Soaking It In: Metropolis

Metropolis (1927) by Fritz Lang: 147 minutes, 8.5 IMDB, 98.6% fresh tomatoes

We kicked off the film fest in style with Metropolis. Specifically with the 123-minute, digitally restored version restored 75th anniversary edition that the the F.W. Murnau Foundation released in 2002. There are many other restorations and re-releases, including a bunch that came out during the 1990s when Metropolis was briefly in the public domain in the U.S, but these are generally *horrible versions and are to be avoided.

My notes:

• Frame rate
• Aspect ratio
• Meyerhold vs. Stanislavski
• 0:01:21 My new screen saver
• Recent book about how quickly major cities will flood without people to operate the pumps (The World Without Us; timeline here)
• 1:40:00 Camera on a swing

The cousinnephew summary:

• Liked the camera work.
• A complicated plot; surprising for something that old.

Some links:

• Metropolis - Fritz Lang - how the film was made (Pt1)
• Metropolis - Fritz Lang - how the film was made (Pt2)
• Metropolis - Bohemian Rhapsody

* I had the cousinnephew and his brother (also a cousinnephew) wailing in agony when I played them the 1993 Corinth Video edition of Metropolis, with an execrable music track by Loy Cook Jr. "How could you watch this?" "It's like he just wrote two pieces of music and just switched back and forth between them." "Why is this so crappy?"