Metropolis in Berlin
Oct. 30th, 2009 01:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rmIf I could get to Berlin for this, I would go (for this to be possible, it would mean being able to get tickets to the event, which may be nigh on impossible, finding a decent airfare and being willing to fly out to Berlin on a red-eye, see the city for a day, go to the gala and get back on a plane the next morning, all of which would be beyond irrational, but still tempting).
Fritz Lang's Metropolis flopped when it was first released in January 1927 and was re-edited and re-released a few months later with many of its plot-lines excised entirely or fragmented in a way that no longer made sense.
Shortly thereafter, by the summer of that year, all original prints of the film were believed to have been lost.
Occasionally more footage, stills or notes would surface, and because of this many partial restorations have been released over the years. These restorations, however, were always, on some level, an act of mourning; we all knew it as a fact: the true film would never be seen again, and its complete plot lost to all but those who were involved with it or saw it on its initial release in January 1927. Most of those people are, of course, no longer alive.
Last year a heavily-damaged 16mm print of the unedited original release was found in Buenos Aires. This was approximately equivalent to discovering the Easter Bunny is real and waiting to have tea with you. Right now. At the Plaza.
Metropolis, restored to as it was first shown to the public on January 10, 1927, will be seen in Berlin on February 10, 2010, over eighty years after it was first presumed lost.
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118010550.html?categoryId=1061&cs=1&cache=false
*
My parents took several friends and I to the Giorgio Moroder reconstruction (which I like, okay?) for my twelfth birthday. It scared my best friend Elyse terribly. Elena thought it was cool, because it was sci-fi, and I remember pretty and pert Marguerita watching it with the grave studiousness of her station (her father was important and famous, and she knew what it was to travel the world and dutifully see great art). I watched it, as I always have with all stories, as a lesson: here was how a woman moved to seduce, to endure, to survive; here were the hands of madness; here was how a boy looks in love; and this is privilege of my barred present (I was nothing like Marguerita) and of fantasy future and of lost past.
This is a thing I thought I would never see. Unless something really random happens, I won't get to see it in Berlin. But one day I will see it. And, despite my mother's wishes, one day, I will even see Berlin; sometimes it seems like all of the 20th century happened there.
Fritz Lang's Metropolis flopped when it was first released in January 1927 and was re-edited and re-released a few months later with many of its plot-lines excised entirely or fragmented in a way that no longer made sense.
Shortly thereafter, by the summer of that year, all original prints of the film were believed to have been lost.
Occasionally more footage, stills or notes would surface, and because of this many partial restorations have been released over the years. These restorations, however, were always, on some level, an act of mourning; we all knew it as a fact: the true film would never be seen again, and its complete plot lost to all but those who were involved with it or saw it on its initial release in January 1927. Most of those people are, of course, no longer alive.
Last year a heavily-damaged 16mm print of the unedited original release was found in Buenos Aires. This was approximately equivalent to discovering the Easter Bunny is real and waiting to have tea with you. Right now. At the Plaza.
Metropolis, restored to as it was first shown to the public on January 10, 1927, will be seen in Berlin on February 10, 2010, over eighty years after it was first presumed lost.
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118010550.html?categoryId=1061&cs=1&cache=false
*
My parents took several friends and I to the Giorgio Moroder reconstruction (which I like, okay?) for my twelfth birthday. It scared my best friend Elyse terribly. Elena thought it was cool, because it was sci-fi, and I remember pretty and pert Marguerita watching it with the grave studiousness of her station (her father was important and famous, and she knew what it was to travel the world and dutifully see great art). I watched it, as I always have with all stories, as a lesson: here was how a woman moved to seduce, to endure, to survive; here were the hands of madness; here was how a boy looks in love; and this is privilege of my barred present (I was nothing like Marguerita) and of fantasy future and of lost past.
This is a thing I thought I would never see. Unless something really random happens, I won't get to see it in Berlin. But one day I will see it. And, despite my mother's wishes, one day, I will even see Berlin; sometimes it seems like all of the 20th century happened there.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-10-30 06:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-30 06:07 pm (UTC)My.
God.
