"Raygun Gothic"-- more of Metropolis

Sorry, folks, I've just kinda become obsessed with this movie. When you think about the year it was made, and what they had available for special effects, film technology, etc, it's incredible.

Here's the Wikipedia version, edited for length...

Metropolis (film)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Metropolis is a silent science fiction film created by the famed Austrian-German director Fritz Lang. It was produced in Germany in the Babelsberg Studios and released in 1927 during the height of the Weimar Republic. In addition, it was the most expensive silent film of the time, costing approximately 7 million Reichsmark (equivalent to around $200 million in 2005) to make.^[1]

The screenplay was written in 1924 by Lang and his wife, Thea von Harbou, and novelized by von Harbou in 1926. It is set in a futuristic urban dystopia and examines a common science fiction theme of the day: the social crisis between labour and management in capitalism.

Note: There are multiple versions of Metropolis. The original, longest version remained unseen except for its initial premiere and release in Germany in 1927. Of this version, a quarter of the footage is now believed to be permanently lost. The U.S. version, shortened and re-written by Channing Pollock, is the most commonly known and discussed.

The film is set in the year 2026, in the extraordinary Gothic skyscrapers of a corporate city-state, the Metropolis of the title. Society has been divided into two rigid groups: one of planners or thinkers, who live high above the earth in luxury, and another of workers who live underground toiling to sustain the lives of the privileged. The city is run by Johann 'Joh' Fredersen (Alfred Abel).

The beautiful and evangelical figure Maria (Brigitte Helm) takes up the cause of the workers. She advises the desperate workers not to start a revolution, and instead wait for the arrival of "The Mediator", who, she says, will unite the two halves of society. The son of Fredersen, Freder (Gustav Fröhlich), becomes infatuated with Maria, and follows her down into the working underworld. In the underworld, he experiences firsthand the toiling lifestyle of the workers... Shocked at the workers' living conditions, he joins her cause.

Architecture and visual effects

The film features special effects and set design that still impress modern audiences with their visual impact—the film contains cinematic and thematic links to German Expressionism, though the architecture as portrayed in the film appears based on contemporary Modernism and Art Deco. The latter, a brand-new style in Europe at the time, had not reached mass production yet and was considered an emblem of the bourgeois class, and similarly associated with the ruling class in the film.

The effects expert, Eugen Schüfftan, created innovative visual displays widely acclaimed in following years. Among the effects used are miniatures of the city, a camera on a swing, and most notably, the so-called Schüfftan process, later also used by Alfred Hitchcock.

Part of Fritz Lang's visual inspiration for the movie came during a trip to Manhattan, New York. He is quoted on the DVD of the Murnau Foundation version as saying "I saw the buildings like a vertical curtain, opalescent, and very light. Filling the back of the stage, hanging from a sinister sky, in order to dazzle, to diffuse, to hypnotize." Lang, in his later years did claim New York inspired Metropolis, but a mention of the script for Metropolis being recently finished is made in the Licht-Bild-Bühne journal of June 1924, Lang traveled to New York in October of the same year.

The science fiction-melodrama style Metropolis uses is sometimes referred to as "raygun gothic".