It's like, I want that to exist. I
Speaker 2: don't care if George Lucas wants us to see this
Speaker 2: whatever version because he's made several different versions of films
Speaker 2: as well. I want that original document to exist. So
Speaker 2: I want the original document of Metropolis to exist. I
Speaker 2: also want all of those different cuts that have come
Speaker 2: about over the years, like give me that Blade runner
Speaker 2: box where you had the five different versions of it,
Speaker 2: and since then, fan editors have done their own versions
Speaker 2: of these things, Like I want that stuff preserved as
Speaker 2: much as I want the original version that was shown
Speaker 2: in nineteen twenty seven and to still be around.
Speaker 5: I wanted to thank you Ranjit personally over the are
Speaker 5: that you actually sent me a copy of It's on YouTube. Unfortunately,
Speaker 5: it's what it's like sixteen frames per second and it's
Speaker 5: terrible quality. But it is the New Zealand copy correct, right,
Speaker 5: the Australian version that is similar to the American but
Speaker 5: it's not the same, which is just absurd. You know
Speaker 5: that you really can't get the exact copy. Like I
Speaker 5: said when I talked about the first time that I
Speaker 5: saw it, I saw it in the quote unquote full
Speaker 5: restored version, and like you might, I'm hoping and I
Speaker 5: know somewhere, you know, there's the footage. I just know
Speaker 5: that someday Metropolis will be as near complete as it
Speaker 5: can get. But I always wanted to see the American
Speaker 5: version because I'm one of those people that always loves
Speaker 5: to watch like different cultures make the same. And the
Speaker 5: thing that I remember about Metropolis hearing about it was
Speaker 5: that it was three hours long. You know, people said like, oh,
Speaker 5: it's three hours long. It bombed at the cinemas, just
Speaker 5: like you said, they fell for the trap. And sure
Speaker 5: enough I looked into it and I found out that
Speaker 5: of course they would play it at a different speed
Speaker 5: and so take longer, it would last longer. But when
Speaker 5: I first watched it, I was completely captivated, like just
Speaker 5: you know, it got into your mind, and yeah, I
Speaker 5: didn't think about the length. I tend to not think
Speaker 5: about like movie lengths. It's just like, once you're in
Speaker 5: the movie, you're in the movie. That's it done. But
Speaker 5: for two hours twenty five minutes now, and then the
Speaker 5: original release was one hundred and fifty three minutes. That's
Speaker 5: like Prisoners by Move. You know. It's a bunch of
Speaker 5: films like Dark Knight, you know, just these movies that
Speaker 5: everybody loves but they don't want to say, like, oh,
Speaker 5: it's too long. You know. I think the problem too
Speaker 5: is that it's silent and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 5: You know, Oh it's hokey, it's old. I don't want
Speaker 5: to deal with it. But two and a half hours long,
Speaker 5: it moves like nothing. Even if the guy at the
Speaker 5: time in Germany made that joke in the newspaper about
Speaker 5: how like it's like an hour in and then it
Speaker 5: cuts and it's says the end of the end of
Speaker 5: the overture or the prologue, and you're just like, it's
Speaker 5: almost like a comic thing of just like what and
Speaker 5: then you have the intermetso oh gosh, no, no, no's
Speaker 5: it moves like nothing else.
Speaker 2: The other thing that doesn't help is the acting. I
Speaker 2: really like a lot of the acting that happens in here.
Speaker 2: I really like Maria. I think that she does a
Speaker 2: wonderful job. But the guy that plays Frader just something
Speaker 2: about him, and I don't know if it's the character
Speaker 2: or if it's the actor that I just kind of
Speaker 2: chafe with. And like everybody else, I love every single
Speaker 2: moment that rot Wing is on screen. I love when
Speaker 2: josephat is on screen. I've already talked about the Thin
Speaker 2: Man and just how much I enjoy his character. Even
Speaker 2: you know grot the Guardian of the Heart Machine. It's like, yeah,
Speaker 2: these guys are great. But then when it comes to Freighter,
Speaker 2: I don't know if it's that Luke Skywalker going to
Speaker 2: Tashi station to pick up some power converters kind of
Speaker 2: thing or what it is, but it's just like, get
Speaker 2: this guy off the screen. He sucks. I just don't
Speaker 2: like I.
Speaker 4: Do like him. That was not the actor's fault. I
Speaker 4: think that was Fritz's direction. He wanted this juvenile to
Speaker 4: be in the lead, so he got a juvenile, and
Speaker 4: Gustav slowly played it like a juvenile. If didn't want that,
Speaker 4: he wouldn't have done that.
Speaker 5: In mcgilligan's biography of Lang, which is excellent. I love
Speaker 5: that we're talking about a movie that was covered by
Speaker 5: mcgillingen because like reading his work is just so easy,
Speaker 5: you know, it just like flows like nothing else. But
Speaker 5: it talks about Gustav Rolick and it says that was
Speaker 5: it was von Harbu who actually decided that if somebody
Speaker 5: else was in the role, and that she actually picked
Speaker 5: him out of a lap and she picked him for
Speaker 5: his good looks, youthful ernest. But I'm with you, Mike,
Speaker 5: there is something to be said about those silent actors
Speaker 5: who go they cast to the back row. It's almost
Speaker 5: like they come from theater and they're not adapted well
Speaker 5: to that kind of act. And I think he is
Speaker 5: the weak link and if you can get over him,
Speaker 5: and if you can take him as kind of like
Speaker 5: a naive child, like Ranjit was saying, possible, I mean
Speaker 5: the cast is so you know, it's just one actor
Speaker 5: out of however many, he's a speed bump. You just
Speaker 5: get over him.
Speaker 2: It is interesting too that he's the one that has visions.
Speaker 2: You mentioned Villeneuve earlier, and it's almost Dune is a
Speaker 2: great Messiah story, and this is very much a Messiah story,
Speaker 2: and people forget that Paula Tredes was what's sixteen in
Speaker 2: the story. I mean, this feels like even though he
Speaker 2: looks older than sixteen, he feels like a sixteen year old,
Speaker 2: he feels like a younger character. And he is the
Speaker 2: one that has these visions. He sees the machine as Moloch,
Speaker 2: this demon who's just eating all of the workers and
Speaker 2: just feeding upon the bodies of slaves. Later on, it's
Speaker 2: almost as if he sees Maria when she's in the
Speaker 2: club doing her dance. But there's some great cross cutting
Speaker 2: that's going on there. And also I want to say
Speaker 2: that he's the one that sees the seven deadly Sindents
Speaker 2: come to life, and so it's like he's the one
Speaker 2: that can see what's behind the veil. Like I think that,
Speaker 2: of course these things are symbolic, but I want to
Speaker 2: say that he has seen the world for more of
Speaker 2: what it is than what the rest of everyone in
Speaker 2: the cast is seeing what the rest of Metropolis sees.
Speaker 2: They see a machine, whereas he sees a demon, and
Speaker 2: he sees what's really going on with these things, even
Speaker 2: if it's more metaphorical terms. All right, let's go ahead
Speaker 2: and take a break, and we'll be back after these
Speaker 2: brief messages.
Speaker 6: Seven the sixth Sense, Sweet sixteen nine songs, seven Brides
Speaker 6: for seven Brothers, twelve Angry Men in the Verse. While
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Speaker 2: All right, we are back and we are continuing our
Speaker 2: talk about Metropolis.
Speaker 4: Beda is in the eternal garden with this programmed Crotazan.
Speaker 4: And then suddenly, as though subconscious is rising to consciousness,
Speaker 4: the door opened and there's reality it's Maria, this poper children.
Speaker 4: As soon as she comes out, she locks eyes with them,
Speaker 4: as though she knew he was going to be standing
Speaker 4: right there, and she knew she had to make contact
Speaker 4: with them. Somehow, The guards shove them all back through
Speaker 4: the door and they disappear. Trede chases them, obviously down
Speaker 4: because they work below the surface of the earth. So
Speaker 4: he's down below the surface of the earth in this
Speaker 4: bizarre factory with machines that are just fantastical gadgets that
Speaker 4: have no relation to anything in reality. He has that
Speaker 4: vision of the moloc machine. He runs out out of
Speaker 4: the frame, down the stairs to a limousine that's waiting
Speaker 4: for him. Did that limousine know to be waiting for
Speaker 4: him right there? And then we see the puppet limousine
Speaker 4: leave and is driving down a ramp from something like
Speaker 4: the twenty fifth story of a skyscraper. Where was he?
Speaker 4: Was he under the ground or was he at the
Speaker 4: twenty fifth store of a story of a skyscraper? And
Speaker 4: that's when I get the impression that this is fits
Speaker 4: and the other people making the movie telling us, calm down,
Speaker 4: this is dream imagery. Don't worry too much. We're playing games.
Speaker 2: Just go with us.
Speaker 4: What do you what's your opinion of that.
Speaker 2: I love the idea of the him continuously going down
Speaker 2: and down and down. I mean this, I'm surprised that
Speaker 2: in a lot of the commentary that I heard or
Speaker 2: articles that I read, that Orpheus never came up when
Speaker 2: it came to this discussion, because this feels so much
Speaker 2: like an Orpheus story of the descent into the underworld
Speaker 2: and can having your quest and trying to bring back
Speaker 2: the love. You know, he's constantly searching for Maria. So yeah,
Speaker 2: I think that's really very astute as far as, yes,
Speaker 2: how does he get from below ground to way up
Speaker 2: above ground and then have to continue to descend, And
Speaker 2: really when it comes to his father, I would imagine
Speaker 2: his father is at the pinnacle when it comes to
Speaker 2: all of this. It feels like he should be the
Speaker 2: person that's at the tippy top of all this. And
Speaker 2: the idea of the Tower of Babble keeps coming up,
Speaker 2: and we've got you know, think it's really more based
Speaker 2: on the Briigle painting than what you would read in
Speaker 2: the Bible. But I love this whole idea too, of
Speaker 2: having you know these and I guess there are archangels
Speaker 2: kind of looking at the Tower of Babel and just
Speaker 2: talking about, like, you know, the hubris of man. And
Speaker 2: again the hubris doesn't get punished, Like I'm surprised that
Speaker 2: the tower, as in the biblical story, just doesn't get destroyed.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: It feels more like, oh, yeah, we're okay with this now,
Speaker 2: because it's it's commerce related. It's not you know, I mean,
Speaker 2: at the same time, it is man's hubris. It's man
Speaker 2: trying to reach the levels of the gods with that
Speaker 2: out going through more of a spiritual journey. It's just
Speaker 2: I've got the money, I'm going to build the tower
Speaker 2: in order to make it to the heavens.
Speaker 4: I was at the very end. You do see the
Speaker 4: ruins of the tower with that logo painted in the
Speaker 4: sky above it, great as the Creator and great as Man.
Speaker 4: So do you see that? And of course Maria changes
Speaker 4: the whole point of the story of the Tower Babel,
Speaker 4: which in the Book of Genesis just about this big
Speaker 4: it's just a few lines.
Speaker 2: All the big stories are just a few lines. It's
Speaker 2: like what I read about Noah's Ark, It's like, all right,
Speaker 2: couple paragraphs. You're not gonna hole lot.
Speaker 4: The meaning in the Book of Genesis is not the
Speaker 4: meaning that Maria gives to it. She gives to it
Speaker 4: the meaning that the critics of Taylorism would give to
Speaker 4: the way factories are run.
Speaker 5: The tower was like a super major bone of contention
Speaker 5: during production. They started out with the sketches and it
Speaker 5: looked like the spiral from the story the Interstitial One,
Speaker 5: and Lang himself said, I don't want it to look
Speaker 5: like that. I wanted to be modern, and they added
Speaker 5: the crossbars and kind of like there were supposed to
Speaker 5: be airplanes like landing on it, and I think you
Speaker 5: can see a few little model airplanes landing on it.
Speaker 5: But you were talking around you about how it's like
Speaker 5: a dream city. You don't know where you're going to
Speaker 5: end up. You could think that you're at street level,
Speaker 5: but you could be basically up in the clouds. And
Speaker 5: about the cities in China that are built in the
Speaker 5: side of like hills. You know, they're built in like
Speaker 5: river valleys, and they have all of these stairs and elevators,
Speaker 5: and so it's like you never know where in relation
Speaker 5: you are to the ground, and you could be like
Speaker 5: living on the eleventh floor, but there are people living
Speaker 5: far far below you, and you could go to work
Speaker 5: far far above you. I wanted to answer the question
Speaker 5: talking about like the vision, the sense of Freda being
Speaker 5: the one that has these like apocalyptic visions, because there
Speaker 5: generally are apocalyptic the sense of like gays like this
Speaker 5: film has an absolute rock solid understanding of the camera
Speaker 5: I as being an analog or the viewer's eye, you know,
Speaker 5: the lens to the eye. And Ranjie you mentioned Maria
Speaker 5: opening the door and immediately looking at Frader, but she's
Speaker 5: not looking at Frader. She's looking us as Freders, as
Speaker 5: the embodiment of him. And one thing I love about
Speaker 5: certain films and films of this era too, is that
Speaker 5: they're not afraid to, like Spike the lens, to have
Speaker 5: actors just peer straight into your soul. And this film
Speaker 5: has so so many scenes like of incredible pathos and
Speaker 5: power that would come off really not great if they
Speaker 5: weren't done that way. Like I always think about the
Speaker 5: one where he goes to the chapel that they have
Speaker 5: in the catacombs, and there's that scene where everybody leaves
Speaker 5: and Freder comes up to basically receive blessing but also
Speaker 5: throw his heart and soul to Maria, and you see
Speaker 5: him clutch his heart, and that's very you know, one
Speaker 5: oh one, just over the top acting is just I
Speaker 5: need to show everybody that I'm in lie, so I
Speaker 5: clutch my heart. But he's gazing directly into the camera
Speaker 5: as if we are the object of his love, and
Speaker 5: so that transference from the actor to the viewer. And
Speaker 5: then you cut to Maria. I mean Maria not only
Speaker 5: like Maria herself, but the false Maria also has incredible
Speaker 5: scenes of gazing directly into the camera, like the dance
Speaker 5: you were talking about, the dance that she does, and
Speaker 5: the dance itself is like that's the seduction. Like you
Speaker 5: literally had the Madonna at the beginning goading you to
Speaker 5: fall into this you know, this great I don't want
Speaker 5: to say lie, but this great promise of religion. And
Speaker 5: then near the end of the movie you have the
Speaker 5: horror of Babylon gazing from the cinema screen asking you
Speaker 5: to fall into temptation and talking about like the men
Speaker 5: there and the gaze of them, I mean to the
Speaker 5: point where they cut all their eyes out and they
Speaker 5: basically fill the screen like it's almost like the argus
Speaker 5: of Pinopti's the ogre that with a thousand eyes just
Speaker 5: gazing back at you. It's just that that that image
Speaker 5: just lag. I don't know, it's just the kettle hot.
