Original subtitles

36,000 extras, 1,100 shaved heads, 200,000 costumes,

500 to 600 70-storey skyscrapers.

Metropolis, Ufa's most expensive silent film.

Total cost: 5 million Reichsmark.

The film only took just over 75,000 Reichsmark at the box office in 1927.

A disaster for the distributor.

Metropolis was dropped, shortened and mutilated.

No-one has seen the complete version of it since.

On the film set where director Fritz Lang is still all smiles.

The city of the future as it looks in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner,

a modern sci-fi classic from the '80s.

And it was clearly modelled on another film.

An architect's sketch, but not for Blade Runner.

This tower is at the centre of Metropolis.

It's the scene of the action as well as a symbol.

Metropolis - the city of cities, a city of towers.

The new Tower of Babel.

These images still fire the imagination of directors and architects.

The box office flop from back then

is now one of the most important works in cinematic history.

We are now in Buenos Aires on the trail of Metropolis.

It leads us to the small Museo del Cine

which is on the site of a factory in an industrial area.

Not really a museum - more an archive for film industry insiders.

Here, on these shelves, Metropolis re-surfaced.

This is where the Manuel Pefia Rodriguez film collection is stored.

And in May 2008, Fernando Pefia and I...

Fernando had suspected for 18 years

that there might be the complete version of Metropolis in these film cans.

So we went to these shelves and found

that it is indeed a complete copy of Metropolis.

Surrounded by these rusty film cans,

a global sensation had been stored for decades without being discovered.

In 1986, I met Salvador Sammaritano at the film academy

and started working for him at the Cine Club Nucleo.

The Fondo Nacional de las Artes

wanted to donate Pefia Rodriguez's film collection to the club.

As we discovered Metropolis, Sammaritano said to me:

"I will never forget how we showed this film in 1959.

"For two and a half hours

"I had to hold down the film gate of the projector with my finger."

That seemed strange to me

because Giorgio Moroder's version of Metropolis had just hit the cinemas,

and that wasn't two and a half hours long, not even two hours,

but just 90 minutes.

HAMBURG-AMERICA LINE

October 1924.

Architect Erich Mendelsohn

travels to America on behalf of the Berliner Tageblatt.

"A fact-finding mission for the eyes and mind", he calls his journey.

Film director Fritz Lang is also on board,

as well as producer Erich Pommer with his wife Gertrud.

They are going to the opening of Die Nibelungen in New York.

Mendelsohn on his travelling companion Fritz Lang:

"Monocle and other Viennese quirks aside,

"he is a thoughtful and daring human being.

"Port entrance. The ship swerves.

"In the haze, a first glimpse of the skyline.

"Then rising to the sky, the Woolworth Building.

"Quick entrance, turns, curves.

"Space cataract, space battle, infinite flush of victory."

Fritz Lang is overwhelmed as well:

"The buildings seemed like a vertical curtain,

"shimmering and very light,

"an exuberant backdrop hanging from a dark sky

"that dazzles, distracts and hypnotises."

Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten, published in Berlin, 1926.

Erich Mendelsohn's report with photos of avant-garde audacity.

Broadway bei Nacht, an image that Mendelsohn attributes to Fritz Lang.

Lang was later to claim that Metropolis

had been inspired by his first impression of New York.

One of his many tales, as we know today.

Architecture and physics, poetry and film...

Erich Mendelsohn's Einstein Tower in Potsdam.

Designed in the trenches of World War I,

and built at the beginning of the 1920s,

a prototype of the architecture of Metropolis.

Even today this edifice looks like a message from the future.

"This script is dedicated to Erich Pommer" -

the original dedication on the title page of the screenplay for Metropolis.

Fritz Lang and his wife Thea von Harbou

completed it in June 1924,

before their trip to America.

The flat that they shared on the Hohenzollerndamm in Berlin -

photos for the magazine Die Dame.

A strangely old-fashioned interior

in which this futuristic subject matter was conceived.

The story of a vertically layered city.

"All the buildings used as a backdrop on the film set

"had been described in such detail in the screenplay

"that there could be no doubt about their character and their dimensions",

art director Erich Kettelhut remembers.

Thea and Fritz at the Ufa zoo.

