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1971: Behind the Iron Curtain
My vague understanding is that when the Soviets conquered Germany at the end of WWII,
they decided to conquer Metropolis as well.
It was war booty.
Since Ufa had English copies of the film,
well, now the Soviets had them — or at least some of them.
Among the Gosfilmofond holdings was the Paramount negative, 2,816m, or 9,239'.
That length confuses me terribly.
The Soviets concluded that they did not have enough to work with,
but then they discovered that the Czechoslovakians had the other fragments, I presume as war booty.
So, in 1971, Gosfilmofond in Moscow and Československý filmový archiv in Prague
collaborated on the earliest attempt at restoring the movie.
(Well, they thought it was the earliest attempt.
They didn’t know about some colleagues who had already begun a parallel project two years earlier.
We’ll get to that in just a minute.)
Vladimir Yurevich Dmitirev was involved in some principal capacity,
which I assume was administrative rather than hands-on .
The other people involved? I wish I knew.
I doubt this restoration was ever shown to the public.
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Gosfilmofond, in Moscow,
and the Československý filmový archiv, in
Prague, jointly produced an improved Paramount version that at least attained a length of
2,816 meters [9,239'], and was therefore more complete than the material known in Berlin, if still
shorter than the version edited by Pollock in
11 Note from Vladimir Dmitriev of the Russian organization Gosfilmofond to the author.
Prague obviously owned (received from Berlin?) the
short version of the Paramount version in which the Gosfilmofond integrated, as good as possible,
additional scenes into the original, negative fragment later received from Berlin and sent back again.
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After a hiatus of some 23 years, I am reading once again Enno Patalas’s essay,
“The City of the Future — A Film of Ruins: On the Work of the Munich Film Museum,”
from the Minden/Bachmann volume.
This lovely essay means more to me now than it did when I typeset this book,
because now I have the background to understand much of it, though by no means all.