Speaker 5: Like all the production design of the cinematographer is just gaze.
Speaker 5: It's so much about Gaye.
Speaker 2: That dance sequence and the reaction of the men and
Speaker 2: the eyes. That is my favorite section of this film.
Speaker 2: It is just so avant garde and so beautiful to
Speaker 2: look at, and I love just the oh god, the
Speaker 2: one shot where it's like all of the eyes and
Speaker 2: it feels like four or five different planes of different
Speaker 2: sections going on. Some are just eyes. You've got Maria,
Speaker 2: You've got all of these things happening all at the
Speaker 2: same time. And then when you see and thank god,
Speaker 2: it's the you know, the the restored or like, it's
Speaker 2: not the Argentinian footage, it's the you know, the footage
Speaker 2: that we've had before, and how gorgeous that footage looks.
Speaker 2: And when you get to a shot like that, it just, oh,
Speaker 2: it just melts my heart to see that because it's
Speaker 2: so beautiful and so striking and just fits in with
Speaker 2: the rest of this film so much. Like you're saying,
Speaker 2: like the gaze and everything. Here are all of these
Speaker 2: eyes looking at us and Maria looking at us. And yeah,
Speaker 2: the things that that the actress that that plays Maria,
Speaker 2: that she does with her eyes, the whole thing of
Speaker 2: like one eye open, one eye closed kind of thing.
Speaker 4: I love that stuff.
Speaker 2: And she is so striking and I love that they
Speaker 2: have her as both you know, Madonna and whore throughout
Speaker 2: this whole thing. And it takes so long. Like I
Speaker 2: think a lot of people kind of like me, think
Speaker 2: that the robot transformation of the creature that Rotwang builds
Speaker 2: to Maria, to the false Maria, that that happens way
Speaker 2: earlier than it does because it's it takes placed pretty
Speaker 2: far into the film. It's really his whole thing of Oh,
Speaker 2: I'm going to disrupt the whole labor thing. I'm going
Speaker 2: to film into revolution with this false Maria. And the
Speaker 2: whole thing that he does is like, well, if you
Speaker 2: can't buy her as Maria by her as a person,
Speaker 2: you know, this whole thing is over with. But I
Speaker 2: we should probably talk a little bit about the whole
Speaker 2: rivalry between rot Waning and Joe and especially all of
Speaker 2: the stuff that goes on with the mother with Hell,
Speaker 2: because that the whole thing with Hell. It just there mentions,
Speaker 2: you know, of the wife, but her name being I
Speaker 2: guess too offensive for America. I just can't buy that
Speaker 2: Hell was too offensive for Americans in nineteen twenty seven.
Speaker 2: But maybe it was. Maybe we were way too prudish
Speaker 2: with that. But come on, guys, it's a Norse goddess's name.
Speaker 2: It means light. It's not literal Hell. There's no double
Speaker 2: hockey stick on there, It's just one hockey stick.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, no, All the instances of the time are
Speaker 4: perfectly okay with things like that.
Speaker 2: Right, I mean, this is pre code.
Speaker 4: If they were worried about it, all they had to
Speaker 4: do is put a little parenthetical. Hell was a Norse
Speaker 4: goddess of the city of the Dead, and incidentally the
Speaker 4: catacomb where Maria preaches. Did you notice that Josefat refers
Speaker 4: to that as the city of the dead. That makes
Speaker 4: a little bit of a parallel there between Hell and Maria,
Speaker 4: So there's sort of doppelgangers. What I found odd is
Speaker 4: rivalry between Lotvang and Yow for Hell. You do know
Speaker 4: that Telfon Habu was previously married to the actor who
Speaker 4: played Lotvang and then married Great Slang, so she was
Speaker 4: massed flit Slang when they were making this movie. But
Speaker 4: they were apparently still good friends, I guess with her
Speaker 4: first husband, and Flitz loved to cast him and he
Speaker 4: was wonderful And in this Movietang is just another version
Speaker 4: of Doctor Morbusa, which the Donald few years earlier. If
Speaker 4: you remember, Doctor Morbusa is one of my favorites. That
Speaker 4: the rivalry there that seemed to be a joke about
Speaker 4: what had happened in their personal lives.
Speaker 5: McGilligan says that they were married for ten years, they
Speaker 5: were married for one year, and then they waited to
Speaker 5: get divorced for not it was like a It was
Speaker 5: a partnership, a creative partnership, and there was no real
Speaker 5: love in it. In some sense that Lang was, you know,
Speaker 5: he had the wandering eye, constantly looking for new engineers,
Speaker 5: somebody you know, more precious, more pure for his for
Speaker 5: his taste. But Mike, you you keep mentioning the woman
Speaker 5: who plays Maria. But I think, like we got to
Speaker 5: talk Brigitte Helm. This film would not work without her performance,
Speaker 5: and this is her first on screen role and she
Speaker 5: hated acting. She did not want to do this. I mean,
Speaker 5: she she did. This is like a famous story of
Speaker 5: him going to see her and asking her, you know,
Speaker 5: she was on set and he said like, do you know,
Speaker 5: do you want to be an actor? Actress? And she said,
Speaker 5: I want anything but and her mother like was apoplectic
Speaker 5: because her mother was the standard stage mother pushing her
Speaker 5: daughter into it. But not only is this her first role,
Speaker 5: not only is she incredible as Maria, but she's playing
Speaker 5: five separate roles, like she's the machine man, the creative man,
Speaker 5: the seven Deadly Sins. I don't know how she played
Speaker 5: seven deadly sins, but she played death too. And she
Speaker 5: plays the false mother. That's a tall order for anybody,
Speaker 5: let alone somebody who was still growing at the time.
Speaker 5: Hence the costume like biting into her and her having
Speaker 5: it to be there for hours and hours hours. I mean,
Speaker 5: this is just a toward of force performance from her.
Speaker 5: And you mentioned the eye thing, you know, closing one
Speaker 5: eye to show that she's a false Maria, that she's
Speaker 5: a temptress. And her makeup, the makeup and design of
Speaker 5: her is just incredible too. At the very end, you
Speaker 5: see her in the worker City and she's saving children.
Speaker 5: I don't know how asexual, like, how how motherly you
Speaker 5: can get besides literally saving children from drowning. And her
Speaker 5: they're wearing the same costume, and her costume is straight
Speaker 5: laced and tight, and it's like a bodice. You cut
Speaker 5: to the false Maria. False Maria has bags under her eyes,
Speaker 5: disheveled hair, and the same costume, but it's like undone.
Speaker 5: So you're seeing more and more and more of her body,
Speaker 5: more and more of her cleavage, and it's just, you know,
Speaker 5: production design is just tw tiny little things. And bridget Helm,
Speaker 5: I mean, despite her not liking acting, which I don't
Speaker 5: blame her at all, she did an incredible job well.
Speaker 2: And the whole idea too, of doubling and having the
Speaker 2: two Marias. But then, like you said, all of the
Speaker 2: different parts that she's playing, and then you get even
Speaker 2: the very obvious doubling, but the whole idea of Georgie
Speaker 2: the worker that exchanges places with freighter, and the whole
Speaker 2: idea of them switching their hats and uniforms and you know,
Speaker 2: losing the job pers that that Freder wears throughout so
Speaker 2: much of this, and I really like that, and I
Speaker 2: like to that the number. Georgie has a number that
Speaker 2: he's one one eight one one, So we've got that
Speaker 2: nice palindromic number, and you've got all the dumbles from
Speaker 2: one side to the other with that as well. I
Speaker 2: think that's great that they're doing these things and you've
Speaker 2: got like kind of the like Slim versus Joseph, Fat
Speaker 2: Joe versus rot Wang, like all the characters seem to
Speaker 2: have their other person other than just mentioned Georgie taking
Speaker 2: the place. But really we know that Freder is the one,
Speaker 2: like Neo, right, He's the one when it comes to
Speaker 2: this stuff. And I love the machine that he's running
Speaker 2: that this whole idea of this big it looks like
Speaker 2: a clock face with three hands and just moving the
Speaker 2: hands around and the lights will light up and he
Speaker 2: keeps moving his arms around toward Georgie is there just
Speaker 2: wiping his head off because such labor intensive stuff. And
Speaker 2: it's like, like you said Earlierrojie, it's like, what the
Speaker 2: hell does this machine do? We have no freakin' idea,
Speaker 2: And that became like a real stumbling block for somebody
Speaker 2: like an HG. Wells, where he's like, well, they don't
Speaker 2: explain what these machines do, and it's like, do they
Speaker 2: need to do we need to have an explanation as
Speaker 2: they like, what the what's being produced? I mean it's
Speaker 2: basically they're producing the guffins. You know, there's there's nothing
Speaker 2: to this, you know, it's just this is the point
Speaker 2: of it is the labor. It's not what they produce.
Speaker 2: The labor is the production. It is just all about
Speaker 2: that and having that ridiculous machine. And you know, like
Speaker 2: I said earlier, when I was growing up and watching
Speaker 2: the Radio Gaga video and having Freddie Mercury there, you know,
Speaker 2: moving the arms around and stuff, and just like, what
Speaker 2: the hell is he doing?
Speaker 4: What is here?
Speaker 2: I have no idea. As a little kid, I was like,
Speaker 2: all right, that's kind of cool, I guess, But then
Speaker 2: seeing it in context of this film, it's like, oh wow,
Speaker 2: this is wild. I like that. You know, it's this
Speaker 2: very brazil world. This would so much influence Brazil where
Speaker 2: it's like we don't know really what we're working at.
Speaker 2: We just have to work to work.
Speaker 4: It looks sort of like a clock with three hands.
Speaker 4: Did you notice at the beginning that one of the
Speaker 4: very first things we see as a clock, it's a
Speaker 4: ten hour clock and above it is a twenty four
Speaker 4: hour clock. So in those days in Germany people had
Speaker 4: ten hour shifts, but apparently in the movie ten hours
Speaker 4: is the equivalent of our twelve hours. They expanded the hours.
Speaker 4: It's a twenty hour day.
Speaker 2: Frederico, you mentioned China and the idea of like building
Speaker 2: into nature and everything, and when I saw that ten
Speaker 2: hour and twenty four hour clock, I kept thinking of
Speaker 2: how they treat time in China these days. Right now,
Speaker 2: there are no time zones in China. China is one
Speaker 2: time zone. So it's really crazy when you think about
Speaker 2: the people that are all the way to the east
Speaker 2: coast of this because China's, you know, about as big
Speaker 2: as America, if not bigger. I mean talking about continental
Speaker 2: United States. All the way on one side of it,
Speaker 2: it's seven am. All the way on the other side
Speaker 2: of it, it's seven am. The sun could rise around
Speaker 2: five or ten, doesn't really you know, like that was
Speaker 2: one of the things when the Communists came in, They're
Speaker 2: just like, yeah, nope, we control time. That is one
Speaker 2: of the things that we do. They're making the trains
Speaker 2: run on time. Was very easy since it's one big
Speaker 2: time zone. And yeah, I just found that very fascinating
Speaker 2: that controlling time is one of those rights that a
Speaker 2: fascistic government is going to impose. That we are the
Speaker 2: ones that tell you how long a day is and
Speaker 2: how long a shift is. Like you were saying, renji,
Speaker 2: the expansion of the ten into twelve hours, because that's
Speaker 2: just the way that things work.
Speaker 5: Sorry, the tyranny too of time being your mast I
Speaker 5: think about like the development of why time came around,
Speaker 5: like timekeeping devices was for monks so that they can
Speaker 5: know where that when their prayers were, and so it
Speaker 5: started with religion, and then it moved into the workplace,
Speaker 5: and you think about it's like, okay, if you're a
Speaker 5: peasant in that you know, what is it ten hundreds
Speaker 5: all this kind of stuff. You got up with the sun,
Speaker 5: you worked, you broke in the middle of the day,
Speaker 5: you worked, and then you went home and you slept,
Speaker 5: or sometimes you woke up in the middle of the
Speaker 5: night and you did a little bit of work and
Speaker 5: then you went back to sleep. And it's that primordial
Speaker 5: aspect of time is the only thing that we have.
Speaker 5: And so if a state can control it, like you
Speaker 5: bring up Brazil, but obviously the other big thing is
Speaker 5: nineteen eighty four with coming into your thoughts. You know,
Speaker 5: it's like your time, your thoughts, just the things that
Speaker 5: are so absolutely personal you just can't deal with it
Speaker 5: and run g eat to you. I never thought that
Speaker 5: they stretched ten to twelve. I always thought it was
Speaker 5: an evocation of the decimalization of time from it was
Speaker 5: after the French Revolution they tried to do the Republican
Speaker 5: time and it was like it was like a terrible,
Speaker 5: terrible thing. Nobody liked it because everybody was so used
Speaker 5: to the twelve hours that stuff. I thought of it
Speaker 5: as an eva that Mike. I just wanted to point
Speaker 5: out that technically the machine in Metropolis does have a name.
Speaker 5: It doesn't have a point, but it's explained terribly. It's
Speaker 5: not done in the in the film, but it's done
Speaker 5: in the novel that Harbor wrote. It's a Potter noster,
Speaker 5: which is the pattern noster lift, which is almost like
Speaker 5: the chain buckets that you see in the movie, where
Speaker 5: you get on them and then you get off at
Speaker 5: the at the stop that you want, at the floor
Speaker 5: that you want. They're like super prevalent in Germany, Vienna,
Speaker 5: they have a few in England, they're kind of dangerous,
Speaker 5: people get like limbs, you know, all this kind of stuff.
Speaker 5: But Potter is Latin for our Father, and there's this
Speaker 5: whole religious aspect to it, and it's in the novel
Speaker 5: by Harbor of just like a potternoster to the and
Speaker 5: those three blades essentially, and that Christ imagery when Freder
Speaker 5: is basically crucified on his own machine and he calls
Speaker 5: out for his own father. I mean, it's so on
Speaker 5: the youth. I mean, it's like one of the last
Speaker 5: things Jesus says is like my.
Speaker 4: God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Speaker 5: It's right there in the movie, right there for you.
Speaker 2: The pottern Maaster. I need to go back and try
Speaker 2: to re listen to the commentary that's on the Masters
Speaker 2: of Cinema Desk, because it's I don't know what the
Speaker 2: hell was going on with that. I like David Collott,
Speaker 2: I like or call it. I like John the Rosenbaum,
Speaker 2: of course I like him Alott, he's been on the
Speaker 2: show before. But that commentary is recorded so poorly or
Speaker 2: presented so poorly. I hear the music so much louder
Speaker 2: than I hear the voices, and I'm just like what
Speaker 2: the hell, guys, And it sounds almost like Collot's like
Speaker 2: three feet away from the microphone and rosenbombs across the room,
Speaker 2: and I'm just like, what are you guys doing? What
Speaker 2: the hell? But I swear at one point they're talking
Speaker 2: about the pottern Noster and Klot's like, oh, yeah, that
Speaker 2: thing's impossible, like it doesn't exist or something like it's
Speaker 2: a science fiction invention. I'm like, uh, yeah, I've seen
Speaker 2: that in so many movies. Now, like, this is a
Speaker 2: real thing, guys.