As the screenwriter, she had always been held responsible

for all the kitsch and mundane subject matter in Lang's films.

It was no different with Metropolis.

Modernity in town planning.

At the same time Le Corbusier draws up the Plan Voisin for Paris -

the old city centre must give way

and is subjected to "surgical intervention".

There are 18 cross-shaped skyscrapers made of steel and glass.

Every skyscraper is a vertical city district for 50,000 people.

A contrast to New York.

"My proposition is brutal because town planning is brutal,

"because life is brutal;

"life shows no mercy;

"life must defend itself;

"in the face of death one must act

"to thwart death's schemes",

Le Corbusier writes in his book Urbanisme.

The film Metropolis juxtaposes this concept

with a dual vision of New York.

A model of high-rise buildings and urban canyons.

A cinematic achievement.

"When we shot the scene of the main street

"in which we used approximately 300 small toy cars,

"we had to move every single car a few millimetres forward

"after every single frame that we had shot

"to create the impression of movement in the film",

wrote cameraman Gunther Rittau.

Eight days of work for ten seconds of film.

Design of a high-rise building.

It could be for Metropolis,

but it was actually made by Hugo Haring in 1922

for the design competition Hochhaus am Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, Berlin.

The same goes for Hans Poelzig's entry.

An architect's sketch for Metropolis by Erich Kettelhut

reinterprets such ideas.

The Mossehaus in Berlin's former newspaper district.

A real intrusion of modernity.

In 1923, Mendelsohn gave an old district a new facade.

It "flows" around the corner, as it were.

A house in motion.

Almost everyone knows this image -

the Robot Maria from Metropolis by Walter Schulze-Mittendorff.

An icon of silent film.

The laboratory of Rotwang, the inventor of The Machine-Man.

The set design inspired dozens of films.

The multiple exposure sequence of the incarnation of a robot.

But what does a robot look like?

Contemporary abstract sculptures were used as models.

Rudolf Belling's Skulptur 23, a futuristic hollow head, made of brass.

Oskar Schlemmer's Abstrakte Figur, created between 1921 and 1923.

Fritz Lang's film gathers and condenses the impulses of its time

and makes its own mark on the development of art and architecture.

I actually think that films -

and that is something that I personally have always done -

should deal with today's problems.

I have always been a fighter.

I have always fought very hard for my ideas, to implement them.

Also in America. Or especially in America.

If you have convictions, you have to fight for them.

Lang on the set.

Filming took place from May 1925 to August 1926.

Metropolis, initially budgeted at 800,000 Reichsmark,

is now estimated to have cost approximately 3.5 million Reichsmark.

Ufa's press office proudly reported

about 620,000 metres of negative film and 1,300,000 metres of positive film

that Lang had exposed.

It's hard to understand that until the discovery in Buenos Aires

no complete version of Metropolis had survived.

Fritz Lang's film technique was a montage of several negatives.

He achieved this effect by working with several cameras,

or, in scenes in which that was not possible,

by doing so many takes

that there were at least three good ones of each shot.

You can confirm that by looking at the surviving material.

There is only one surviving original negative.

That's the original negative that was used for the American edit,

which is not the same as the one that was cut by Lang,

but it's the surviving edit that was made by Paramount.

Of the other negatives only copies have survived.

There was a negative for the German market,

and there was a negative for Ufa's export department.

And this negative was used to make the copies

that are now in London, Australia, New Zealand and Argentina.

The Ufa studio in Neubabelsberg.

The outdoor set for Metropolis.

These images were shot in the summer of 1927,

long after the film had been completed.

We are showing them here for the first time.

"To work with Fritz Lang as director was no picnic for anyone�,

remembers Gustav Frohlich,

who plays Freder, the son of the ruler of Metropolis.

"His patience and his tenacity appeared to be infinite,

"as did his powers of persuasion, if necessary, his downright manipulation.

"He also had a hypnotic effect on all his colleagues

"and pushed everyone to their limits.

"But nevertheless, work progressed calmly and efficiently,

"without yelling, but with unyielding persistence."

Freder and Maria - the heroes of the film,

a forbidden love,

for Maria is a girl from the underworld...

