The first DVD I asked my parents to prioritize above their own in our Netflix mail queue was Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. I had seen an image of a poster for it somewhere in the blogosphere of about 2004. For something I had never heard of— a silent German interwar film— it felt uniquely familiar. With the benefit of now two decades of hindsight, I cherish the sense of innocence held in this memory. It’s just a genealogical fact to me now, that all of cinema and science fiction owes foundational debt to this film. Of course C3PO is a dream of Rotwang’s Maschinenmensch, of course the yawning chasm of the metropolis, crossed by tiny aeroplanes and stilted monorails feels like a relative of Blade Runner’s Los Angeles and Akira’s Neo Tokyo. Metropolis felt familiar because it pervaded and influenced so many things I had experienced as contemporary, even by the time I was 12.
It’s a film that continues to delight through an expanded universe of its own legend, as it’s visually called back to in so many films. It gives me a specific delight to decode a reference to it in another vision of the future— and there are a lot of futures made of or at least built atop 1927. On one level it feels good to be in on something fairly niche and detail oriented, of finding an easter egg, but there is also something else going on. It’s as if the zeitgeist of this silent film has had its surface tension relaxed by constant handling from the real mundane futures that have found it. It’s like 1925-27 and the time of the the homage begin to exist as something maybe more like Bakhtin’s Chronotope of literature, in which the ability to transcend the limitations of time becomes the form itself. Setting aside more detail oriented analyses of the materialism of the movie, Metropolis is “the future” and it can be reached from whenever you have the coordinates because it is safely archived in the past.
Cinema has a specific time form; a film is dreamed during pre-production, manifesting first as paper architecture responding to a script or treatment which at minimum summarizes the intent for the filming. All photography depends on the principle of excluding the entire world in favor of what is framed to convey narrative, so a plan, however abstract, is useful. But film narrative can also be built exclusively from the frame inwards. It could be months-years of design and fabrication to produce a series of set pieces and costumes before preparing the actors. In Metropolis’ case, the invention of a world is in the more literal sense. It had a production period of 17 months, during which plaster and wood hallucinated a future conceived on drawing boards in nearly the same place and time as those at the Bauhaus. The zeitgeist of the Wiemar Republic is part of the lasting resonance of the film. It took the hallucinogenic qualities inherent to the expressionist visual method and cooled them into the kind of rational fantasy that modern films and video games have normalized a century later. And while the Bauhaus, and the Republic only lasted a few years longer, the Metropolis still stands... somewhere…
But if it seems like ambitious production design and subject matter assured the films memory, I suggest watching with its original score— the gravity of 1927 is much harder to escape. If somehow the original poster I saw had a musical component, I might not have been so intrigued. I think one of the main reasons that the film isn’t a mass media attraction in the way some of its inheritors are, is simply because it is most available with its original score by Gottfried Huppertz, which limits the appeal to a few kinds of nerds basically. But the film has a surprisingly long list of scores created for it by musicians, artists and cultural institutions in dialogue with the original, and with the images themselves in every decade since release.
So today, the film is seen engaging with time in several ways that resemble the sense of architecture embodied in the ruin— the increment of time that is given proportion, harmony and meaning, given firmness in a final edit/print, then undergoes a saga of generative loss resulting in many new hybrids. In the sense of an architectural ruin pertaining to an old building, over the years, centuries and and millennia, it becomes an collection of palimpsests from its many users and owners and the changes they make to its original order, the care they prioritize or neglect, and the external forces that visit the site. The theoretical ‘completion’ of an architecture is when it is disassembled as if by time itself (a desert Tell mound as archetype). Time has consumed the ruin in the sense that we stand after it, looking at its architecture in a way not so divorced from how one looks at a plan drawing, where it is all simultaneously there outside of rational space, on the page. When faithful restorations are made they draw on both original stonework and timber as available and also on the paper folio-form of a building, in which the many chapters of changing ownership, renovation and calamity animate the surviving relics. Thus a pedigree is established with a nonexistent parts of the ruin through less-physical information forms, documenta, ephermera, forms as virtual as existed before an actual cyberspace.
In Donna Harraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (1985) a confluence of developments in the 20th century provided the ground for a myth of dissolving boundaries, hybrids and dualism: the cyborg. Evolution merged the domains of animal and human, mechanical Industrialization fused animal-humans and machines and Microelectronic technology blurred together the physical and non-physical. Metropolis in its late form is ruinous in its accumulated meaning, being like a chronotope of a world that was still coalescing in the decades that followed its release, and likely a contemporary point of reference for ideas of progress towards a … real future (present) in which popular homages to it are yet divorced from the origin. Something cybernetic, the film has become a dualistic hybrid of the past and future, a time cyborg: past-seeding-future and its eventual result coming to know its prescient origins through later perversions. From the present, the film and all its referential resonance are like the many pages of a set of building plans for a future that was only partly built, or the compacted strata of a ruined tell mound. From this angle, we are able to glimpse outside of time and across reality itself.