Speaker 4: I love this.
Speaker 2: Elevator, yes, which is also it's great, but it's also
Speaker 2: another instance of something that's very old fashioned.
Speaker 4: And also physically implausible.
Speaker 5: There's no way you could actually build such a thing
Speaker 5: and have it work in.
Speaker 4: A real building.
Speaker 2: That is not science fiction. That's a genuine article. And yeah,
Speaker 2: we don't seem to use those here in the States.
Speaker 2: I've never actually seen one in real life, but I've
Speaker 2: seen it in plenty of movies and almost all German movies,
Speaker 2: and I was just baffled by that take on it
Speaker 2: that it wasn't even a real thing. But yeah, I
Speaker 2: love that take of our Father and just the whole
Speaker 2: father imagery that goes through this whole thing, going back
Speaker 2: to the whole rot Wing versus Show thing. The one
Speaker 2: thing that I've found very surprising is that there's no
Speaker 2: real resolution of their relationship in this as opposed to
Speaker 2: the book that actually has more of a resolution. And
Speaker 2: I wanted to say, what was it that it was?
Speaker 2: It was it Joe's mother that had a letter from
Speaker 2: Hell and gives it to him at the end of it,
Speaker 2: and it basically is a letter from Hell saying like,
Speaker 2: I've always loved you, I really never liked Rotlong. Your
Speaker 2: whole thing of me falling in love with him. It
Speaker 2: was a complete lie, like no, I've always been you know,
Speaker 2: your woman kind of thing. And Joe's mother refused to
Speaker 2: give it to him until he had a change of heart,
Speaker 2: and so I guess, like the worker Revolution is what
Speaker 2: caused that change. So I'm like, okay, but that's not
Speaker 2: really found in this. There's not real real resolution between
Speaker 2: those two characters.
Speaker 4: And it was a nice sending the book, very brilliant
Speaker 4: because all the way as you're reading the book, you
Speaker 4: think this is a story of Reda and Maria, and
Speaker 4: then right at the end you discovered, no, it wasn't
Speaker 4: their story. It was a story of you all all alone.
Speaker 4: It was beautiful, but how do you film that? So
Speaker 4: they never filmed an ending for the movie. They just
Speaker 4: stopped it, which is rather unfortunate. But after I saw
Speaker 4: the movie about fifty times, I realized why they had
Speaker 4: stopped it there. And then I just put my face
Speaker 4: in my hands and I thought, oh, guys, no, no,
Speaker 4: that was the wrong idea.
Speaker 5: Before I forget, I should mention that the potternoster left
Speaker 5: in Germany is actually named after the rosary beads that
Speaker 5: go into a chain that when you pray you spin
Speaker 5: them and so it looks like that, and so they
Speaker 5: named the chain lift after it. But now that it's
Speaker 5: just something else.
Speaker 4: Yeah, very few of them left. I'd love to ride
Speaker 4: one someday, but I don't travel anymore because my cat
Speaker 4: told me not to, so I'll never see about their
Speaker 4: nosk with.
Speaker 2: Got to listen to that cat. I dislike this idea.
Speaker 2: You know, we're talking about all of these things that
Speaker 2: have kind of glombed onto Metropolis over the years. And
Speaker 2: I'm sure Renchie you crazy, because I know you're You're
Speaker 2: very particular when it comes to facts and figures and
Speaker 2: all these things, you know, seventeen frames a second versus
Speaker 2: sixteen frames kind of thing. And you hear all of
Speaker 2: these stories that just get attributed to Metropolis where it's like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: Fritz Lang went to New York City and saw the
Speaker 2: lights and that's what's inspired him for Metropolis. It's like, well,
Speaker 2: actually there was a treatment that he wrote all these
Speaker 2: years ago, or a script that he wrote that was
Speaker 2: very much like Metropolis, and don't forget that they tey
Speaker 2: Von Harbo was working on this book and the script,
Speaker 2: and it feels very two thousand and one to space
Speaker 2: outussy as far as the idea of when was the
Speaker 2: script versus the book? And was the script being written
Speaker 2: at the same time as the book? And I don't
Speaker 2: know if anybody's really pulled that thing apart to say
Speaker 2: like this is what happened when kind of thing. But
Speaker 2: it wasn't a trip to New York City that made
Speaker 2: Metropolis happen. I mean, the trip to New York City
Speaker 2: was what twenty four or twenty six, and it's like, yeah,
Speaker 2: this was already in production, so like calm your jets
Speaker 2: kind of thing. The the other thing that I really
Speaker 2: hate is this idea and I think this maybe came
Speaker 2: from our dear friend Louis Bnwell, where it's like, all
Speaker 2: the good things in the movie are Fritz Lang, all
Speaker 2: the bad things in the movie are Taevan Harbo, and
Speaker 2: she was this horrible, cheesy person that just added all
Speaker 2: the schlock to it. And it's like, no, she came
Speaker 2: up with a lot of these ideas on her own,
Speaker 2: or they worked together as a team. It wasn't just
Speaker 2: you know, And it feels to me very misogynistic as
Speaker 2: far as like, oh, yeah, the woman comes up with
Speaker 2: all the bad ideas, the guy comes up with all
Speaker 2: the great ideas, and it's as simple as that. And
Speaker 2: it's like, no, there's a little bit more shading to
Speaker 2: the story.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and even it's stood up for and defended on
Speaker 4: Harbor for all the rest of his days. He was
Speaker 4: apparently still fond of her even after he divorced her.
Speaker 2: Even after she became a Nazi.
Speaker 4: Yeah, she wasn't shoving people in.
Speaker 2: The Auburn unlike that imagery of Moloch, which just seemed
Speaker 2: to really presage what was going to happen in Germany
Speaker 2: in a few years.
Speaker 5: I feel like you guys are bearing the lead here
Speaker 5: with thea von Harbor. I feel like that's a super
Speaker 5: important part of the story. And the thing that I
Speaker 5: always love to bring up about Metropolis was like, I
Speaker 5: don't want to be that guy. You know, it's like,
Speaker 5: did you know that it was written by a Nazi?
Speaker 5: You know, all this kind of stuff, because that's that's
Speaker 5: that's coming afterwards, that's that's the crisis during the war.
Speaker 5: But the aspect of him leaving Germany and leaving his
Speaker 5: white behind, you know, quasi wife, you know, all this
Speaker 5: is that shock of Oh I didn't know that, but
Speaker 5: it kind of explains some aspects of the story. I
Speaker 5: don't want to say that I fell for it hook
Speaker 5: line and sinker, but I did believe for the longest
Speaker 5: time that Harbor was the one that inserted all of
Speaker 5: the I don't want to say fascist imagery, but the
Speaker 5: quasi fascist imagery, the reef install stuff you were mentioning
Speaker 5: at the beginning, kind of like trying to find a
Speaker 5: way to meld the two, because I think it's it's
Speaker 5: an idiotic prospect to try in bridge fascism and socialism,
Speaker 5: like you make basically a demon baby in the middle.
Speaker 5: There's no way, there's no way you're gonna square that circle.
Speaker 5: But Harbu being a member of the Nazi Party, living
Speaker 5: through the war, staying there and then being blacklisted and
Speaker 5: then struggling to get work after the war and dying
Speaker 5: pretty is tragedy. But like Ron said, I mean, he
Speaker 5: was in an interview with Bogdanovic. I think he mentioned
Speaker 5: that he was fifty percent responsible for everything wrong with Metropolis.
Speaker 5: He did defend her, even after he was no longer
Speaker 5: say what you will about long like his imperious ways
Speaker 5: on set, all this kind of stuff, But he had
Speaker 5: his moments.
Speaker 2: Was he the one that called her a Nazi bitch?
Speaker 2: Or was that somebody else?
Speaker 4: Oh, I don't remember who called her that. He never
Speaker 4: called her that.
Speaker 2: Okay, because I seem to remember hearing that at some
Speaker 2: point that that was attributed to him. I guess I
Speaker 2: think it's even in something that Rosenbaum wrote. But I'm
Speaker 2: just like, yeah, it didn't seem from that back down
Speaker 2: of his interview. I was like, yeah, it doesn't sound
Speaker 2: like he harbors that many bad feelings. I mean, the
Speaker 2: whole idea of you know, the way that Lang's first
Speaker 2: wife ended up and what happened with the escape from Germany,
Speaker 2: and all that stuff. Like I talked about the whole
Speaker 2: self mythology that Lang was just steeped in. I love.
Speaker 2: There's a book by Howard A. Rodman called What Is
Speaker 2: the Destiny Express It is kind of a fictionalization of
Speaker 2: that time in Lang's life. Really great book, but it
Speaker 2: also then helps muddy the waters as to what's real
Speaker 2: and what's not, what's a theory versus what's true. I
Speaker 2: don't know again if we'll ever find out all of
Speaker 2: the things around there, but yeah, they highly recommend that
Speaker 2: book if people are interested in reading some good fiction
Speaker 2: around this.
Speaker 4: And I am not at all convinced that they had
Speaker 4: a wife prior to the fun Harbor. I have no
Speaker 4: reason to believe it. It sounds like the story that
Speaker 4: Fitz came up with after he read a newspaper article
Speaker 4: about something vaguely similar. I had to put it into
Speaker 4: a movie script, didn't work on it, told a few
Speaker 4: people the idea, then it got blown out of all proportion.
Speaker 4: I don't think there was a previous wife. If I
Speaker 4: were to live in Germany for two or three years,
Speaker 4: I think i'd like to research that. But I'll never
Speaker 4: go to Germany. And you know why, that darn yead.
Speaker 5: That was Tom Gunning the films of Fritz Lang. He
Speaker 5: said that, So it's not even it's not even like
Speaker 5: a media personality or you know, like a filmmaker that
Speaker 5: called her a Nazi bitch is.
Speaker 2: Just oh so he's the one that called her a
Speaker 2: Nazi bitch. M hm okay, because when I look at
Speaker 2: the Rosenbaum thing, it says a Fisher attributable acclaim by
Speaker 2: many to the Harbowlange collaboration with the good do to
Speaker 2: Lang and the bad due to quote that Nazi bitch.
Speaker 2: But there's not a footnote to this. All right, thank
Speaker 2: you for putting that in there. I've always been a
Speaker 2: student of the way that other races are portrayed, especially
Speaker 2: Asian people are portrayed in films. I mean to have
Speaker 2: the nightclub, the very lascivious nightclub called Yoshiwara, which is
Speaker 2: a reference to the red light district in I think
Speaker 2: it's Tokyo. Yeah, to just greatantly call it, yeah, the
Speaker 2: Yoshiwara club. And then one of those deleted images that
Speaker 2: we have from the Argentinian cut is three faces that
Speaker 2: are kind of overlaid, cross dissolved kind of thing of
Speaker 2: there's a black person, a woman's face in the middle,
Speaker 2: and then an Asian face on the other side, and
Speaker 2: I'm not sure if they are. The woman in the
Speaker 2: middle is definitely a woman, but I don't know if
Speaker 2: the Asian person or the black person are men or women.
Speaker 2: I don't know if they're female and pers at the
Speaker 2: time or not. But I find that othering and the
Speaker 2: whole idea of Yoshiwara being this den of iniquity to
Speaker 2: be fascinating. I always appreciate seeing, you know, like I
Speaker 2: was shown broken blossoms and a woman in film class
Speaker 2: years ago, and it's like, oh, the way that Griffith
Speaker 2: would like, you know, all the bad things we're going
Speaker 2: to put onto the Asian people. You know, we gotta
Speaker 2: we're okay. Us white people are okay, but all the
Speaker 2: bad things come from the Asian, you know. You see
Speaker 2: that even in like The Big Sleep with Geiger's den
Speaker 2: and the Asian imagery having the camera behind the Buddha
Speaker 2: heead statue, all of that stuff. So to see that
Speaker 2: here again, and then to see the way that black
Speaker 2: bodies are used just as ornamentation, like when Maria does
Speaker 2: her big dance and that she's lifted up onto this
Speaker 2: dais and the what's holding the dais? And are all
Speaker 2: these black men with it literally on their back. I'm
Speaker 2: just like, wow, that's that's such powerful imagery. And it's
Speaker 2: that introduction of Yoshiwara which really takes us more into
Speaker 2: and it's just kind of a some imagery that's happening
Speaker 2: when Georgie is in the back of that limousine and
Speaker 2: it's almost like again he's picturing what's going on there
Speaker 2: because a leaflet ends up in the car. But it's
Speaker 2: very shortly after that that imagery that we get to
Speaker 2: rot Wang and really start to see more of him,
Speaker 2: and we get to see more of like the Hell
Speaker 2: statue and things, and again rot Wang just being this
Speaker 2: fascinating character, and I love this whole idea of him.
Speaker 2: I don't know what happened when Frader was born, but
Speaker 2: that Hell died in childbirth, it sounds like. But then
Speaker 2: also something to do with Hell is why rot Wang
Speaker 2: only has the one hand.
Speaker 4: When he was making the robot, burned his hand at
Speaker 4: burned his wa and in the book he says that
Speaker 4: was because of the mixture of eighty old oil. I
Speaker 4: can't remember the name of it, but what is that?
Speaker 4: And I looked it up and there's nothing in the dictionary,
Speaker 4: nothing on Google, so maybe she just made that up.
Speaker 4: But fixing that oil with quicksilver, which is mercury, So
Speaker 4: that's explained there. In the movie, they just delied over it.
Speaker 4: Wasn't it worth losing my arm to recreate?
Speaker 1: Hell?
Speaker 4: Yeah, he's essentially an alchemist, Marcer a wizard, not a scientist.
Speaker 2: The whole thing about the house that he lives in,
Speaker 2: I think it's in the book they talk about how
Speaker 2: a magician had lived there and then after the magician died,
Speaker 2: Rottling took over the house and you see the inverted pentagram.