...the workers' underworld - deep below the Earth's surface.

At the M-Machine - people like robots.

19th December, 1925.

The so-called "Parufamet Agreement� is signed.

For a $4 million credit

Ufa agreed to reserve 75% of its cinema capacity

for productions from the American companies Paramount and Metro.

The Americans agreed to show ten Ufa films per season.

A fateful day for Metropolis.

Even before its premi�re in Germany in January 1927,

the film came to America and was radically edited and shortened there

by Channing Pollock at the request of Paramount.

In the summer of 1927, the German edit was also re-cut to match this model

and shortened by 30 minutes.

The material that had been cut out was destroyed.

The Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv in Berlin-Hoppegarten.

A modern bunker for approximately 90,000 reels of nitrate film.

Amongst them, eight reels of the original negative of Metropolis

in the Paramount version.

In 2001, this "American" camera negative

was used to restore the film

under the aegis of the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung.

But the lost 30 minutes were still missing.

Nowadays, the American negative is the best in terms of quality, of course,

because it is the only surviving camera negative,

i.e. first-generation film,

except for one reel, which unfortunately is a duplicate from the '60s.

It's also the best in terms of the quality of its contents,

i.e. of what the actors are doing,

and how well continuity has been maintained.

But not everything can be used

because, as I said before, one reel is a duplicate which isn't very good,

and the changes that Channing Pollock made in 1927

sometimes led to changes in continuity.

Some of the material had been shortened to such an extent

that it was no longer possible to piece it together

as it had been originally,

and it had to be replaced with different material.

Sometimes we used fade-outs

where there were new transitions between scenes.

When Pollock had finished a scene, he wanted to have a fade-out.

He treated the negative chemically, so there was a fade-out,

and in these sequences the image suddenly goes black.

Stadt der S6hne [City of the Sons], a sketch for Metropolis.

The stadium sequence was also cut out in 1927.

"Figure height: 14 metres.

"Plinth: 8 metres."

"In reality the figures were only about 20 centimetres high",

Erich Kettelhut remembers.

Mauer nebst Figuren, ein Modell [Wall with Figures, a Model]

was projected onto a 3-metre-high angled wall, using the Schifftan process.

Fritz Lang's screenplay is thought to have been lost.

Only the 13th page, complete with handwritten notes, has survived -

as a facsimile,

reproduced in the Ufa magazine, in the special edition Metropolis.

The Eternal Gardens in the upper city of Metropolis.

Many journalists and guests visited the set and wrote about it.

Even Hitchcock - not yet a director himself - is said to have been there.

A photo shoot on the set of the Eternal Gardens:

Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein on the far right of the picture.

Lang has not yet seen Bronenosets Potyomkin [Battleship Potemkin].

He says to Eisenstein: "Watch and learn, and you will shoot like me."

"We will shoot differently", Eisenstein thinks.

Russians and Metropolis.

There will be consequences...

In the Soviet Union, all film magazines and newspapers

constantly wrote about Metropolis.

Expectations were high,

due to Fritz Lang's huge success with Die Nibelungen.

Images from the film, reports about the shooting...

The film was eagerly anticipated.

It was quite a long wait.

It was only in 1929 that they tried to distribute the film.

Sovkino provided the censorship authorities with a detailed report.

Ideologically, the film was not acceptable.

But they promised to change it - to shorten and re-write it

and to put explanatory slates at the beginning and the end.

They hoped the film in this form would make it to the cinema.

Far from it.

In April 1929, it was banned from being shown in the Soviet Union.

The censorship decision signed by Fyodor Raskolnikov.

Towards the end of the 1920s,

the housing development Schorlemer Allee is built in Berlin-Dahlem,

Berlin's first steel-framed housing development,

designed in the studio of brothers Luckhardt and Alfons Anker.

A futuristic house.

In 1929, the director of Metropolis moves in.

In 1933, Fritz Lang goes into exile from here.

He stays in America even after the war.

There is a story about a man

who arrived at the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1943.

As he climbed up the ramp

and saw countless men and women with shaved heads in work clothes,

he is alleged to have said to one of his fellow inmates:

"Do you know Metropolis?"

There is always more significance to a major work of art

than its author is aware of.

