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Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) stands as a towering achievement - as much a monument of an age, and an ideal, as the cityscape itself. It is an early science-fiction film and was the most expensive silent film of its time. Like the very best science fiction, Metropolis also works as a social commentary. Set in the increasingly less distant future of 2026, it concerns the divide between workers and aristocracy in an utterly industrialized, dystopian world. The 'haves' and the 'have nots' are physically segregated by the city, unaware that they are all part of the same vast machine. Each class is capable of the other's destruction. This comes to a boiling point when Maria (Brigitte Helm) and Freder (Gustav Fröhlich) - two young people from opposite sides - fall in love.
Maria teaches an astonished Freder about the brutal truth behind his shining city, while at the same time convincing her fellow workers not to revolt, and instead wait for a peaceful resolution under new leadership. However, the incumbent lord and manager of the city Fredersen Alfred Able), Freder's father - has other ideas. Together with the mad scientist Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), he plans to replace Maria with an android imposter called a Maschinenmensch (also played by Helm) and to use 'her' to secretly control the people.
The Maschinen mensch proves to be a devastating force of its own. Disobeying Fredersen, it starts to cause havoc (perhaps on orders from Rotwang). With the real Maria kidnapped, and the Maschinenmensch provoking and rallying people on either side of the divide, the metropolis is set to selfdestruct. This leads to an explosive climax in which Freder and Maria must avert catastrophe and reunite their society.
Along with Metropolis' place in cinematic history, classroom discussion can also locate the film within a wider context of world history - in cultural movements of the early twentieth century, such as modernism, particularly in Weimar Germany, and dynamic social issues that involve technology, cinema and sociopolitical ideas. But the first task is to make sure you have the right text.
A lost city
The complete version of the film, which premiered in Berlin in January 1927, has been lost forever. The original negative is regrettably incomplete, and all its...