| Return home |  |
Return to previous page |
1983: The Electronic Metropolis
Let’s get back to Ted.
To fill in the final three minutes of his off-air recording of the KCET broadcast,
he recorded the next showing, but there was no next showing.
Nonetheless, he recorded the next showing,
but, predictably, something went terribly wrong.
I just now discovered this comment that he posted under the alias Big_Bopper on 5 March 2008 at
Forums/TCM.com.
He wrote:
|
But I did find out who owns the BBC version - Janus Films.
I will explain. I recorded the BBC version in 1978 off KCET in los angeles. After that it was never shown again. However I erased over by mistake the last 5 min. Then in the 1980’s Metropolis was shown on Bravo & it was the BBC version but speeded up & bad quality. So I was able to rerecord the missing 5 min. As soon as they shake hands it cut away & said: Brandon films & then Janus films. Janus degraded the beautiful BBC version & trashed it. & suppressed it. Guess I was lucky to record it the first time! |
Ah. Time to do more research. When did Bravo present Metropolis?
Answer: October
1986!
Ted stitched the Bravo ending to the tail of his KCET recording. Here is the result:
|
Why? Because telecine operators and film-to-video technicians and projectionists
(and lab technicians and cinematographers and movie directors and movie producers and film historians)
all have this idea that “Silent movies were 1:1.33” and
“Old sound movies were 1:1.33”
and conclude that “They’re the same!
|
Just now, I made a discovery, and it knocked the wind out of me.
Since I started scribbling this Metropolis essay at about the beginning of 2023,
I have begun collecting various video editions of the movie, as well as whatever Janus Films catalogues I can find on eBay.
I just received the 1984 catalogue, THE CLASSIC COLLECTION:
A joint distribution venture of Janus Films and Films Incorporated, Third Edition.
Inside is a listing for The Electronic Metropolis.
Behold:
We see that Brandon Films sublicensed this edition to Janus Films and Films, Inc.
Or was it Janus Films that sublicensed this edition to Brandon Films and Films, Inc.?
The 126-minute audio would play properly at 20fps, but what 16mm projector can run at 20fps?
So it was played at 24fps, always, everywhere.
The Janus/FI catalogue supplies a running time of (approximately) 93 minutes, but that was for the previous Associated British edition,
which had been surrendered by this time.
The Electronic Metropolis was about 105 minutes at 24fps.
Oh my, what a mess!
You want to know why?
I’ll tell you why, because I’ve lived through this narrative countless times.
The boss, who has never seen a single movie in the Janus catalogue and who never will,
orders a grunt, “Get me a running time on Metropolis.”
The grunt pulls out an old 35mm print that is about to be returned to the license holder,
and he knows enough from experience to guesstimate and report back,
“About 93 minutes.”
And that’s what goes into the catalogue.
Nobody bothers to check the new edition against the old edition.
If somebody does mention to the boss that “The new edition is eleven minutes longer than the old edition,”
the boss will have one of two reactions, either, “Clear out your desk and get out of here,”
or, “Who cares?”
No matter where you work, the most surefire way of getting canned
is to hold a sincere commitment to the company’s mission statement.
That’s a terminable offense.
The catalogue, by the way, is chock-full of movies that I never suspected were in any way even vaguely associated with Janus.
Shows how little I know.
Anyway, this calls for an investigation,
but now, after all these decades, it is almost impossible to determine anything.
Below you will find a few factoids, but precisely how they fit together and why,
we may never learn.
Ted made yet another discovery:
The Jahnke/Fitzwater/Davies edition of Metropolis had been issued on VHS after all!
Alas, it was not so simple.
This was not a VHS cassette that you could purchase from your neighborhood video shop.
There was a problem, a huge, huge problem.
Anyway, he helpfully referred us to a pair of OCLC listings as they appear on WorldCat:
The running time is approximate and was less than 107 minutes and certainly less than 120 minutes.
It had to have been 105 minutes plus some extra time for logos and copyright notices and the FBI warning.
Now, do you see a teensy problemette with those OCLC listings?
They list 1,185 + 229 libraries that have some sort of video of Metropolis,
but those listings include all 135 + 62 editions,
but how do we find the Voyager edition?
Needle in a haystack.
Well, a librarian just taught me a trick.
Then, when I got home, I accidentally discovered another trick.
OCLC item # 18542569: UCI University of California at Irvine, Multimedia Resources Center (MRC), Irvine, CA 92623, (949) 824-6836 ,
PN1997 .M436213 1983.
