If 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.
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