Speaker 2: I mean it goes into so many of these spiritual
Speaker 2: in magic and just all of these more ethereal realms
Speaker 2: and the hard machines that we have, And that's kind
Speaker 2: of mix again of the scientific plus the fantastic. Even
Speaker 2: when in the intro, like you had a note Renjie
Speaker 2: where you're like, I don't really consider this a science
Speaker 2: fiction film. I consider the science fiction film just because
Speaker 2: there's a freaking robot in it. But there are so
Speaker 2: many things around magic and stuff, and like, you know,
Speaker 2: how would rot Wing's hand even work. You know, it
Speaker 2: feels like it shouldn't even be there, but again, you
Speaker 2: know it's I see this being such an influence. Of course,
Speaker 2: Maria is so an influence on C three PO. You
Speaker 2: see those Ralph mcquarie drawings and you're just like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: totally this is Maria. And then you see you know,
Speaker 2: the fake hand and stuff, and you're just like, okay, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's Luke Skywalker. I mean, hands are always in danger
Speaker 2: in Star Wars film Star Wars films. I mean it's
Speaker 2: even like Return of the Jedi we're going to talk
Speaker 2: about later on this month, and it's when Luke chops
Speaker 2: off his own father's hand, which I always see as
Speaker 2: being kind of a a more of a castration type
Speaker 2: of thing. I mean, for me, like the whole chopping
Speaker 2: off of Luke's hand is so like he chops off
Speaker 2: his son's dick basically, and the whole idea of like
Speaker 2: rotwying having this mechanical hand. It's it's so to me, like, yes,
Speaker 2: he's not a full human being anymore, he's missing something
Speaker 2: super vital from him, and that to me, the hand
Speaker 2: really influences what happens inside of Star Wars. But just
Speaker 2: as a real quick aside. I love the idea of
Speaker 2: rotwaying and the performance of rotwaying so influencing Nick Cage
Speaker 2: in Moonstruck. Yes, Cage himself was like, yes, Like when
Speaker 2: he holds up his hand and.
Speaker 3: I lost my hand, I lost my bride, Johnny his hand, Johnny,
Speaker 3: it's says, bride, you want.
Speaker 1: Me to take my heartbreak put her away, and forgot.
Speaker 2: He was pulling directly from Metropolis. So I'm like, that's brilliant,
Speaker 2: Nick Cage, thank you so much.
Speaker 5: I lost my hand. I lo's my bride. I love that.
Speaker 2: I had no idea.
Speaker 5: That's so interesting. Yeah, I mean Cage is a pick.
Speaker 5: You know, he researches. I mean that's the funny thing.
Speaker 5: I mean we're getting sidetracked, but that's the funny thing
Speaker 5: is everybody thinks he's like, you know this surface levels whatever. No,
Speaker 5: he's a Coppola, Like he has the artistic background, he
Speaker 5: has the teaching all that kind of stuff. And you
Speaker 5: guys are talking about Rank. I mean, can we just
Speaker 5: talk about him in general. It's just rog The actor
Speaker 5: is just electric, just like the scene of him during
Speaker 5: the transformation, Like there are things that you have to
Speaker 5: put into a movie. You have to have shot to shot,
Speaker 5: you have to have conversations, and then you have to
Speaker 5: have you know, exposition. You do it some way. There's
Speaker 5: a scene in this where it's his scientific laboratory and
Speaker 5: it's all the bubbling stuff and you're thinking to yourself, well,
Speaker 5: this is before Frankenstein. This is before a lot of
Speaker 5: things that would go on to be influenced by this.
Speaker 5: And it's just him paling around pressing dials and knobs.
Speaker 5: But the way that he walks, the way that he moves,
Speaker 5: the artificiality of every part of him. It's not just
Speaker 5: the hand, it's like his his piercing gaze, you know,
Speaker 5: the eyes, like even when he's at the nightclub and
Speaker 5: he just points to the curtain of the false marine
Speaker 5: about to open. And his relationship to Yo Frederson Jofriederson
Speaker 5: is literally the god of this world. At the beginning,
Speaker 5: when we're in the office with him and the numbers
Speaker 5: are coming down and he's holding forth with all of
Speaker 5: his minions, one of them messes up, done out, he
Speaker 5: loses his job because he's, you know, so perfect. He's
Speaker 5: the master of Metropolis. They even rename him John Masterson.
Speaker 5: In the American release, which is just you know, a thing. Besides,
Speaker 5: but rot Wang is the only one that can stand
Speaker 5: up to him, and I think that most importantly. The
Speaker 5: interesting thing about that is in the novel they talk
Speaker 5: about how rot Wang like invented Metropolis, he gave him
Speaker 5: the technology necessary to build it. That Yo Fraderson is not,
Speaker 5: you know, the luminary, all encompassing genius. He did need
Speaker 5: rot Wang, And it's this melding between science and you know,
Speaker 5: you know, one needs the other to survive and to exist.
Speaker 5: And that battle over Hell. I don't know how you
Speaker 5: watch this movie without Hell. I don't know how you
Speaker 5: watch this movie without Yoshiwara, I have to say. I
Speaker 5: mean I watched the twenty ten restored version, so I
Speaker 5: only have that to go on. But they're like fundamental
Speaker 5: aspects to the story. Is the battle over a dead
Speaker 5: woman and rot Wang resenting Freder for taking both of them.
Speaker 5: You know, they resent Freighter the Sun and that it's incestuous.
Speaker 5: It really is incestuous. And I just wanted to like
Speaker 5: bring up to that aspect the Youngian aspects too, of
Speaker 5: like the the top, middle and below, where you have
Speaker 5: like Yo Fraderson is like the super ego, he's all
Speaker 5: the way at the top. He's asexual, he's almost like celibate.
Speaker 5: He has no time for that. He only has time
Speaker 5: for work. Then you have like freder As the egg
Speaker 5: as the ego, who's like, you know, flitting in between
Speaker 5: all this kind of stuff. And then you have Maria,
Speaker 5: who technically I suppose in her like vaunted, you know,
Speaker 5: pious mother mary Way is also super ego, but she's
Speaker 5: in the depths and she just has that aspect of
Speaker 5: pure Id when she turns into the false Maria and
Speaker 5: she does the dance.
Speaker 2: Well, I think that's also brought up by the levels
Speaker 2: of the city. You know, the super ego above and
Speaker 2: the layer where the workers live is probably pure id.
Speaker 2: You know, there's in somewhere in the middle. We've got
Speaker 2: the ego to balance those things out, but to have
Speaker 2: those layers, I mean, whenever I see things happening in
Speaker 2: an attic or things happening in a basement and a
Speaker 2: horror film, I'm just like, okay, And you know, kind
Speaker 2: of to your point, there are a lot of science fiction,
Speaker 2: there's a lot of mysticism in here, but there's a
Speaker 2: little bit of horror as well. I mean, the idea
Speaker 2: of the demons and Moloch, you know, eating these slaves
Speaker 2: to the machine is very horrific and gosh, just the
Speaker 2: idea of going down in those catacombs, and it's it's
Speaker 2: fascinating to me that I think in the version that
Speaker 2: we've seen, you know, not the restored version. I think
Speaker 2: in the Americanized version of this, they cut out this
Speaker 2: whole idea of having to go to rot Wang in
Speaker 2: order to look at that map and see what's happening
Speaker 2: on the map. Because two of the people that die
Speaker 2: early on in the film have this drawing of a
Speaker 2: map inside of their thing. And then when Frader is
Speaker 2: wearing the uniform of Georgie, he finds the exact same
Speaker 2: map as well. And Joe, meanwhile, at the exact same time,
Speaker 2: is going to rot Wang saying, you know, what is this? Well,
Speaker 2: where is this part of the city. It's like he
Speaker 2: doesn't even know his own city. And that's the catacombs
Speaker 2: where Maria is, and I think there's you know, skeletons
Speaker 2: and all these kind of like horror show things. I
Speaker 2: want to say that there's it's very similar to set
Speaker 2: in The Nevable Nee Below, which I cannot pronounce, So
Speaker 2: I apologize, and I apologize to everybody for all my
Speaker 2: horrific pronunciations of German words. It just does not roll
Speaker 2: off the tongue for me very well at all. Thank you.
Speaker 2: I just need to hire you to say that whenever
Speaker 2: I refer to that movie.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's imagery in its long movies that pops up
Speaker 4: again and again, and he improves it from film to film.
Speaker 4: It's under watch his silent movies. I only like his
Speaker 4: silent movies off there for his talkies.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the talkies are interesting to me, kind of like
Speaker 2: you were saying, Federico, as far as seeing how things
Speaker 2: are reflected back to us. You know, how the American
Speaker 2: version of this film is different than the German, different
Speaker 2: than even the key we year the Australian versions. To
Speaker 2: see Lang working in the American system, it's interesting to
Speaker 2: see how his germanness gets translated through in American life,
Speaker 2: you know, and to see what a German filmmaker is doing.
Speaker 2: I mean, I love like a Billy Wilder where it's
Speaker 2: like seeing how he reflects American culture back to us,
Speaker 2: and just things like Double Indemnity where it's like, yes,
Speaker 2: people are really super Venal and just will do anything
Speaker 2: to fuck over each other just to get you know,
Speaker 2: Fred mcmuurr will do anything to get laid by Felix
Speaker 2: Philis Dietrichson. Great, you know, and I think that's very
Speaker 2: fun to watch how other cultures reflect back to us.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and Mike, you are the perfect person to back
Speaker 5: me up on this because you were there at Nitrate
Speaker 5: when they played You and Me right nineteen thirty six.
Speaker 5: Ron Jay, you say you don't watch the American versions
Speaker 5: of Fritz Long films, and I have to say, you know,
Speaker 5: I haven't seen many Fritz Long films, but I think
Speaker 5: two years ago we saw You and Me, and then
Speaker 5: this year we saw You only Live once. The nineteen
Speaker 5: thirty seven they called it a proto war. I don't
Speaker 5: know what they're talking about. That's war. One of the
Speaker 5: most amazing noras I've ever seen. And Long is just
Speaker 5: on a different You can say all you want about
Speaker 5: him come to America and not comparing to the German films,
Speaker 5: but he is a master in like a child's playground.
Speaker 5: It's the same thing that happened with Murnow when he
Speaker 5: came here. It's the same thing. It's the same thing
Speaker 5: that happen with Lubitch, same thing with happened with them
Speaker 5: all is that they hone their skills absolutely to the
Speaker 5: peak that they could in Europe, and then the economics
Speaker 5: set in, and then they came to America because America
Speaker 5: had the production facilities, They had everything. I mean, I
Speaker 5: was reading the interview with Fritz Long and he was
Speaker 5: talking about how in order to get light on the
Speaker 5: sets when they made Metropolis, they used coal furnaces. They
Speaker 5: didn't like I mean, they had electricity in some aspects,
Speaker 5: but when they were shooting in the Zeppelin hanger for
Speaker 5: the Tower of Babel sequence, they had coal furnaces to
Speaker 5: do and light reflectors, and in between takes because it
Speaker 5: was so cold, all the extras huddled around the coal furnaces.
Speaker 5: So it's just like when Wang comes to America, he
Speaker 5: has that aspect too, of like, it's no longer a
Speaker 5: strong man. You know, the German national character is Siegfried.
Speaker 5: It's basically a demigod. And then when he comes to
Speaker 5: America he has to learn no, it's America is the
Speaker 5: land of the common man, and I have to give
Speaker 5: it to Long. He said, he came here and he
Speaker 5: started reading newspaper comics. He read them every single day.
Speaker 5: He read thousands of them, because he said they're not
Speaker 5: high art, but they speak to the people, and they're
Speaker 5: so popular. And you can tell, you can tell aism
Speaker 5: in his American works, that he has a sensibility that
Speaker 5: is so so sharp about America.
Speaker 2: A lot of people will call this an expressionistic film,
Speaker 2: because that, of course is what it was, kind of
Speaker 2: stock in trade of a lot of UFA films, was
Speaker 2: the idea of expressionism. And I don't necessarily see a
Speaker 2: lot of expressionistic things inside of Metropolis, other than really
Speaker 2: some of the set design, of course, But really when
Speaker 2: it comes to the altar that Maria has and all
Speaker 2: of those crosses behind her, because it's not just one
Speaker 2: big cross, it's several crosses, and they're different sizes, different shapes,
Speaker 2: they're not all standing upright, some are tilted, and just
Speaker 2: all of those crosses, to me, feel like the most
Speaker 2: expressionistic part of this film. This is not Caligari, with
Speaker 2: the painted sets and the very outward mental projections of things.
Speaker 2: If there was anything, I would say maybe some of
Speaker 2: the title cards. And I like that the title cards,
Speaker 2: so many of them, especially at the beginning of the film.
Speaker 2: They're in a triangle shape, and it really, to me
Speaker 2: represents that whole heart, hand and head type of triumvirant
Speaker 2: that we have, even when it comes to the Tower
Speaker 2: of Babel. Very very triangular when it comes to that.
Speaker 2: And I never really realized how much the Tower of
Speaker 2: Babel was the inspiration for Minas Tirif in the Lord
Speaker 2: of the Rings movies until I was rewinded this and going, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's that's or sorry, I said, minister as I meant Gondor,
Speaker 2: the White City of Gondor is so Tower of Babel.
Speaker 2: As far as this designed, this same who is it
Speaker 2: Breugel painting of the Tower Babyl. It's like, oh, okay,
Speaker 2: I can see that. And I don't know if that
Speaker 2: was in Tolkien. It's been a while since I've read
Speaker 2: Returned the King, but definitely when it came to the
Speaker 2: Peter Jackson versions, it's like, yeah, there it is.
Speaker 5: That.
Speaker 2: Basically that's the Tower of Babel right there, and the
Speaker 2: way that you kind of go up the stairway to
Speaker 2: the top and to the steward of Gondor. I really
Speaker 2: appreciate the whole triangular thing, and I want to say
Speaker 2: that some of the bodies towards the end are also
Speaker 2: in a triangle shape when it comes to post flood
Speaker 2: and all that. And to go back to what you're saying, Frederico,
Speaker 2: as far as the coal and all that, to hear
Speaker 2: the miserable conditions, especially during that flood, and how people
Speaker 2: are just not having a good time. I mean, you
Speaker 2: mentioned the idea of the the outfit that Maria is sorry,
Speaker 2: I forget the actress's name that she's in, and the
Speaker 2: way that it would cut into her legs and things
Speaker 2: that it was not meant to be sat in. But
Speaker 2: then Lang had her sitting in it for who knows
Speaker 2: how many takes. Yeah, it sounds like this was just
Speaker 2: a miserable production to be on in that it took
Speaker 2: what was it three hundred days or something to make
Speaker 2: this film just seems like it went out forever.
Speaker 4: I'm glad you brought up triangles, because that's why they
Speaker 4: ended the film without ending it. It's all the way
Speaker 4: through from the very first shot you see all the
Speaker 4: buildings in the background and drawing of Metropolis, the cluster
Speaker 4: of buildings closest to us is in the shape of
Speaker 4: a triangle. Then we go to the pistons up and down,
Speaker 4: upper class, lower class, upper class, lower class. The only
Speaker 4: way we can see the pistons move is because they
Speaker 4: have cones, sections of cones stuck on them. Then when
Speaker 4: the children rush up to Maria during the flood, they
Speaker 4: all have their hands up and as they rush toward her,
Speaker 4: they form a triangle. At the club, when the robot
Speaker 4: does her dance, all the men rush up to her
Speaker 4: with their hands up. They form a triangle. And you're right.
Speaker 4: The triangle is the three parts head, heart and hands.