OCLC item # 18542569: Manhattanville College Library, 2900 Purchase St, Purchase, NY 10577, (914) 323-5275 ,
AV PN1997 .M486 1983 Video cassette.
OCLC item # 1325403620: Enoch Pratt Free Library, 400 Cathedral St, Baltimore, MD 21201, (410) 396-5395 ,
VIDEOTAPE(P).
Just found two images on eBay that are of some interest.
Let’s look first at a front cover:
Yes, this is what the hard-black-plastic Voyager VHS shells all looked like,
with that plain black background and images along the right side.
They were bigger than what you would expect, with lots of extra room on the inside.
Do you see what I see?
It should be screaming at you.
Let’s enlarge a detail:
That’s blurry. Let me type it out for you:
Not for retail sale or home video sale or rental
Distributed with
Non-Theatrical and Public Performance Rights
by The Voyager Company
a joint venture of Janus Films and Voyager Press
Distributed with
Non-Theatrical and Public Performance Rights
by The Voyager Company
a joint venture of Janus Films and Voyager Press
Now isn’t that interesting?
No wonder I so seldom ran across these Voyager Company VHS tapes!
It’s going to be almost impossible to find one of these.
Now, there was a fellow who called himself festofspirit
who, in 2013, put up an auction of his
“JANUS FILM COLLECTION - with PUBLIC PERFORMANCE RIGHTS: THIRTY-ONE FILMS on VHS - $79.”
He stated:
|
JANUS FILMS WITH NON-THEATRICAL RIGHTS - 16 VHS VOLUMES containing 31 FILMS
These VHS videos are from my personal collection and they come with Non-Theatrical Public Performance Rights for public exhibition in non-theatrical venues -- meaning they can be shown in a club, library, museum, gallery, restaurant, bar, etc. The videos are in FINE condition and almost all of the VHS (NTSC) tapes come in elegant hard shell cases. 16 VHS Videos containing 31 Films, including the three volume Janus Shorts Collection. These originally sold for $700 as a set.
F.W. Murnau’s NOSFERATU
Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS Masaki Kobayashi’s KWAIDAN (on 2 Videos) Fred Zimmerman’s HIGH NOON Akira Kurosawa’s DODES’KA-DEN Akira Kurosawa’s YOJIMBO Akira Kurosawa’s RASHOMON Carlos Saura’s BLOOD WEDDING Marcel Camus’ BLACK ORPHEUS Jean Cocteau’s BEAUTY AND THE BEAST Jean Cocteau’s ORPHEUS Jean Cocteau’s TESTAMENT OF ORPHEUS PLUS THE JANUS SHORTS COLLECTION VOLS. 1, 2, & 3
This three volume collection of nineteen short, groundbreaking films are between 6 minutes to 55 minutes in length
and have collectively won almost every short film award in the world.
Many of these incredible short films have never been released elsewhere on VHS or DVD,
including THE BESPOKE OVECOAT by Jack Clayton, Godfrey & Lerner’s DO IT YOURSELF CARTOON KIT,
Jan Lenica’s LABYRINTH, Walerian Borowczyk’s RENAISSANCE and LES JEUX DES ANGES,
Wendy Toye’s THE STRANGER LEFT NO CARD,
Lutkovy’s haunting anti-war film THE MAGICIAN
and many more (see list below).
Three VHS (NTSC) videos in elegant hard shell cases:
Jack Clayton’s THE BESPOKE OVECOAT
Godfrey & Lerner’s DO IT YOURSELF CARTOON KIT Jan Lenica’s LABYRINTH Walerian Borowczyk’s RENAISSANCE and LES JEUX DES ANGES Wendy Toye’s THE STRANGER LEFT NO CARD Lutkovy’s THE MAGICIAN Polansky’s THE FAT & THE LEAN and TWO MEN AND A WARDROBE De Daunant’s CORRIDA INTERDITE Cocteau’s BLOOD OF A POET Bunuel’s UN CHIEN ANDALOU Reiniger’s PAPAGENO Vukotić’s ERSATZ THE FLY ENTER HAMLET Tadeusz Wilkosz’s BAGS Bettiol’s ACT WITHOUT WORDS Sechan’s THE STRINGBEAN Chris Marker’s LA JETEE SHIPPNG BY USPS MEDIA MAIL WITH DELIVERY CONFIRMATION
ABOUT ME: Lover of fine quality audio/video for three decades.
