Tara McCormack
posted 5 May 2006

In conjunction with the Victoria & Albert Museum's 'Modernism' exhibition, and Tate Modern's exploration of Bauhaus, the National Film Theatre in London last month screened a re-mastered version of Metropolis.

Despite the exaggerated silent-movie acting, and the weak story, this is without doubt one of the great films of the last century. Stylistically, there are some stunning scenes that beat many modern sci-fi or fantasy films (though of course Metropolis itself has had a huge influence on those genres). These are the scenes which have become iconic - the workers trudging like zombies to their soul-destroying shifts, the spooky face of the robot woman, and the fantastic cityscape of Metropolis itself, with its elevated roads, neon signs, and planes buzzing round the towering art deco-gothic sky scrapers.

The film combines the beautiful futuristic vision of the city, with dystopian scenes of technology gone awry, and dark, Expressionistic, and sometimes gothic imagery, such as the dancing figures of death and the seven deadly sins, and the mad inventor, living in a small house that looks like a witch's hut, complete with pentagrams on the door (signifying magic, that the inventor is some kind of wizard). Only towards the end during the grand finale does the silent film acting and exaggeration become rather wearing, and unintentionally comical.

The story follows the son of the ruler of Metropolis, who is interrupted in his pleasure garden by a beautiful woman with a crowd of ragged children. Look, says the woman to the children, pointing to the people, and the riches, these are your brothers. Stunned by the woman, and the children, the son sets off to find her. Below the surface of Metropolis he finds the workers city where the workers toil in dreadful ten-hour shifts at the face of enormous machines. As he gazes in horror at what lies beneath his beautiful city, the machines become transformed into a vision of a pagan idol, demanding endless blood sacrifice. He swaps clothes with a worker and discovers that Maria, the beautiful woman, is secretly calling the workers to meetings, where she urges them to refrain from violent revolt, but to wait for ' the mediator' who will form a bridge between them and the owners. The head (the bosses) and the hands (the workers) need a heart to mediate, she tells them. I am that mediator, realises the son.

In the meantime his father has rumbled his secret outings, and the workers meetings, and visits his old rival, the mad inventor, who has built a human-like robot. The father concocts a dastardly plan and arranges with the inventor to have the robot turned into the likeness of Maria, who can then lead the workers astray. The new, evil Maria has a lot more eye make-up then good Maria, and relishes her evil task. Unbeknown to the father though, the inventor has his own agenda, and sets evil Maria to destroy the entire town. Evil Maria calls the workers to violent revolution, whilst in the city itself she sends the wealthy into a spiral of decadence and folly.

The workers, urged on by evil Maria, destroy the machines, and they unleash a terrible flood that threatens to destroy the underground city. Grot, the foreman of the 'heart machine', shouts at them, you fools, we'll all die without the machines! It's not the machines of course that are the problem, but the system. If only the bosses and the workers would get together. Meanwhile, the lights are going out in the city, the ruler begins to think he was not so clever after all. Good Maria was right, all they need is a mediator to make both sides see the value of the other…

Metropolis is a critique of the soul-destroying drudgery of labour, but there is certainly no revolutionary message here. The clear message is ultimately a conservative one, a plea for moderation, some kind of reasoned social-democracy, if only all sides got together and talked, things could be so much better.

Overall, the film seems to suggest that problems arise when society no longer understands itself as a whole, when each section forgets that it relies on the other. So whilst the workers slave, the upper classes lead a useless life of dissipation, each section as if they were different species, on different planets (a point also made fairly obviously by the workers' city, and the machines being kept underground). Lang was also clearly worried about the ease with which 'the masses' and the workers could be manipulated. Yet he was also worried about the manipulation of the wealthier sections of society (who in the film are just as easily manipulated by evil Maria), and that the elites would forget that the working classes were not simply cogs in a machine, but humans, and that it was in the elites interests as well to ensure that the workers could live decently.

The social and political milieu in which Lang was working, and which informed the film, was one of the most turbulent periods in Germany's history. As soon as it had been formed, the Weimar Republic had almost collapsed under the combined impact of Germany's defeat, and subsequent humiliation by the Treaty of Versailles, bankruptcy, and the catastrophic inflation of the early 20s (which impoverished large sections of the German middle classes, who would go on to support Hitler), not to mention the narrow defeat of the 1923 Communist uprising, and the steady rise of the far right.

This all within the context of general European turbulence. Europe was just beginning to stabilise economically after the devastation of the War, with the help of huge American loans, the Russian Revolution was only 10 years old, across Europe the forces of reaction were on the rise (fascist governments in Romania, Italy, Portugal, Spain, authoritarian governments in other states). It must have been like living in a permanent force nine gale, but as Harry Lime pointed out in The Third Man, there is nothing like it for stimulating art and creativity. Lang himself was against the Nazis and was to leave Germany for America in 1933, after refusing the Nazi's invitation to head the German film industry. He continued to direct films in Hollywood, but Metropolis is the film that he is rightly remembered for. Despite the ultimately conservative message, the film is clearly the product of a vast social and political imagination.