Speaker 4: And at the end, when you have y'all on one side,
Speaker 4: grow up on the other. In the middle, he grabs
Speaker 4: their two hands. He forces them to shake hands. The
Speaker 4: very frame we're all hands touched. They've completed the triangle
Speaker 4: cut end of movie go home, no doubt there.
Speaker 2: Even the whistle to get back to work, and everything
Speaker 2: is in a triangle shape. And the idea of the
Speaker 2: movie being in three parts right there with a triangle
Speaker 2: as well, in three very uneven parts too. I mean,
Speaker 2: I also, like you said, Frederico, I laugh out loud
Speaker 2: when they go okay end of overture, and you're like, wait,
Speaker 2: what what type is? This was the overture. How much
Speaker 2: longer is.
Speaker 5: This going to go on? Every time I watch it,
Speaker 5: I always forget that they do the musical moment for
Speaker 5: the third act and it actually says the tone that
Speaker 5: it's supposed to be. They say furioso, you know, like
Speaker 5: it's sheet music. It's just incredible. I mean, maybe we
Speaker 5: can take a moment now, or we can wait until
Speaker 5: later to talk about the Hubert score, because I do
Speaker 5: kind of want to, like mention you know, just how
Speaker 5: modern it is, because when I first put it on
Speaker 5: and the title started, like the music starts halfway through
Speaker 5: the credits, and then it hits that triumphant absolute peak
Speaker 5: when the when the beautiful titles, the hand drawn titles
Speaker 5: in animated titles come up and the lightmotifs that are
Speaker 5: so Lugnerian that come from like, you know, Nibologian, all
Speaker 5: that kind of stuff, the German background of how you
Speaker 5: write the music, and then that developed into film music itself.
Speaker 5: And I had, I guess, the opportunity to watch Metropolis
Speaker 5: live score by a musician and it was at a Wurlitzer,
Speaker 5: but it was technically not piped. It was like a
Speaker 5: digital like a mixture. And I talked to him afterwards,
Speaker 5: and I mentioned how much I love the hooprit and
Speaker 5: he said, but it's so terribly repetitive, don't you find it?
Speaker 5: It tires you. And it's like, I don't know, it's
Speaker 5: like the fundamental basis of modern film music. It's just
Speaker 5: like you could take the score out of this movie
Speaker 5: and put it to any movie and it would work.
Speaker 5: And the score is like so much of the emotional
Speaker 5: power of it. For me, all the themes get me
Speaker 5: every time every time I watch it.
Speaker 2: The use of the Marseillees is fascinating, especially because last
Speaker 2: film that you and I talked about, Federico is Casablanca,
Speaker 2: that plays such an important role in there. But to
Speaker 2: have the it's almost like an off to Marseilles that
Speaker 2: plays through here. It's almost like it reminds me of
Speaker 2: watching King Solomon's Minds, the Richard Chamberlain version, which was
Speaker 2: and I know King Solomon's Minds came way before Raiders
Speaker 2: of the Lost Arc, but then you watch the film,
Speaker 2: which is after Raiders, and it feels like the main
Speaker 2: theme of King Solomon's Minds is like that da da
Speaker 2: da da da du you know, like we're playing with it,
Speaker 2: but we can't do the theme. We have to do
Speaker 2: like a few notes off, and the Marseille is when
Speaker 2: it comes up during the revolution in the third act
Speaker 2: or the third movement of this. It's so close but
Speaker 2: not quite there. It's just a little off key kind
Speaker 2: of thing. But it's definitely so reminiscent that you're just like, oh,
Speaker 2: I get it. This is the French Revolution, this is
Speaker 2: a revolutionary theme. Okay, I got it. But that for
Speaker 2: me was the only sour note where it was like
Speaker 2: literally a sour note where I was like, ah, why
Speaker 2: can't you guys just play the damn song? You know?
Speaker 2: But instead it's like a little twisted Yeah, it's like
Speaker 2: it's not quite there. Maybe the twisting is the point,
Speaker 2: but it just every time you hear it, it's kind
Speaker 2: of like the Yosemite Sam when he hears bugs Bunny
Speaker 2: playing that song wrong. Every single time he's like.
Speaker 3: No, no, rabbit, Oh you stupid rabbit.
Speaker 2: Like that, I wanted to kind of run in there
Speaker 2: and do that, probably only to have the piano explode
Speaker 2: my face and have keys instead of teeth.
Speaker 5: Afterwards, you were on such a role that I didn't
Speaker 5: want to interrupt you and say like, hey, Mike, it's
Speaker 5: technically the Internationale.
Speaker 2: It's the communists.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's technically it's technically the communist anthem, the world anthem.
Speaker 2: Thank you. It sounded so much like Marcelle is the Internationale.
Speaker 2: The Metropolis score by Gottfried Hoopert's La Marseilles.
Speaker 5: Written by Eugene Potier who was a French communist, and
Speaker 5: he wrote the words and he had it to the
Speaker 5: melody of the Marciells. So you're not wrong. It is
Speaker 5: technically the Marciells too. But I think it is a
Speaker 5: very deliberate artistic decision because the revolt of the workers
Speaker 5: is fomented by basically the creation of the depth. So
Speaker 5: if they played the Internacionale in nineteen twenty seven Berlin,
Speaker 5: there would be people sitting in that theater who sing
Speaker 5: that song at their political meetings and they would take
Speaker 5: umbrage with that. So I think by tuning it a
Speaker 5: little bit out of whack, it's saying, Okay, we know
Speaker 5: that what they're saying is the slogan of the Communist party,
Speaker 5: you know, smash the smash, the means of production, take
Speaker 5: over everything, all this kind of stuff. But it's it's twisted.
Speaker 5: So that's why we're able to like demonize them and
Speaker 5: make them, you know, fools that leave their own children.
Speaker 5: You know, they're just in a frenzy that go to
Speaker 5: buy a thing. I think it's a very deliberate artistic decision.
Speaker 2: All right, let's go ahead and take a break and
Speaker 2: we'll be back after these brief messages.
Speaker 7: Hello everyone, this is Malcolm mc I just want to
Speaker 7: say that this is a request to listeners of the
Speaker 7: Projection Booth podcast to become patrons of the show via
Speaker 7: Patreon dot com, PA t eo n dot com slash
Speaker 7: Projection Booth.
Speaker 2: That's pretty simple. I think you can do that.
Speaker 8: It's a great show and Mike he provides hours of
Speaker 8: great entertainment. So now it's time to give back my
Speaker 8: little drovies. Settle down and take a listen and have
Speaker 8: a sip of the old Molocco and then.
Speaker 4: You'll be ready for a little of the old in out,
Speaker 4: in out real horror show. Bye bye.
Speaker 2: All right, we're back, and we were talking about.
Speaker 4: Metropolis mcgilligan's book and something in it that really knocked
Speaker 4: the wind own. So it's was attending Los Angeles County
Speaker 4: Museum retrospective of his work in nineteen sixty nine. Long
Speaker 4: appreciated the retrospectives, but also enjoyed finding details to complain about.
Speaker 4: He didn't like the musical score the La Museum used
Speaker 4: to accompany one of his silent films. I don't like
Speaker 4: music with my films. They were made to be silent.
Speaker 4: They should stay silent. Anytime there is music, somebody obstructs
Speaker 4: my rhythms.
Speaker 5: Why on earth.
Speaker 4: Would he say that the silent filk Roberston with music?
Speaker 4: But then that makes me wonder. That was nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 4: I don't know if you've seen the PBS version of Metropolis.
Speaker 4: I put it on my website. It opens my website
Speaker 4: so you can watch it. It's damaged, but it'll give
Speaker 4: you the idea. There was no music in it. They
Speaker 4: use the East German restoration performed solo at Katyanka. It
Speaker 4: was the very first film restoration ever released, not just
Speaker 4: for Metropolis, but of any movie ever. It was the
Speaker 4: very first respiration ever to be shown through the pubblic
Speaker 4: so it was revolutionary in that sense. It made absolutely
Speaker 4: no impression when it was first shown, but over the
Speaker 4: next couple of years it gained some traction, and people
Speaker 4: got the idea that maybe it's a maybe it would
Speaker 4: be good to start restoring all movies. But they ran
Speaker 4: it on BBC two nineteen seventy five. They got a
Speaker 4: thirty five millimeter full aperture print. They ran it at
Speaker 4: twenty frames per second. Why they chose that speed, I
Speaker 4: don't know. It looked nice though, and there was no music.
Speaker 4: The accompaniment was electronic sound effects. That's the version I
Speaker 4: saw on PBS Movie Theater in May nineteen seventy seven.
Speaker 4: Now I'm quite to a purists when it comes to silent movies.
Speaker 4: I want to see them presented the way they were
Speaker 4: originally presented, with this sort of music that would originally
Speaker 4: have accompanied them. This one I forgave because it worked perfectly,
Speaker 4: And I am wondering. Fitzlong was still alive in seventy five,
Speaker 4: and the East German ARC guy was in contact with him.
Speaker 4: Did somebody ask him what sort of music would you
Speaker 4: like on this? And did he say I don't want
Speaker 4: any music on it? And did they then suggest, well,
Speaker 4: what if we put electronic sound effects? And he said, okay, fine,
Speaker 4: I don't know, but it worked beautifully. You should watch it.
Speaker 2: Your website is that the RJA Buffalo dot com. I
Speaker 2: will point people to the right place.
Speaker 5: I went to your site. I love it. It's very interesting.
Speaker 5: Like I told you, I wish I had seen it
Speaker 5: months ago so I could peruse it in more detail
Speaker 5: in preparation for this. But Ronja, you pulled down McGill
Speaker 5: again physically first, So I'm gonna hit you with my
Speaker 5: McGilligan story. You know, I love that his assistant Long's assistant,
Speaker 5: Gustav Putka. Is that how you say p U T
Speaker 5: T c h e er. He was basically the slim character.
Speaker 5: He was on set all the time, but he was
Speaker 5: also the court jester. They would make fun of him,
Speaker 5: kind of to diffuse tension on set. They'd play practical
Speaker 5: jokes on him. They did horrible, awful things. He led
Speaker 5: a terrible life. But there was one stipulation in his
Speaker 5: contract Long at the beginning of production of every single
Speaker 5: film with Gota Vienna, and they'd have a perfectly cut
Speaker 5: suit made for him, tailored absolutely, and he would put
Speaker 5: it on at the start of the day and he
Speaker 5: would take it off at the end of the day.
Speaker 5: Basically essentially ceremonial work clothes and put Kerr. His reward
Speaker 5: for having to put up with Long, dealing with all
Speaker 5: of this stuff day after day after day, was he
Speaker 5: got that suit at the end of production, the end
Speaker 5: of every production, he got a little piece of Long,
Speaker 5: and I I just love that. It's just weird German stuff.
Speaker 2: We talked a little bit about the music, but we
Speaker 2: really haven't talked about the effects, which are absolutely amazing.
Speaker 2: And that's one of the things that I think is
Speaker 2: why we still talk about this movie today is just
Speaker 2: how audacious this film is and just how wonderful it
Speaker 2: all comes together. The use of the models, the use
Speaker 2: of you know, I mentioned the title cards. The title
Speaker 2: cards are wild because they are not just title cards,
Speaker 2: you know, like we think of title cards and like
Speaker 2: people will be like, oh, well, yeah, Alfred Hitchcott got
Speaker 2: to start making title cards and most people yawn and
Speaker 2: be like, okay, great he could type. You know. It's
Speaker 2: like no title cards were part of the experience, and
Speaker 2: the title cards for a movie like this so important.
Speaker 2: I mean to have animations of title cards, you know,
Speaker 2: the idea of the upper and lower having the title
Speaker 2: cards animate on the screen and having those words telling
Speaker 2: us the story, but also telling us the story through
Speaker 2: the shape, through the form of things to have, you know,
Speaker 2: even just the use of the title of Metropolis when
Speaker 2: the title comes on screen, beautiful animation and just really stunning,
Speaker 2: and that they even use animation in the movie itself.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think Frederico, you were going to call
Speaker 2: out the whole idea of the way that Death's scythe
Speaker 2: is being animated across freighter when he's having his visions,
Speaker 2: and it's just wonderful that they do that. It's just
Speaker 2: a slight little thing, but it makes such a difference.
Speaker 5: No, it's incredible. Ronjit, I wanted to ask you, what
Speaker 5: is the German phrase they use for the great United
Speaker 5: work geselschef Kunst or something like that they had, like
Speaker 5: a German industry had for where they would combine all
Speaker 5: of the arts into one like great and it's something kunst.
Speaker 5: I know, it's like a great art, But yeah, I
Speaker 5: did want of you guys have been talking about the
Speaker 5: triangles and the title, and I've just been like itching
Speaker 5: to talk about the fact that they cut from the
Speaker 5: film itself into the titles and then the titles cut
Speaker 5: back into the It's so naturalistic, it's done so expertly,
Speaker 5: and that's why the film works so well. I mean,
Speaker 5: it's two and a half hours long, like a've blabored saying,
Speaker 5: but it moves so well because the titles allow you
Speaker 5: to breathe and they get you in. And this is
Speaker 5: like the Tower of Babbel sequence. They have these beautiful
Speaker 5: glass light bars all around the to kind of tell
Speaker 5: you this is a separate story of Maria's. You know,
Speaker 5: this is like a biblical story. This is something different.
Speaker 5: And when the Tower of Babbel comes up on the titles,
Speaker 5: it's dripping light. I mean, honestly, it should be dripping blood,
Speaker 5: but you know, we'll take it. And this, I mean,
Speaker 5: I die every single time I mentioned this, every single
Speaker 5: time I talk about Metropolis, is that there's one shot
Speaker 5: when the workers are in the elevator and we start
Speaker 5: at the top with the human actors in the elevator
Speaker 5: for the set, and then they moved down. Then we
Speaker 5: cut and we're in the model shot, and rather than
Speaker 5: doing some kind of like optical they just have a
Speaker 5: hand drawing of the workers Like this is one of
Speaker 5: the few films I've seen where they have just artists
Speaker 5: work straight in front of the camera and I live
Speaker 5: for it every time. The opening titles are just art.
Speaker 5: It's the blending of music, technical draftsmanship, art, anime, all
Speaker 5: of that model shots and stop motion. I mean, it
Speaker 5: goes on and on and on and on.
