Metropolis

Fritz Langs METROPOLIS transports the audience to a dystopian futurist metropole in the year 2000, where the poor and the rich are living strictly separated, without knowledge of each other’s existence. But when news of the poor ‘underworld’ and the rich ‘upper world’ do reach each other, this divide is no longer tenable. The workers in the gigantic underground factory city revolt against the ruling class, living in the magnificent surface city. Freder, the son of the master of Metropolis, tries to avoid catastrophe with the help of prophet Maria.

In METROPOLIS the social inequality is built as a light-flooded upper world for the rich with skyscrapers based on the New York City skyline and a dark underworld beneath the city where the workers have to work continuously. The female Messias wants to unite the workers and the bosses in a world where there is again space for ‘heart’ and beauty. Screenwriter Thea von Harbou wrote the book Metropolis in 1925 with the goal to later use it as the blueprint for a screenplay for her then-husband Fritz Lang.

METROPOLIS is released in 1927 at the end of the silent era and is immediately one of its highlights. With stylized sets, 25.000 bit-players, dramatic camera angles and shadow plays, the film is also a highlight of the German Expressionism. The impressive special effects were realised by a specialised special effects team led by Eugen Schüfftan and cinematographer Karl Freund. Schüfftan for example created a mirror method especially for the film, where the use of mirrors enabled the actors and the miniature sets to be in the same shot at the same time.

METROPOLIS is a hallucinatory nightmare which remains relevant even nearly 100 years after its release. As one of the first science fiction films, it focuses on the fear of too far-reaching scientific progress. Men becomes a slave of the machine. The two-and-a-half hour long epic was a direct influence on many important science fiction films, like BLADE RUNNER, THE MATRIX and EX MACHINA. Especially the conceptualisation of the mad scientists, who plot diabolical schemes in their labs and humanoid robots who mislead people, are still very recognisable in sci fi today. Especially these days of artificial intelligence and alternative realities on social media the question arises: what even is real anymore?

METROPOLIS will be accompanied live by a new composition by guitarist Menno Buggenhout, who resurrects the unheimlich familiarity of this one hundred-year-old masterpiece with his electronic sounds.