That also holds true for this film by Fritz Lang.

Moments of premonition.

The former bunker complex of the Reichsfilmarchiv in Babelsberg.

Just after the end of the war it is seized and secured by the Red Army.

A Soviet special commission removes countless films

and sends them to Moscow.

Film as "war loot" - including Metropolis.

35 years later, at the beginning of the '80s,

Enno Patalas, head of the Filmmuseum Miinchen,

contacts the Soviet film archive Gosfilmofond

and brings some of the films that had been looted back to Germany.

That had consequences, including for Metropolis.

We had heard and seen

that the films at Gosfilmofond were of a much better quality

than they were anywhere else, especially in Germany.

And once we had received the famous Soviet films

by Eisenstein, Pudovkin and so forth,

we asked for German films from the Soviet archive by way of exchange.

We exchanged metre for metre,

1 metre colour for 3 metres black and white.

And old German films for new German films,

i.e. Fassbinder, Herzog, Kluge for Murnau, Fritz Lang and so forth.

And Metropolis was only one of approximately 12 films we had asked for.

And it had no particular priority.

It was just one of the films

which we thought that we should have,

and we had seen or presumed, quite often we only presumed,

that the quality at Gosfilmofond was better than anywhere else.

It was not the case that we specifically chose Metropolis

in order to maybe work on it.

That had not even occurred to us.

It was the other way round. The film chose us to give us work.

Storage rooms of the Russian film archive Gosfilmofond.

Films that were looted from the Reichsfilmarchiv are piling up here.

Long before Enno Patalas did business with the Soviets,

the employees of Gosfilmofond tried to reconstruct Metropolis themselves.

They finally wanted to see the film.

After the war, a lot of film reels were brought here from Germany,

and it wasn't known exactly what they were.

We tried long and hard to identify them.

Finally, Metropolis was unearthed from this pile.

There were five reels with English intertitles.

The film was given an archive number

and it was archived at Gosfilmofond in the Soviet Union.

Unfortunately, no-one could do anything with the film

because there were only fragments.

But fortunately, the Czechoslovak Filmovy Archiv in Prague

had the other fragments.

We decided to piece the film together from these fragments.

That's how Gosfilmofond and the Narodni Filmovy Archiv in Prague

created an improved American edit in 1961.

The first attempt at reconstructing Metropolis.

In 1971, the fragments were returned to the Staatliches Filmarchiv der DDR

which was also trying to reconstruct the film.

"Dear Mr Lang,

"may we approach you again with questions when we are finishing the film,

"especially with regards to the exact sequencing of the scenes

"and maintaining continuity between cuts?"

"Dear Mr Klaue,

"please find enclosed a copy of a brochure with quotes

"that Paramount issued to the American press at the premi�re,

"so you can see for yourself

"how thoughtless and dictatorial distributors in America were

"in the way they treated European films in the 1920s.

"Yours sincerely, Fritz Lang."

The comparison of the copies

that we had acquired from other archives

was done by a young employee at the film archive

who had just come from the film academy, Eckart Jahnke.

He was a few doors down from me

and one day he was all excited and said:

"Mr Klaue, Mr Klaue,

"there's a cat walking across the screen in a scene from one of the copies,

"but there's no cat in the other copy."

That was a revelation.

The same scene was shot with multiple cameras,

and maybe there were different negatives.

We had not even considered that possibility.

We were convinced that there was just one source,

one negative that had been edited.

We did not find the cat.

Instead we'll show a comparison of a different scene.

Josaphat's dismissal by Joh Fredersen, the ruler of Metropolis.

The American edit on the left, the German edit on the right.

Some scenes suggest

that they were indeed shot with two cameras.

In other instances, there are multiple takes of the same scene.

These subtle differences prove

how precise Fritz Lang was in translating his vision of a scene.

As far as it was possible, we completed the copy

and showed a first reconstructed edit

at the congress of the F�d�ration Internationale des Archives du Film

in 1972 in Bucharest.

It was acknowledged with interest,

but I have to say that the interest was not spectacular.

Maybe it was a bit too soon.

We were the first to attempt such a reconstruction

with international co-operation.

People weren't exactly filled with enthusiasm.