Speaker 2: Well, the music is really what helped with the restoration
Speaker 2: as well, because so many of those cues, like every
Speaker 2: scene has its own cue, and those notes, I think,
Speaker 2: what was it Like the scripts were missing for a while,
Speaker 2: some of them were reprinted or pages were reprinted, I think,
Speaker 2: but like, I don't think that there was a complete
Speaker 2: version of the script for a while when they're trying
Speaker 2: to put stuff back together. But it was the music
Speaker 2: cues that helped guide the hand of the restoration people
Speaker 2: to say where things were supposed to be properly, just
Speaker 2: because it was such a complete score. I mean, the
Speaker 2: whole idea of showing a silent movie without any music
Speaker 2: really hurts my heart because that's how I saw a
Speaker 2: lot of silent films in one of the film classes
Speaker 2: I took in college, where professor Ukatake was like, no, no,
Speaker 2: silent films were never shown with accompaniment or soundtracks. I'm like,
Speaker 2: what are you talking about. So watching Strike with no
Speaker 2: music whatsoever, It was one of the weirdest experiences I've
Speaker 2: ever seen. I love you, Sergey Eisenstein, But my god,
Speaker 2: there's a reason why there was a score to that movie.
Speaker 2: It's not supposed to be shown absolutely silent, because I
Speaker 2: had a hard time keeping my eyes open, no matter
Speaker 2: how wonderful the montage was. The eyes were closing without
Speaker 2: the music to give me a little jug and I
Speaker 2: hate it.
Speaker 4: Went in the seventies and I would go see silent movies.
Speaker 4: Usually they were the most horrible sixteen millimeter print, a
Speaker 4: bridge to blotchy flickery and no music all. So you
Speaker 4: really have to have a strong stomach to get through.
Speaker 2: That strong stomach and a lot of caffeine.
Speaker 4: I didn't that be.
Speaker 5: You did another one. I found out what it's called.
Speaker 5: It's called a gesumpt Kunstvek. It's a synthesis of the arts.
Speaker 5: I'm sorry you guys had to expense I filmed that way.
Speaker 5: I'm kind of glad I'm younger than you guys, because
Speaker 5: i've you know, dealt with restorations primarily. But I have
Speaker 5: had my my times, you know. I watched I Think Earth,
Speaker 5: What is it that that Russian posts to the Soviet movie.
Speaker 4: Yeah, wonderful movie.
Speaker 5: Yoh, Ukrainian, thank you very much. Oh, I'm sure it's
Speaker 5: a wonderful, beautiful movie. I watched it in a giant
Speaker 5: movie theater on a DVD with like terrible music and
Speaker 5: a child crying in the back. So with silent movies,
Speaker 5: it's so important to get the music. It's just like
Speaker 5: they say that the music and sound effects are basically
Speaker 5: half of the emotional power of film, but in silence
Speaker 5: it might as well be like sixty seventy percent, because
Speaker 5: if you have a terrible a terrible time, then you're
Speaker 5: not going to enjoy the film at all.
Speaker 4: No, I've noticed that the best silent movie with a
Speaker 4: bad music score is unwatchable. The worst silent movie with
Speaker 4: a good music score is perfectly watchable.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And going back to the special effects again, talking
Speaker 2: about like the double exposures that they had, and just
Speaker 2: I mean everything is done with such care, like you're saying, Federico,
Speaker 2: as far as the marriage of the visuals, the title cards,
Speaker 2: the special effects, the music, everything's just seemed so well
Speaker 2: planned and it doesn't feel like there is a real
Speaker 2: misstep as far as the way that we're putting this together.
Speaker 2: It just feels like there's so much gill that comes
Speaker 2: in from these German crafts, people that just make it,
Speaker 2: just make it shine, make it sane. And even just
Speaker 2: the art style of things. You're talking about again the
Speaker 2: title cards, but also the title of Metropolis itself. Just
Speaker 2: that use of the Bauhaus or is it art Deco.
Speaker 2: Just the style of the stuff looks so good. You're
Speaker 2: in Joe's office and you can see lines in the
Speaker 2: background where it's like, Okay, there's something going on. These
Speaker 2: aren't just flat walls. Everything is made with purpose, and
Speaker 2: even in like a you know, a cave scenario, the
Speaker 2: catacombs that they're in, everything looks very well put together.
Speaker 2: I just love the production design of this movie and
Speaker 2: the special effects of this movie. I mean, again, I
Speaker 2: won't say it's a perfect film, but it's sure put together,
Speaker 2: very very well.
Speaker 5: I always go to Blade Runner as my pick for
Speaker 5: like a film that the production design is almost better
Speaker 5: than the story. You know, it kind of has like
Speaker 5: a similar aspect. I mean, I love the story Blade Runner.
Speaker 5: I love the story of Roy Baddick, but that aspect
Speaker 5: of yeah, everything is just designed to within an inch
Speaker 5: of his life and then you see Blade Runner, then
Speaker 5: you watch Metropolis and it's like, oh, okay, so you
Speaker 5: now I understand, you know, and people kind of labor,
Speaker 5: people kind of like talk over the fact, you know,
Speaker 5: all the kind of this time around was the first
Speaker 5: time activist art in general, like there's not a lot
Speaker 5: of adorment on walls in terms of like you know,
Speaker 5: paintings or like prints. There's a few, but generally they're
Speaker 5: they're kept for the upper classes, which is in keeping
Speaker 5: with you know, Europe at a certain point in time.
Speaker 5: You know, the workers barracks are completely bare. There's stone,
Speaker 5: there's no adornment, there's no nothing. I mean, there's not
Speaker 5: even like windows or anything. It's just straight cut. But
Speaker 5: In's visions when he's in bed and he sees the
Speaker 5: dance and Slim is at the foot of his bed.
Speaker 5: If you look closely on the wall, there's a single
Speaker 5: i want to say, maybe like a watercolor, like a
Speaker 5: like a ukiyoe, like a woodblock print of like Japanese art,
Speaker 5: and you were talking about orientalism and the Yoshiwara stuff,
Speaker 5: and it's just running under the surface constantly, like all
Speaker 5: the design like Bajau's the Vienna Secession movement too was
Speaker 5: like a very important like influence on this, like not
Speaker 5: only Clint but his contemporaries too. There's an incredible book
Speaker 5: I don't know, Ranja, if you, I was lucky enough
Speaker 5: to find it in my library catalog. It's called German
Speaker 5: Film ar Charchitecture nineteen eighteen to nineteen thirty three. It's
Speaker 5: in German and English both at the same time. Thank
Speaker 5: you very much for whoever decided to do that was
Speaker 5: published in twenty nineteen by a gallery and they have
Speaker 5: the original production drawings for the Tower of Babel. They
Speaker 5: have depictions of Metropolis itself, they have how they're going
Speaker 5: to set up. This is where I learned that the
Speaker 5: production designers on Metropolis actually dictated the shot composite, which
Speaker 5: I had no idea what it previously On Niva Longan,
Speaker 5: the production designers actually drew where the camera would be placed,
Speaker 5: the platform, the height, the actors where they would be
Speaker 5: placed in the frame. And then they show the drawing
Speaker 5: and the film and it's the same image. And they
Speaker 5: even have most incredibly, they have hands scrolled out drawings
Speaker 5: of Metropolis, like the city center, the shot of the
Speaker 5: cathedral where Fritz long actually dictated. He said, I don't
Speaker 5: want a standard office building here, I want a cathedral.
Speaker 5: And he just wrote straight on straight on the paper
Speaker 5: and he said, this is what I want. I want
Speaker 5: the cathedral. And it's like you have the cathedral that
Speaker 5: is old and you have Rotwang like lair, and those
Speaker 5: are the two kind of like you know, talking about
Speaker 5: the German expressionist things where it's like kind of tips
Speaker 5: over into old Germany. You know, this is quote unquote
Speaker 5: modern Germany or way into the future, but then we
Speaker 5: kind of dip dip into the past and it becomes
Speaker 5: a totally different film. I just wanted to mention in
Speaker 5: Passing if we don't get to it, that the scene
Speaker 5: of Rotvang chasing Maria in the catacombs, it could be
Speaker 5: from a movie from last year, Like it is the
Speaker 5: most startling, startlingly contemporary like editing feat I've seen in ages,
Speaker 5: and every time I watch the movie, it takes me,
Speaker 5: it takes my breath away. That's probably my favorite part
Speaker 5: of the entire movie because Rodvang has the lighting is
Speaker 5: intentional where he has the light in his hand and
Speaker 5: so you see the light move as the gaze of
Speaker 5: the cameras and you try to find Maria and her
Speaker 5: face of bridget Helm, just afraid of what this man
Speaker 5: is going to do to her, and it's oh, it's
Speaker 5: so good.
Speaker 2: Well rot Wang, there's a lot of spirals when it
Speaker 2: comes to rot Wang. There's a it looks like a
Speaker 2: Neon sculpture on his desk that is a spiral. When
Speaker 2: Fader opens up the door to rot Wang's place, which
Speaker 2: is protected by a pentagram on the door, it's like
Speaker 2: supposed to be sealed that way, but he manages to
Speaker 2: get in. I think the door opens almost magically for him.
Speaker 2: And there's these two spirals that are hanging down and
Speaker 2: there again there's this Neon shape. When he goes down
Speaker 2: to find rot Wang, he's coming down a spiral staircase.
Speaker 2: You know, it's very much associated with that character. And
Speaker 2: I don't know if it's supposed to be like, oh,
Speaker 2: he's twisted or something. You know, usually when I see
Speaker 2: a spiral staircase, it's a symbol of you know, going
Speaker 2: to the lower depths. You know, like you see spiral
Speaker 2: staircases and Hitchcock films all the time. You know, think
Speaker 2: of Scotty going up to the top of the tower
Speaker 2: and vertigo kind of thing. You know, there's just all
Speaker 2: of this spiral stuff. And then that also plays into
Speaker 2: the Tower of Babble. Like I was talking about, how
Speaker 2: it feels like you go up and up and up
Speaker 2: going around these spirals. It's very Guggenheim ask, you know,
Speaker 2: with the way that that's almost like a Nautilus shell.
Speaker 2: Oh sorry again with the spirals, the up and down
Speaker 2: of the stuff across Maria's body, and especially across the
Speaker 2: false Maria across the robot. I find that fascinating to
Speaker 2: the almost Leleu esque dress of the straps across Maria,
Speaker 2: the real Maria when you see her in the chamber.
Speaker 2: But it's very interesting that he's associated with that. And
Speaker 2: then going back to also the idea of the expressionism
Speaker 2: versus not expressionism. The I love that when rot Wang
Speaker 2: is taunting and not necessarily torturing Maria, but he's got
Speaker 2: her in that room. In the attic again an attic
Speaker 2: that the shadows on the wall are not just painted
Speaker 2: on shadows, that these are real shadows created by light
Speaker 2: from a light source. So it's not that caligary effect
Speaker 2: of you know, painting the shadows onto things that it's
Speaker 2: an actual thing, like when she moves in front of that,
Speaker 2: you see those shadows on her dress that it's actually there.
Speaker 2: The one thing that we haven't talked about during this
Speaker 2: whole thing, too, is the use of the moving camera.
Speaker 2: We don't have too many shots of a moving camera,
Speaker 2: but when those shots come around, they're very striking to me.
Speaker 2: I think the very first time you see it is
Speaker 2: when the explosion is happening in the factory and the
Speaker 2: way the camera kind of swoops in on freighter, and
Speaker 2: then there's also a swoop in later on when he
Speaker 2: is in rot Wang's place and he goes to reach
Speaker 2: for I don't remember what it is, but I just
Speaker 2: remember the camera moves and it's almost following his more
Speaker 2: like emotional state than his physical state. But it is
Speaker 2: supposed to be his hand reaching out for this.
Speaker 5: That's my single favorite shot of the whole movie. What
Speaker 5: is it, Ronja? It's a piece of address, right, I
Speaker 5: think it's a scarf.
Speaker 4: I'm not sure. I looked at it again and I thought,
Speaker 4: I think that's a scarf, but I can't. I won't
Speaker 4: swear to it. But that startled me when I saw
Speaker 4: the restoration because i've seen other versions of the movie before.
Speaker 4: There was no camera movement in that sed and then
Speaker 4: they do this new restoration and the camera moves. Where'd
Speaker 4: that come from? That's the American negative. They didn't put
Speaker 4: the German version of the export version. Oh okay.
Speaker 2: The other thing that's so strange about this is, I
Speaker 2: know it's something that happened in other films. This wasn't
Speaker 2: unique to Metropolis. But this idea of shooting with multiple cameras.
Speaker 2: And when I say multiple cameras, of course we think,
Speaker 2: you know, shot reverse shot, We're going to shoot with
Speaker 2: two cameras. No, I'm talking more more of a Tommy
Speaker 2: Wiseou type of thing. Where are you shooting with multiple
Speaker 2: cameras that are standing next to each other and one
Speaker 2: might be closer, one might be farther. You get a
Speaker 2: slightly different angle of course, just because of the geometry
Speaker 2: of the space. And there's a great documentary about the
Speaker 2: restoration of the film, the whole finding of the Argentinian
Speaker 2: print and all this where they show a picture and
Speaker 2: this could be from Metrupolis, could be something else, but
Speaker 2: of three cameramen standing next to each other, and then
Speaker 2: they do a side by side comparison of here's what's
Speaker 2: in one version, Here's what's in the other version, and
Speaker 2: you can see that the framing is slightly different. Some
Speaker 2: of the takes are actually different.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: So it feels very much like that new is that
Speaker 2: the documentary about Brian Eno, where it's like it's never
Speaker 2: the same movie twice. Every single time you see it,
Speaker 2: it's different. And so this idea of and I imagine
Speaker 2: if you tried to catalog and maybe you've tried to
Speaker 2: do this right cheap, but if you tried to catalog
Speaker 2: what's going on in these different versions of it, it
Speaker 2: feels like you would lose your mind. It feels like
Speaker 2: you can't what started talking to you.
Speaker 4: I Tom Bob Sadi, who's another expert on the movie.
Speaker 4: He and Michael Orgon have done marvelous work on this movie.
Speaker 4: I Tom did the first few minutes of Netropolis's German version,
Speaker 4: US version Export version side by side, and you could
Speaker 4: see they never match. And I've caught that myself and
Speaker 4: people would gripe about the Blu ray release of the
Speaker 4: Georgia Morauder version. You know, why are they using this
Speaker 4: old print when they could have just substituted the new
Speaker 4: restoration well, you can't substitute it. It's all different.
Speaker 2: Take all right, let's go ahead and take a break
Speaker 2: and we'll be back after these brief messages.
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Speaker 9: Hollywood Outsider dot com. All right, we are back and
Speaker 9: talking about Fritz Lang's Metropolis. The Marauder version is interesting.
Speaker 9: Can't say I'm a big ban of it, obviously.
Speaker 2: Since that came out in eighty four, it was very
Speaker 2: much a thing when I was younger. I would have
Speaker 2: been twelve years old when it came out, so I
Speaker 2: always associated this film with the Marauder version, and I
Speaker 2: remember the TV commercials, I remember discussions on in articles
Speaker 2: and things about this version. I only finally watched it
Speaker 2: just recently for this discussion. I don't think that the
Speaker 2: pop music really works very well at all in it.