*is ded*
And oh, yes, Berlin beckons me as well. I've been to Poland (where much of the 20th century happened as well... but different), but I want to see Berlin... live in it as well... just to say a big Eff U to the bias and history I was taught.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-30 06:11 pm (UTC)And agreed with you on the Moroder reconstruction. I like it too. I've got it on a (PAL) home-recorded tape somewhere. The DVD of a later edit may be more complete, but I don't like it as much.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-30 06:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-30 06:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-30 06:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-30 06:35 pm (UTC)This is genuinely neat news, this new restoration. I was lucky enough to see the as-restored-as-they-could-at-the-time version of Metropolis in 2003, on the big screen, the version with the original score.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-30 06:36 pm (UTC)And yeah, the Moroder thing really did bring the film back into consciousness and get a new audience interested in the lost film.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-30 06:57 pm (UTC)I would sell vital organs to get to Berlin for this.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-30 11:26 pm (UTC)A few years ago, I saw the Alloy Orchestra play the score over a print of the Moroder version. It was hysterical to watch Roger Miller totally shredding as song credits for bands like Loverboy and Bonnie Tyler started scrolling up the screen.
[/derail]
no subject
Date: 2009-10-30 06:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-30 06:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-30 07:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-30 07:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-30 07:18 pm (UTC)I heard about this. I don't think I can go, either. But I have a suspicion I know where it will be coming soon.
And Berlin. I spent a week there, ten years ago this past August. Someday I will get back -- everything will be changed, and yet.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-30 07:56 pm (UTC)Berlin changes so fast. I was there four times and it was a different city every time.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-30 08:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-30 08:06 pm (UTC)I drives me crazy, how much we’ve lost, how much we burned, or let rot on a shelf, or taped over to save pennies,* but every once in a while, someone opens an old trunk...
* We nearly lost Monty Python’s Flying Circus! What the fuck, BBC>
no subject
Date: 2009-10-30 08:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-30 09:01 pm (UTC)*sobs*
(Thank god for crew members who occasionally took home their own copies, else we'd have even LESS of the early years of that show...)
no subject
Date: 2009-10-30 11:55 pm (UTC)You know, I like to think that there’s a department of the Time Agency — hopefully one not staffed with sociopaths — devoted to preserving/retrieving “lost” artifacts and art. They smuggled scrolls out of the Library of Alexandria as it burned, and on movie nights they screen London after Midnight.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-31 01:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-31 05:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-31 01:38 am (UTC)Speaking of film artifacts that have been lost or deliberately destroyed: one that stands out for me is the annual National Song Festival for Portugal)which is where the song representing that country is chosen to go to Eurovision and compete with other national finalists), in 1973.
1973 was the last full year of the dictatorship in Portugal, and the formerly stringent censorship was beginning to be lightened, ever so slightly. Enough, in the previous five years or so, that every national song contest had featured songs with increasingly incendiary lyrics. In 1973, they boiled over.
The winning song was so audacious and so absolutely, perfectly spit-in-your-eye. Somehow, no one knows by what miracle, the censors remained completely oblivious to all the eye spitting...UNTIL Eurovision aired and the entire Western bloc of Europe got to see Fernando Tordo calling out the Portuguese dictatorship on camera via song. The song was banned in Portugal, despite the fact that everyone had heard and seen it by this time. No radio play. No film footage of any sort.
A bit of locking the barn door after the horses are in the next county, but...
The order went out. Burn the evidence. All of it.
And so, alas, we have none of the live performances for that year's National Song Festival (though the intermission acts survived, oddly). Nothing but...
An eighteen-millimeter strip of film, no soundtrack, shot from an odd camera angle, of Fernando Tordo running through his winning song, "Tourada". It's been synched with the song and now is on Youtube.
The dictatorship? Crumbled in 1974, in a bloodless coup.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-31 02:21 am (UTC)I've seen a version of Metropolis on DVD once, with the included music turned off, listening to Gooding instead. I don't know which version, though.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-31 06:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-31 06:47 am (UTC)My dad's office still has a Checkpoint Charlie sign copy on the wall, and my dad would have loved to see this print. His eyesight was so bad that he wouldn't have been able to enjoy it lately anyway, and so while I generally try to ignore afterlife stuff, I am going to assume that the afterlife screening theater already had this print, cleaned up, waiting for him and a lot of other folks.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-31 11:12 am (UTC)And, despite my mother's wishes, one day, I will even see Berlin
While I honestly understand where your mother's coming from, it still hurts to hear every time. Do come to Berlin when you get the chance. Things - and generations - have changed (while definitely a lot still needs to be done).