Thursday, July 18, 2024

Metropolis (1927)

Fritz Lang's pioneering silent film is available on YouTube colorized.  If you are not familiarav3  with it,  it is a dystopia with a small population of capitalist overlords and vast numbers of proletarian industrial works.  While not quite at the Eloi and Morlock level of The Time Machine, it is still a dark vision of a future that has only been approached by a few nations committed to ending capitalism. It is unique and advanced in its filmmaking technique. 

The often Olympian sets art-deco of course, and the miniatures of the city of thr future with airplanes flying between buildings and swarms of industrial workers marching up ramps must have seemed pretty astonishing in 1927.

There are some very stylized sequences with workers in front of a,machine that eventually reveals itself as Moloch with workers moving in a way that reminds you that humans in service to the machine are like parts of the machine. 

The makeup and exaggerated acting style are partly a leftover from traditional stage acting where everything was a bit over the top to make sure you get in the back rows and the limits of expressing emotion without audio.

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