Speaker 2: I actually would have rather have had more of When
Speaker 2: I think of Georgia or Morouder, I think of the
Speaker 2: work that he was doing with Donna Summers and just
Speaker 2: the idea of the more electronic type of thing that
Speaker 2: he was doing. I would rather have had something like
Speaker 2: that or give me, you know. And of course there
Speaker 2: have been you know, you're talking Federico's far all of
Speaker 2: the different scores and things, and there have been like
Speaker 2: the Ally Orchestra has done a score. There's so many
Speaker 2: different versions of the score for this. If you look
Speaker 2: on Wikipedia, they're just like scads and scads of people
Speaker 2: that have done scores for this. Moroder, as far as
Speaker 2: I know, he really pushed as far as like doing
Speaker 2: yet another edit of the film and then doing some
Speaker 2: interesting things as far as still frames or like images
Speaker 2: that they had from the film and then he would
Speaker 2: try to animate those. Almost reminded me of like a
Speaker 2: Alan Parsons project music video with the way that he
Speaker 2: would move the images along and he would have like,
Speaker 2: you know, the Yoshiwara logo in the back and kind
Speaker 2: of go through the window to show us that thing.
Speaker 2: It was interesting as far as that goes, Like, Yeah,
Speaker 2: the pop music itself just didn't fit with the rest
Speaker 2: of the film. Sometimes it felt like the songs was
Speaker 2: just kind of fade out, fade back in later on,
Speaker 2: and I'm like, no, no, just give me a whole
Speaker 2: electronic score. Give me Ahex Twins version of Metropolis. I
Speaker 2: would like to see that personally.
Speaker 5: Give me Wendy Carlos any day. Oh my goodness. Can
Speaker 5: you imagine what this would be like with Wendy behind
Speaker 5: the synth board? Oh a dream? No. I was just
Speaker 5: like you. I was like, oh, Georgia Moroder, who I
Speaker 5: know from the you know the two Frenchmen. What are
Speaker 5: the deaf Punk? I know them, you know Backfilled? But
Speaker 5: I like Moroder. I watched it and I was like
Speaker 5: I turned it on and I was like, wait, why
Speaker 5: are people singing? Like why? Why is this pop music?
Speaker 5: I don't want this. I want synth music. It's just like,
Speaker 5: this is not what I signed up for. I will
Speaker 5: say I do love Blood from a Stone, the one
Speaker 5: song from this that I actually can stand of them working.
Speaker 5: I think it's kind of haunting and beautiful. You know,
Speaker 5: Moroder hint like he tinted the film, and he did
Speaker 5: what he could to restore it at the point of
Speaker 5: the footage that was extant, and at the end of it,
Speaker 5: I said, you know, it's not for me, but I
Speaker 5: really respect him for putting up the money. You know,
Speaker 5: he put up his own money to make a restoration
Speaker 5: of the droplets and share it with people, and that
Speaker 5: just it's a testament to the continuing like power of
Speaker 5: the film that somebody would be willing to do and
Speaker 5: show it to people, so that people could take it
Speaker 5: within themselves and carry it and show it to more people,
Speaker 5: even if it has you know, the Bonnie Tyler songs.
Speaker 5: At least you've seen a version of Metropolis. You'll see
Speaker 5: another in ten seconds.
Speaker 4: When the version was first announced, friend of mine and
Speaker 4: I were talking about it. We've both seen it on PBS,
Speaker 4: and the press release was saying that this was going
Speaker 4: to be the most complete ever. George and Mark Well
Speaker 4: to travel the world to find every piece of missing film,
Speaker 4: put it all back together, and the result is something
Speaker 4: like eighty three minutes. My friend and I looked at
Speaker 4: each other and said, eighty three minutes what we saw
Speaker 4: in PBS it was more than two hours.
Speaker 5: Oh, what seemed that most complete.
Speaker 4: Well, he did find some interesting footage. He did put
Speaker 4: it back in. I'm glad the quality was much better
Speaker 4: than what we saw from Thunderbird or Griggs, that's for sure.
Speaker 4: But I went to see it at at Paseo in
Speaker 4: Santa Fe. I said, before I see this, I want
Speaker 4: to talk to the projectionist. Go on up. Back in
Speaker 4: those days, they let you go to the booth. So
Speaker 4: I go to the booth. He's running it in wide
Speaker 4: screen one point eight five to one. Why are you
Speaker 4: running in wide screen? The distributor sent us this lens
Speaker 4: in this aperture, but I don't know what to do
Speaker 4: with it. I don't know what they're for, so I
Speaker 4: just left him on the shelf. My god, is the
Speaker 4: Academy aperture. This is what you're supposed to use. It's
Speaker 4: an Academy reduction. But anyway, he didn't switch it, so
Speaker 4: I I'm not gonna watch this. So I waited years
Speaker 4: until it popped up at University of Buffalo and there
Speaker 4: was one projectionist there I liked and he trusted me.
Speaker 4: I thought, okay, there are about four projections there, one
Speaker 4: and four chants. He'll be there tonight, So I went
Speaker 4: he was there. I had Howard reached into my pot.
Speaker 4: Use these apertures bring down the tall screen, and so
Speaker 4: I got to see the full image, as probably the
Speaker 4: only time that was ever shown at a cinema without
Speaker 4: being cropped. I watched it, and this tells me a
Speaker 4: lot about me, and it will tell you a lot
Speaker 4: about me. I watched the whole movie, and when it ended,
Speaker 4: I thought, I thought there was going to be singing
Speaker 4: in this. I didn't hear any singing. I heard lots
Speaker 4: of loud music. I didn't hear any singing because I
Speaker 4: was so concentrating on the images, I didn't notice that
Speaker 4: many of one was singing on the ground track. But
Speaker 4: what I did notice about the movie is that this
Speaker 4: is not what I saw on PBS. This is not
Speaker 4: what I saw don ponchos. This is some other version
Speaker 4: of the movie. I wish I could put the three
Speaker 4: side by side to see what the differences are. I
Speaker 4: can't put my finger on what the differences are. And
Speaker 4: I've seen them such great different times. I you know,
Speaker 4: it's not like I watched one and then an hour
Speaker 4: later I watched another, and I saw one months later,
Speaker 4: I saw another more than a decade later, I saw another,
Speaker 4: and so I could. I couldn't remember what the differences were.
Speaker 4: I just knew they were very, very different. But yeah,
Speaker 4: I have nothing against the moral de version, so long
Speaker 4: as people know it's not the original. It's what Georgio
Speaker 4: Moroder paid his dues paid for the paid the licenses
Speaker 4: to do with the film. It's a Georgia Morada film.
Speaker 4: It's not a fitzlan film anymore. And if you like
Speaker 4: a Georgia morad film, fine, if you'd rather see the
Speaker 4: fitz long version that's available too, I'm okay with it.
Speaker 4: It did not get a big release because it didn't
Speaker 4: get a good distributor. Well I don't know where you
Speaker 4: two saw it, but it did not play at the
Speaker 4: big houses, led at the mom and pops.
Speaker 2: I'm just glad that Freddie Mercury was involved with that
Speaker 2: Moroda version because there was a deal that was made
Speaker 2: that then Queen could use the footage, the better footage
Speaker 2: that you know, because he did, like you said, put
Speaker 2: his money into it. There was some restoration that was happening.
Speaker 2: They were able to use that footage for that Radio
Speaker 2: Gaga video, which I think is pretty great. And that
Speaker 2: was my introduction, and that was so strange that music
Speaker 2: videos for years have been kind of an introduction for
Speaker 2: some people to classic silent cinema. Will you talk about
Speaker 2: I keep going back to Caligari. There's a great video
Speaker 2: for Living Dead Girl by Rob Zombie or White Zombie.
Speaker 2: I don't remember if it's a solo or a band
Speaker 2: act that is all Caligari or even And I'm not
Speaker 2: a fan of this band at all, but Smashing Pumps
Speaker 2: one of their videos was basically a redo of a
Speaker 2: trip to the Moon, So it's like, okay, this is
Speaker 2: a good way at least to introduce people. So like
Speaker 2: Moroder and that version of his thing. At least it's
Speaker 2: a way to get people introduced to old classic cinema.
Speaker 2: And yes it's very boulderized, but at least it's there
Speaker 2: and it's a way for people, hopefully to go. I'm
Speaker 2: interested in finding out more about this.
Speaker 5: Speaking about vulgarized, I just wanted to bring up thing
Speaker 5: about there's a version on YouTube now of a four
Speaker 5: k sixty frames per second of Maria's The False Marias
Speaker 5: Like Dance, and I don't know if either of you
Speaker 5: guys got a chance to look at it. Even in passing.
Speaker 5: It's it's interesting because it's almost like culture wants to
Speaker 5: pull Metropolis with it. It's like it changes for the
Speaker 5: times and people now they want it to be in color,
Speaker 5: and they want it to be the speed that they
Speaker 5: like and at the resolution that even if it's you know, bastardized,
Speaker 5: even if it's not whatded I mean you say Long
Speaker 5: didn't want any music. I'm not going to go that far.
Speaker 5: I'm not going to watch Metropolis without music. I can't
Speaker 5: do it. Don't make me.
Speaker 4: But watch the PBS person.
Speaker 5: Watching that version that like four point three million people,
Speaker 5: four point three million views on YouTube. It's like one
Speaker 5: of the most popular videos. And it's talking about like
Speaker 5: the striking aspect of the filmmaking itself, reaching from the
Speaker 5: past and grabbing you. It's that it's just completely universal,
Speaker 5: and you know, seeing that transposed to the metrics of
Speaker 5: our time of what film and what basically internet media
Speaker 5: is supposed to look like, it's the it's almost Metropolis
Speaker 5: itself saying, you know, I'm going to be here for
Speaker 5: a long time. If we're coming up on one hundred years,
Speaker 5: there is no doubt in my mind that one hundred
Speaker 5: years from now the image of the false Maria in
Speaker 5: that chair with the rings around her will be where.
Speaker 5: You know, it might be in a book, it might
Speaker 5: be on the internet, it might be an art you're
Speaker 5: talking about music videos. I mean, it just rolls on
Speaker 5: and on and on. And that's how silent cinema survives.
Speaker 5: And I'm so happy the Metropolis survives because so many
Speaker 5: films of that era just completely got butchered and destroyed,
Speaker 5: lost and fires everything, and we have, you know, lunatics
Speaker 5: and film fanatics to thank for keeping it, you know,
Speaker 5: the Argentinian Film Archive, all just it just it just endures.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, we've been talking about this movie for what
Speaker 2: two and a half hours now or two ten. I
Speaker 2: could talk about it for another four hours if we
Speaker 2: needed to, because there's so much about this. This is
Speaker 2: tip of the iceberg kind of stuff. And yeah, it's fascinating.
Speaker 2: You're talking about the way that culture pulls along with it,
Speaker 2: that influence. You know, we've mentioned so many films that
Speaker 2: have been influenced by this, so many music videos. I
Speaker 2: know that I think it was the might have been
Speaker 2: the Rosenbomb and commentary, or might have been another commentary
Speaker 2: that I heard where they're talking about was it Express
Speaker 2: Yourself the Madonna where it's like, yep, here we go.
Speaker 2: Here's another influence on Metropolis. And we haven't even talked
Speaker 2: about the two thousand and one anime version, which I
Speaker 2: was reading more about that, and it was based on
Speaker 2: manga from was it the forties, but it was definitely
Speaker 2: older than the two thousand and one date. But that
Speaker 2: two thousand and one version apparently takes takes a different
Speaker 2: track than the Are Attacked than the manga and really
Speaker 2: feels like it's more like beholden to Metropolis itself, but
Speaker 2: then also with a lot of Blade Runner inside of there,
Speaker 2: because it's not just a society of a few replicants
Speaker 2: are few robots, but it's many, many robots. And this
Speaker 2: whole idea of the robot underclass, I mean very I
Speaker 2: robot again with an influence very this idea of the servants,
Speaker 2: you know, the planet of the apeseness of it, where
Speaker 2: you've got that underclass of difference and then the way
Speaker 2: that the difference gets played out, and some of that
Speaker 2: was I'm not a big anime guy, obviously, We've only
Speaker 2: done a few anime films on this podcast over the
Speaker 2: last fourteen years, but it was decent and it was interesting.
Speaker 2: I'm not a big fan of the character design where
Speaker 2: they look very cartoonish and things, but yeah, I found
Speaker 2: some of it to be kind of interesting and just
Speaker 2: a new way of looking at the material.
Speaker 4: I suppose I haven't seen it. Michael Lorgan told me
Speaker 4: I should see it, but I've never seen it. I
Speaker 4: guess I will someday. My understanding from a press release
Speaker 4: is it was based on just one single still from
Speaker 4: the Metropolis movie and that's all that the artists ever
Speaker 4: saw of Metropolis. I don't know if that's true.
Speaker 5: I really would love to hear your thoughts on the
Speaker 5: Metropolis version, because, like Mike says it, it feels like
Speaker 5: a blend, and I think you'd get something out of it, absolutely,
Speaker 5: because I mean, I wanted to ask you, Runjit, how
Speaker 5: many times have you seen Metropolis?
Speaker 4: I never counted, but probably close to fifty now, but
Speaker 4: usually in different versions.
Speaker 5: Mike, have you seen anything fifty times?
Speaker 2: I probably have seen the ORIGINALT Star Wars at least
Speaker 2: fifty times, and probably Black Shampoo as well.
Speaker 4: I've probably seen the General about one hundred times, but
Speaker 4: again that's because I was trying to research why every
Speaker 4: sixteen millimeter, eight milimeter, thirty five millimeter print, every VHS,
Speaker 4: every laser was different, And so I bought them all
Speaker 4: but bankrupt and I compared themalhel and I learned a
Speaker 4: lot that way, that the history of how the prints
Speaker 4: migrated over a century that would interest absolutely nobody except me. Yeah,
Speaker 4: most movies I can't even get through once. But Metropolis,
Speaker 4: I think I made it probably fifty times by now,
Speaker 4: or close to it. But I've seen the Museum Modern
Speaker 4: Art version, the Australian version that I sent you the
Speaker 4: links to that on YouTube. I saw the nineteen sixty
Speaker 4: three German version with Mulis score. I saw the nineteen
Speaker 4: sixty five version with the Cornard Elcher score. I saw
Speaker 4: it the BBC two version which was shown on PBS
Speaker 4: with the Electronics score. Yeah, this goes on and on.
Speaker 4: Every time. It's something different, and it's edited differently, and
Speaker 4: different scenes are missing a lot of them. They don't
Speaker 4: even have Malhias dance in the middle. It's gone censors did.
