METROPOLIS Germany 1925-27, Fritz Lang, 149 min.
Director: Fritz Lang
Screenplay: Thea von Harbou
Cast: Brigitte Helm, Alfred Abel, Gustav Fröhlich, Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Heinrich George, Fritz Rasp, Theodor Loos, Erwin Biswanger, Olaf Storm, Hans Leo Reich, Heinrich Gotho
Cinematography: Karl Freund, Günther Rittau
Set Designer: Erich Kettelhut, Otto Hunte, Karl Vollbrecht
Music: Gottfried Huppertz
Visual Effects: Eugene Schüfftan
Stage Costume: Aenne Willkomm
Production: Erich Pommer for UFA
The traditional section of the Festival, which converse with history and memory, presents Metropolis by Fritz Lang, one of the most important – probably the most of all - titles of the science fiction that celebrates 90 years. It was the spring of 1927 when it came out in theater room upsetting the audience.
Metropolis will have an inexhaustible impact on the entire history of cinema and it will become the founder of the entire Science Fiction genre. The present version is the most complete restoration existing today, made in 2010 by Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung and Deutsche Kinemathek following the discovery of 25 minutes of lost film in Argentina. After eighty years of spurious versions and a heavy reconstruction work by Enno Patalas, this is finally the film as Thea von Harbou had written it and Fritz Lang had directed it. With the original rebuilt soundtrack of Gottfried Huppertz performed by Berlin Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester directed by Frank Strobel.
Fritz Lang (1890-1976)
Austrian-born American motion-picture director whose films, dealing with fate and man’s inevitable working out of his destiny, are considered masterpieces of visual composition and expressionistic suspense. Lang had already created an impressive body of work in the German cinema before coming to the United States in 1934. Although it took him some 21 years to fashion 22 Hollywood films, arguably at least half of them are noirish masterpieces of menace—tone poems of fear and fate that have stood the test of time.
