Raiders of the lost Metrópolis

Fritz Lang, in the mid twenties, thought up and created a dystopian fable suspiciously similar to our reality which was set, at that time, in a far future (2000 a.C). We are obviously talking about Metropolis. But we had to wait, paradoxically, until the first decade of the 21st century, in a situation very close to the capitalistic overview that this film portrayed, to enjoy it in all its original splendour, lost after the Second World War. This is a historical event, because nowadays only a few alive people have  seen the lost images before the discovery.

The Metropolis version known until today was the American one, which was significantly cut due to the puritanical system of the 1930´s film industry. Second World War and the fragility of the original film roll´s material, nitrate, a self-combustible material, caused what everyone believed to be an irreparable loss of all the copies from the master, opened by Lang in 1927. That is until  after some investigations, the Argentine film historian, Fernando Martínez Peña, tied up the loose ends from a restorer story, who told him that he had held with his own fingers the original Metropolis film in a performance – because the material was in such a bad condition- for two hours, that´s the movie´s length. Peña knew, although the original film´s length was two hours, that the preserved version around the world was shorter, so he started to work in the recovery of the lost scenes created by Lang.

The film shown  in the Buenos Aires  Film Museum was imported from Germany, not from USA. So Argentineans were, until 1973, the only ones in the world who enjoyed the full and original version of Metropolis. At first, the German Cinémathèque couldn’t believe this stunning discovery after so many false alarms in the past.

An extra twenty minutes of film, to add many key details and intensify the values of this masterpiece: the power of the love story, the class struggle and the erotism, neutralized in the cut version. The lost lenght was found in 2008 and, after a huge restoration process, comes to our screens, showing a new dimension of this innovative European classic. An incredible treat that (S8) brings to A Coruña in all its splendour. The screening will be accompanied by the original score played live by the Philarmonic Orchestra of Pontevedra.