Speaker 2: It is fascinating to watch that restored version where you
Speaker 2: can see the difference between the quality of the print
Speaker 2: and see a few extra shots of Maria's dance, and
Speaker 2: especially to see the guy who gets really jealous of
Speaker 2: his friend, and then they cut to him having a
Speaker 2: duel with his friend, and like the duel was in there,
Speaker 2: looks like, but then the shot of him looking at
Speaker 2: his friend jealously was not in there. And it's like,
Speaker 2: it's so fascinating to try to peel back these layers
Speaker 2: and just say who made these decisions and why were
Speaker 2: these decisions made? So obviously Maria's bear back, Oh that
Speaker 2: might be too titillating, you know, but like why the look,
Speaker 2: why was that cut? Why are some of these reaction
Speaker 2: shots cut? And it's just I love watching these kind
Speaker 2: of film mode where you can say, like, oh, okay,
Speaker 2: what was the logic behind removing all of hell? You know?
Speaker 2: And obviously, like we're saying it can't be censorship. Is
Speaker 2: it just we're gonna remove that subplot? And that seems
Speaker 2: much more logical to me, is we're going to remove
Speaker 2: all references to the mother. And then when you start
Speaker 2: removing references to mothers, then you start talking about like
Speaker 2: feminist film theory and all these things, And I just
Speaker 2: love that there are so many different ways of looking
Speaker 2: at this. I like that Rosenbaum really comes to things
Speaker 2: from more of a Freudian point of view. I love
Speaker 2: to read films that way, and you know, talking about
Speaker 2: the id in the underground and all these kind of things.
Speaker 2: But there are so many different ways to to you know,
Speaker 2: skin this cat, sorry Ranjie, to skin this cat that
Speaker 2: it's just wild to be able to see. Like well, Marouder,
Speaker 2: he removed a lot of the use of the montage
Speaker 2: and things, and you know, within the American version is
Speaker 2: much more straight shot, reverse shot kind of stuff, and
Speaker 2: like Lang's original montage and montage being so important, especially
Speaker 2: in silent cinema, but still, you know, montage is one
Speaker 2: of like my favorite things. I love the use of editing,
Speaker 2: and I love the power of editing to be able
Speaker 2: to see those edits right there in your face. Watching
Speaker 2: that restored twenty ten was a version of it. It's
Speaker 2: just great. And it seems amazing that it's gone fifteen
Speaker 2: years and we haven't had yet another update of this.
Speaker 2: It feels like we're maybe on the brink of yet
Speaker 2: another discovery because there are still versions out there, there's
Speaker 2: shot differences, there's all of these things I would almost
Speaker 2: love to see, like the every single different version of
Speaker 2: this that there's available. I mean, where's the box set
Speaker 2: of here's all of these different versions.
Speaker 4: If anyone is rich enough and foolish enough, and rich
Speaker 4: enough and richer enough under that, I would like to
Speaker 4: be in charge of that and if you go, Oh,
Speaker 4: they pulled it down from YouTube, but I caught it
Speaker 4: and I embedded it on my site, the Patescope nine
Speaker 4: point five millimeter version from I think nineteen thirty five.
Speaker 4: It has a couple of seconds in Maria's dance that
Speaker 4: are missing even from the latest restoration, And for this
Speaker 4: I wanted to prepare. I wanted to intercut them and
Speaker 4: put them back in. See you don't have the time.
Speaker 4: Someone needs to do that. I'm sure more of the
Speaker 4: film will pop up. I'm almost convinced that there's a
Speaker 4: complete print incost film a fund that's mislabeled and that
Speaker 4: I hope ticks up before I broke what that's.
Speaker 2: The heartbreak for me is watching that Metropolis Refound documentary,
Speaker 2: and unfortunately the only version I was able to find
Speaker 2: was a horrible quality and really tough to watch. But
Speaker 2: I still got the story out of it, and to
Speaker 2: watch them talk about oh, yeah, we originally had this
Speaker 2: on nitrate and because of night End. Of course, Frederico,
Speaker 2: you're very familiar with all the stories of nitrate. I
Speaker 2: know you are as well, Ronjie. The idea of how
Speaker 2: dangerous the stock is. We were going to transfer all
Speaker 2: of these night Trates prints to thirty five, Oh you know,
Speaker 2: it would cost way too much, so we have to
Speaker 2: transfer it to sixteen. I'm like, oh God, that just
Speaker 2: hurts so much to hear. And you see the loss
Speaker 2: of the quality and the different aspect ratios and all this,
Speaker 2: and you're just like, oh, somebody just to make a
Speaker 2: cost seeming thing. And when they were talking about how
Speaker 2: it was stored and it wasn't stored correctly, and you're
Speaker 2: just like, you see all of these mistakes from the past,
Speaker 2: just adding up to where we're at now and just
Speaker 2: going Yep, because people were fucking cheap or they couldn't
Speaker 2: store the nitrate film, this is what we're ending up with.
Speaker 4: That made me so sad. In what's his name, Fernando Pana,
Speaker 4: I can't remember. He'd been a little booklet how he
Speaker 4: Found Metropolis, which is difficult for me to read because
Speaker 4: it's in a language I don't speak, but I got
Speaker 4: through it courtesy of Google Translator and other little tools.
Speaker 4: He mentioned that just before they destroyed the print, they
Speaker 4: gave it one final screening in thirty five millimeter at
Speaker 4: a brand new cinema on a panoramic screen, which probably
Speaker 4: means one point eight five to one wide screen. You
Speaker 4: can't watch it. Run a full aperture movie at one
Speaker 4: point eight five and see anything that's cutting off half
Speaker 4: the image. The film by then was shriveled, so a
Speaker 4: guy went up to the projection booth and put his
Speaker 4: fingers at the top of the gate to hold the
Speaker 4: rails in tightly so that it wouldn't buckle as much.
Speaker 4: That's why I got so scratched. If they had just
Speaker 4: left it alone, not shown it, donated it to a
Speaker 4: German archive, we'd have the movie. And they when they
Speaker 4: printed it through sixteen millimeter, they didn't even print it
Speaker 4: through the proper gate, so they pumped it to the
Speaker 4: Academy aperture and lost the top on the side. Knuckle heads,
Speaker 4: something more is going to pop up, I'm certain.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I remember that story about the guy pressing it and
Speaker 2: him saying, I held my finger there for two and
Speaker 2: a half hours and people are like, wait, no, the
Speaker 2: movie's not two and a half hours long. He's like no, no,
Speaker 2: I held it for two and a half hour. It's like, well, yeah,
Speaker 2: because there was that version of the film two and
Speaker 2: a half hour long version.
Speaker 4: When they gave the sixty milimeters dupneg to the archive,
Speaker 4: they just cataloged it and put it on the shelf,
Speaker 4: wouldn't let anyone see it. But I thought, wait a minute, guys,
Speaker 4: you know how long it should be, and you can
Speaker 4: see how much film there is on the reels. Doesn't
Speaker 4: it dawn on you that there's an extra thirty forty
Speaker 4: minutes of film on these reels. It didn't dawn on them.
Speaker 4: They didn't check it against anything. They just put it
Speaker 4: on the shelf and wouldn't let anyone look at it.
Speaker 4: Wonderful world of film restoration.
Speaker 5: I have to feel like I have to be the
Speaker 5: one to defend the Argentinians from onslaught.
Speaker 2: You know, Oh, I'm not saying anything bad about them.
Speaker 2: I'm just saying, like the that those things that happened
Speaker 2: then still have resonance today. And it's like, oh, okay.
Speaker 5: Mike, you weren't there for the talk this year? At Nitrate,
Speaker 5: where you with the archivists from Buenos Aires, right, I
Speaker 5: remember you weren't know.
Speaker 2: But I remember watching that noir that they showed, and
Speaker 2: that was marvelous.
Speaker 5: You guys call them knuckleheads, and I completely understand the
Speaker 5: anger of a lot of silent film fans. Ronja. You
Speaker 5: mentioned d why didn't they give it to the bundest
Speaker 5: film Archive? Why didn't they give it to the Germans?
Speaker 5: Hurt and just in general with film archiving in that
Speaker 5: part of the world. I don't know if if you
Speaker 5: guys have been to South America, but it's almost like
Speaker 5: traveling back in time. The economic principles down there just
Speaker 5: do not function at that level. I mean in Uruguay
Speaker 5: they had a leftist film archive that was made during
Speaker 5: the Junta years and it was destroyed for political reasons.
Speaker 5: It's just a totally different ballgame, like art is superfluous.
Speaker 5: I mean, the people that run that film archive, they're
Speaker 5: not even federally funded through Argent. It's just like a museum.
Speaker 5: We can lament the past. I'm lad that we have it,
Speaker 5: like you guys have saying, but there is that aspect too,
Speaker 5: where Metropolis was found, like in the two thousands, and
Speaker 5: they got a lot of funding from ZDF and art
Speaker 5: and a bunch of like German film archives that are
Speaker 5: all credited at the end all over the world. But
Speaker 5: still to this day they're struggling to get funding to
Speaker 5: save their films, the films that they still have. And
Speaker 5: you can like say, well, you know, you should have
Speaker 5: kept your nitrate, you know, climate controlled vaults, all this
Speaker 5: kind of and it's like, have you ever been to Brazil.
Speaker 5: It's not going to happen with a with a country
Speaker 5: under a military dictatorship. It's just you know, the Western
Speaker 5: the Western powers they have they have the money to
Speaker 5: put into art as soft power and propaganda, but South
Speaker 5: America doesn't have the power projection to be worth that well.
Speaker 2: And that there was so much doubt from the Germans
Speaker 2: when the Argentinians contacted them and said, hey, we have
Speaker 2: this longer version of Metropolis, and they're just like didn't
Speaker 2: respond like to the original query or anything. It took
Speaker 2: a guy going to Spain and meeting with a person
Speaker 2: who knows a ton of you know, like basically Spain's
Speaker 2: Renji Sandhu and saying like, hey, here's this and let's
Speaker 2: sit down and we're gonna watch a dupe that I
Speaker 2: created on VHS and see the differences. And then even
Speaker 2: when they took it to then that finally opened up
Speaker 2: doors and got them to go to actual like Berlin
Speaker 2: or wherever in Germany and show it there. And they
Speaker 2: were showing either a VHS or DBDR at that point,
Speaker 2: and they're just like m hmm, yeah, oh yeah, there's
Speaker 2: a slight difference here. Oh there's a slight difference there.
Speaker 2: And they're not seeing a lot of stuff in the
Speaker 2: first few reels. And then finally it starts to kick
Speaker 2: in and they're just like everybody sits up in their chairs,
Speaker 2: so they're like, oh, okay, this is interesting, you know.
Speaker 2: Then they finally start to believe him. And it just
Speaker 2: felt like kind of like you're saying, Federico, and this
Speaker 2: is not the attitude I want to have, which is
Speaker 2: all these these simpletons in Argentina. No, they're doing a
Speaker 2: fantastic job. And yes, under very bad circumstances. I mean,
Speaker 2: the Perone regime was not very kind to anyone, much
Speaker 2: less film restorationists or film keepers, and so yeah, and
Speaker 2: it's really only again going back to what I was
Speaker 2: saying at the very beginning thanks to this guy who
Speaker 2: was had kept a copy of this. It was kind
Speaker 2: of like that, hopefully, one of these days we're going
Speaker 2: to see the copy that was sent from of Magnificent
Speaker 2: Amberson's during the editing phase down from Brazil to Orson
Speaker 2: Wells when he's you know, that's the theory and hopefully
Speaker 2: one of these days is going to pan out. They
Speaker 2: said this version down to Argentina, this guy's like, oh,
Speaker 2: I fucking love this movie. This is fantastic. And then
Speaker 2: I love too that he changed the ending, that he
Speaker 2: took a little bit of the early part of it
Speaker 2: Tropolis and put it at the end to show the
Speaker 2: city still or has been restored, and basically like, now
Speaker 2: we have our happy ending. So we do have a
Speaker 2: slightly different end to that version of it, just because
Speaker 2: the guy was like, no, no, let's give this a
Speaker 2: happier ending.
Speaker 4: They also had a thirty five nitrate of Pandora's Box
Speaker 4: that they incinerated at the same time they incinerated Metropolis.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, that would have the extra eight minutes
Speaker 4: in it, and that might have the proper English broadside
Speaker 4: posted up rather than the German translation, and they incinerated
Speaker 4: it and I will.
Speaker 2: Never see it. So many things lost like tears in
Speaker 2: the rain.
Speaker 5: Never say never.
Speaker 2: All right, guys, we're going to take another break and
Speaker 2: play a preview for next week's show right after these
Speaker 2: brief messages.
Speaker 10: Ruthless Invaders, you will accept me as your master. A
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Speaker 1: They'll be able to us.
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Speaker 10: A Battle beyond Time, Beyond Space, Battle beyond the Stars
Speaker 10: starring Richard Thomas, now, Robert Vaughan, John Saxophone, George Patard.
Speaker 4: About thirty seconds doing that.
Speaker 10: The Battle beyond the Stars in Fading your space soon.
Speaker 2: That's right. We'll be back next week when they look
Speaker 2: at Battle Beyond the Stars. Until then, I want to
Speaker 2: think my co hosts Federica and Renjeet, so Ranjeet, what
Speaker 2: is keeping you busy these days?
Speaker 4: Trying to recover my senses? After eight tragic years. That's
Speaker 4: about it. Not doing anything publicly right now well, and.
Speaker 2: I highly recommend that people go to RJ Buffalo dot
Speaker 2: com and read some of your writing and especially all
Speaker 2: the work that you've done documenting all of this stuff,
Speaker 2: especially around Metropolis the general. So many good things, and Federico,
Speaker 2: what's keeping you busy, sir?
Speaker 5: I got a super eight film camera and I've been
Speaker 5: losing my mind with it a little bit shortly, so
Speaker 5: I've been shooting a lot of stuff. I don't know
Speaker 5: if you saw me at Nitrate, but I have a
Speaker 5: bunch of stuff. I have a YouTube channel it's just
Speaker 5: my name Federik Colbertolini this. I also have an Instagram
Speaker 5: that's a little bit more difficult. You can find me
Speaker 5: under my name Federik Olbertolini, but it's at Duels decorum
Speaker 5: Es propetri dulsa dicorm I'm also kind of in the
Speaker 5: planning phase. I really want to do kind of like
Speaker 5: a breakdown of this year's Nitrate with my friend to
Speaker 5: like talk about the movies and keep it as kind
Speaker 5: of like a memo, and especially the last film. I
Speaker 5: really want to go into that and get people's like
Speaker 5: discussions because everybody at the festival was talking about it,
Speaker 5: but it's in like scattered, tiny little discussions, so it'd
Speaker 5: be nice to pull it all together. So, Mike, if
Speaker 5: you get a message for me asking for your thoughts
Speaker 5: on nitread as a whole and specific films in particular,
Speaker 5: don't be surprised.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much folks for being on the show.
Speaker 2: Thanks everybody for listening. If you want to hear more
Speaker 2: of me shooting off my I'll check out some of
Speaker 2: the other shows that I work on. They are all
Speaker 2: available at Winningwaymedia dot com. Thanks especially to our Patreon community.
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