I'm sure that a few years later it would have fallen on more fertile ground.

I was a bit disappointed.

I had hoped that the experts would pat us on the back

and tell us what a good job we had done

and that we had taught them something new.

That was not the case yet.

The only other thing I was able to do for the film

happened by sheer coincidence.

I was on a visit to Stockholm.

The Svenska Filminstitutet showed me its facilities,

amongst other things its library

with books and information and advertising materials.

Amongst other things they showed me a big box

with unsorted censor-cards

from the German censorship agency and said:

"We have these as well."

And as I was rummaging through this box, as if it were a bargain bin,

what did I find? The censor-cards for Metropolis

which we didn't have when we reconstructed the film.

They didn't exist in Germany.

They are not available in any other archive.

I took them and gave them to Enno Patalas.

Metropolis as a mediator between East and West.

The censor-cards for the first version of the film,

issued in November 1926,

with the complete text of the original German intertitles.

Until 1980, they had to translate the English back into German.

These censor-cards are important documents

that show the original sequencing of the scenes.

Enno Patalas and his team used four copies for the restoration:

the shortened German version

that Ufa sent to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1936,

Moscow's "war loot" version from the Reichsfilmarchiv,

the version from London, as well as one from Melbourne, Australia.

Patalas was determined

to create the best and most complete version of Metropolis.

The premi�re of the reconstructed edit from Munich

took place in the autumn of 1987 in Moscow.

It was not a systematic piece of work, and when somebody asks me,

"How much time did you spend working on it?"

I cannot say 14 days or 8 years

because it was spread out over a number of years.

Quite often nothing happened for a few years,

until suddenly a missing piece was discovered somewhere

or there was an interesting opportunity for us to do something.

Cin�mathe�que Francaise in Paris.

There are 831 photos from the filming of Metropolis stored here

that Thea's brother Horst von Harbou had taken on the set.

Fritz Lang gave three albums of these photos

to the head of the Cin�math�que, Henri Langlois,

who kept them under wraps.

In 1983, they reappeared.

Images from lost scenes.

The Thin Man as Freder's minder.

This character, played by Fritz Rasp,

was almost completely removed from the film.

Rotwang at Hel's monument...

A key scene that explains his enmity with Fredersen.

But what's the best course of action?

Should the stills be used instead of the lost scenes

or should the lost scenes simply be described?

That was a question that was raised at the time in Munich.

The only photo that we used several times in the reconstruction

was the one of the monument.

There was the text on the monument from which the entire story originated,

and the head of Hel and this entire complex.

That was one of the most interesting discoveries.

The character of Hel was removed,

allegedly because the name Hel was too similar to the English word "hell"

and would have seemed strange to the American audience.

In 1984, Giorgio Moroder, composer of Hollywood soundtracks,

released his version of Metropolis.

It was the British version - but in colour.

The soundtrack was recorded by pop stars of the '80s,

such as Freddie Mercury, Bonnie Tyler, Adam Ant and Pat Benatar.

Thus Metropolis had arrived in pop modernity.

A cult classic - especially in America.

After I had completed Metropolis, I didn't like it at all.

I thought that a lot of things had been done too simplistically.

And I thought that, for example, the tenor of Metropolis,

that was written by Mrs von Harbou, my wife at the time,

that the mediator between hands and head,

i.e. between capital and worker, should be the heart...

I thought that cannot be the answer to problems in society.

THE MEDIATOR BETWEEN HEAD AND HANDS

MUST BE THE HEART!

But here's something strange: I dearly love today's youth.

I am 100% behind today's youth.

When I say "today's youth",

I mean America, of course, where I live.

And when you talk to today's youth

and ask them what they think about an establishment governed by computers,

or what they think is missing,

as they are opposed to this establishment,

then all of them say "the heart",

which makes me wonder: Maybe Harbou was 100% right after all.

Fritz Lang as a pop hero, celebrated by Madonna - with dangling monocle!

But unlike this music clip,

its model, Metropolis, is still disturbingly fresh.

At the beginning of the new millennium,

the story of Metropolis appeared to have come to a close.

In 2008, it took an unexpected new turn.

Of course I did not expect any more material to surface.

