Did anyone here see the 1927 movie Metropolis? If so, what exactly did you think of it? 
I thought that given the time it was made, that it was spectacular. Given the talents, tastes, and film skills and tech we have today, it looks…quaint. But I try to imagine how people in the 1920’s would have been amazed at the ‘technology’ shown.
And it told a pretty good story, to boot…
It was the first really ambitious Science Fiction movie, and it still holds up as eminently watchable. Rotwang’s scenery-chewing and the ham-handed social message were kind of appropriate for the medium’s level of development at the time.
I thought it was visually brilliant, though obviously tastes in story-telling make it seem antiquated now. Definitely worth watching if you ignore the clankiness, though.
Evil Robot Maria was disturbingly sexy.
Much is heavy handed and doesn’t date well, but the design is still spectacular.
I bought the Blu-ray last year, and have never gotten around to watching it.
Am going to start watching it this evening. (I’ll watch it over two or three evenings.)
No and, IMO, no.
List of science fiction films of the 1920s. Wikipedia doesn’t have an entry for sf films of the 1910s but there were many of them, some quite ambitious.
I saw the restored version at the George Eastman Museum a few years ago. The added material actually diminishes the coherency of whatever the heck it might have been trying to say. You need a thorough background in modernism and several other isms and ideologies to try to translate the ideas through the stylized filters. Everything that’s left is set design and art direction.
Agreed. It’s brilliant for its time…and not bad even today!
A brilliant introduction of a whole new fetish for generations to come! (Yeah, there are"steelies" as well as “furries.”)
I like the 1984 Moroder version the best.
Oh, you guys all suck. “It was good for THEN…” Fuck off.
One of the greatest fantasy films of all time. Rotwang is DELICIOUS. Love his combination of High Science and the Black Arts. Brilliant art direction and set design. I want my suits to look like Joh Frederson’s (the Master of Metropolis). I even like the novel by Thea Von Harbou, even if she DID stay and become a Nazi when hubby Lang ran off to Hollywood.
I first saw a butchered version on public television in the early 1970s, and have seen every reconstituted edition on big screens since…every few years a little more “lost” material shows up and gets put back in.
It’s aged just fine. Of course it looks weird and ham-fisted. it’s German.
My enjoyment of the film is marred a bit by knowing about Lang’s backstage behavior. For a director supposedly so concerned about the exploitation of the working classes, Lang was thoughtless and brutal to the many extras in the film. In the grand finale, when the city is flooding, the extras standing waist-deep in water were forced to stand there for hours, in ice cold water, while Lang did take after take involving dumping buckets of ice cold water on top of them. Many of the actors caught pneumonia, and were paid barely anything for their troubles.
AGGGGGGHHHHHH!!! Weimar-era German cinema is one of the great treasures of Western Art! Caligari! Golem! Nosferatu! Waxworks! Pabst, Murnau, Lang, Sternberg!
That was a response to Slithy Tove’s post.
Even if meant tongue-in-cheek, this is out of bounds for CS. Let’s avoid saying things like your last sentence.
Oh I love German Expressionism too. It’s just no place to go plumbing for subtle nuance. I’m convinced the panzefaust was originally their prototype of the ballpoint pen.
If you like my links, try this one about a superior remnant of German modernistic creative art.
Oooooooo, baby, you KNOW I love your links.
Lighten up, dude. It’s a thread about German Expresionism!