After 2001, we occasionally received calls or letters from people

who thought they had discovered something.

But invariably that turned out not to be true.

Or they had discovered something that was already known.

When I received the call from an editor at Die Zeit newspaper

who had heard about the story in Buenos Aires

and wanted to write about it,

and said there was new material in Buenos Aires - 16mm,

I immediately said no, and I said I wasn't interested at all.

I thought it was a copy that the Goethe- Institut had left there at some point

in the '50s or '60s.

Thanks, but 16mm...? We really don't need that.

We've got the camera negative and so forth.

You could say I was arrogant.

"Haughty", as Fritz Lang would put it.

Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires.

While film historians were looking for the lost material all over the world,

a complete edit lay here untouched.

An Argentinian distributor had acquired a complete edit of the film in 1927

before it was altered and shortened.

A copy of this edit found its way into the private collection of a film critic

and eventually became Argentinian state property.

What we found at the museum is a 16mm negative

that was reduced from a 35mm positive copy to this format.

We cannot say with absolute certainty when this negative was made,

but we think it must have been 1973 or 1974.

At this time, the Fondo Nacional de las Artes,

which owned the Pefia Rodriguez collection,

decided that it was too dangerous to store 35mm nitrate copies.

There was no money for a 35mm dupe negative,

so the film was copied to 16mm.

I think this material is the worst material I have ever seen in my entire life.

I have never seen such a badly damaged film before.

Still, it was enough of a reason for the Murnau-Stiftung in Wiesbaden,

which owns the rights to the film,

to start a new attempt at restoring the film.

Now Metropolis can be reconstructed almost without any gaps.

The missing material - almost a quarter of the film -

is going to be merged with the edit from 2001.

The handwritten score of the original music by Gottfried Huppertz

with countless notes

is useful for putting the montage together.

The original music has survived,

with all the sync points that are in the score,

which means that we know exactly

what the film must have looked like originally.

And that was our starting point because we noticed,

especially with the material that we now have from Argentina,

that the sequencing of the scenes

is tied closely to the music, and it works out very well.

And that was the starting point for our thinking.

We said that we should try to re-evaluate

everything that had been done when the film was restored

in terms of what the music tells us and what it says about the edit of the film.

But the music has to be edited from scratch as well,

as many musical passages could not be heard until now.

The music, when you first hear it,

and perhaps if you approach it quite critically,

harks back to the 19th century,

because it uses the musical language of the 19th century.

However, if you take a closer look

and if you don't just consider how the music sounds,

but how it interacts with the film,

then I think it can be said that the music was trend-setting,

because the dramaturgy that it develops

transcends what was usually heard in cinemas at the time,

i.e. purely illustrative music.

Metropolis in the digital age.

In the summer of 2009,

the dupe negative from Buenos Aires comes to Germany

and is scanned frame by frame.

Finally, after more than 80 years,

the lost images of Metropolis are returning to the screen.

When the film was copied,

all the damage and the stains were copied as well

and are now part of the image.

Restoration in the sense of physical treatment,

i.e. cleaning, immersing the film in liquid before it is copied

in order to remove scratches and so forth,

is no longer possible, because everything has been photographed.

All the scratches, stains and oil stains and so forth

are now part of the image and cannot be separated from it.

Digital enhancement of the images is the only possibility.

But as the images are so badly damaged,

compared to what they should look like,

there are limits to what can be achieved by digitally enhancing the images.

We have seen various attempts by different companies,

none of which were particularly convincing.

We had to find a compromise

and leave some of the damage intact

which documents the story of what happened to the film in every image.

With that in mind, it is OK for it to be seen.

It won't be possible to restore it perfectly,

but of course it is necessary to "clean" the images,

in inverted commas,

to such a degree that you can recognise what's in the image.

The image restoration is done with dedicated software.

The complete version of Metropolis 2010 can be played from a hard drive.

Our story would end here,

but as is so often the case with Metropolis, it continues.

In Switzerland we found these images by Berlin photographer Alex Stocker.

The Ufa Pavilion at the Nollendorfplatz in Berlin.

The first version of the film was only shown in this cinema.

And it was here that the Argentinian distributor saw it,

and from here, Metropolis went all around the world.