Moving overseas in the spring, so I am selling almost all of my collection.
|
Now let’s turn that VHS box over:
The covers were photographed out of focus, and the writing on the back is difficult to make out,
but, yes, I can detect Metropolis in there.
It took me a long time, but I was eventually able to read through the blurs:
| Aku Aku | ||
| Androcles and the Lion | ||
| Ashes and Diamonds | ||
| L’Avventura | ||
| Ballad of Narayama | ||
| Beauty and the Beast | ||
| Belles of St. Trinian’s | ||
| Billy Liar | ||
| Black Narcissus | ||
| Black Orpheus | ||
| Blythe Spirit | The League of Gentlemen | Sanjuro |
| Blood Wedding | The Little Theatre of Jean Renoir | Secret Agent |
| The Blue Angel | Lola Montez | Seven Samurai |
| Le Bonheur | The Love Goddesses | The Seventh Seal |
| Breaking the Sound Barrier | Loves of a Blonde | Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors |
| Caesar and Cleopatra | M | Shoot the Piano Player |
| Closely Watched Trains | The Magician | The Shop on Main Street |
| The Conversation | Major Barbara | The Silence |
| Dead of Night | The Man in the White Suit | Smiles of a Summer Night |
| The Devil and Daniel Webster | Man of Aran | The Spirit of the Beehive |
| Dodes’ka Den | The Man Who Knew Too Much | La Strada |
| The Emperor Jones | Metropolis | Summertime |
| The Elusive Pimpernel | Miss Julie | Tales of Beatrix Potter |
| The Fallen Idol | Mon Oncle Antoine | Tales of Hoffman |
| Floating Weeds | Mondo Cane | That Obscure Object of Desire |
| Forbidden Games | Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday | The Third Man |
| Gate of Hell | The Most Dangerous Game | The 39 Steps |
| Grand Illusion | Nicholas Nickleby | This Sporting Life |
| The Great Chase | Oliver Twist | The Threepenny Opera |
| Hidden Fortress | Orpheus | Throne of Blood |
| Hobson’s Choice | Our Daily Bread | Through a Glass Darkly |
| The Horse’s Mouth | Pandora’s Box | Tunes of Glory |
| Ikuru | Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist | Ugetsu |
| I’m All Right Jack | Playtime | Umberto D |
| The Importance of Being Earnest | Pygmalion | The Virgin Spring |
| Jour de Fete | Rashomon | Waltz of the Toreadors |
| Kanal | The Red Balloon | Whistle Down the Wind |
| Kind Hearts and Coronets | Red Beard | Wild Strawberries |
| Kon Tiki | Richard III | The Winslow Boy |
| The Lady Vanishes | La Ronde | Winter Light |
| The Ladykillers | Rules of the Game | Yojimbo |
| The Lavender Hill Mob | Sabotage | Young and Innocent |
So, there we go!
(Very strange, because four of those were never Janus titles, as far as I knew.
Well, learn sumpn every day.
I italicized the titles that I am surprised to see here.)
The Voyager VHS edition was not something you could pick up at your local video shop.
Nope.
It was available only to professionals, only as part of a package, and it was not for home use.
As you saw from the composite clip above,
the end credits proclaim A BRANDON FILMS RELEASE,
and the 1983 copyright is attributed to both the BBC and Janus Films.
Zo, let’s explore Brandon Films.
Yes, this was the Brandon Films that for a while was part of Macmillan-Audio-Brandon Films.
What probably happened was that Brandon, upon learning that Janus had just lost its rights to Metropolis,
discovered that English-speaking-American 16mm rights to the Eckart Jahnke edition
were available from the Frankfurt-based Deutsches Institut für Filmkunde (DIF).
According to Enno Patalas (Minden/Bachmann, p. 112),
“In the seventies, the Deutsches Institut für Filmkunde (The German Institute
for Film Studies) distributed a copy of this version that had accidentally
been made using sound film stock.”
Either this was mistranslated or Enno didn’t proofread well enough.
Being printed onto sound film stock is not the issue.
The issue is being printed through a sound-film aperture.
The left side went missing.
Indeed, Janus received a 35mm print on Russian stock with the left side lopped off.
If the left side is missing on the 35mm submaster, then the height will also go missing when it is reduced to 16mm.
I wonder if this is what was shown on German television.
Just had another epiphany.
I bet that the DIF at first offered beautifully made full-aperture silent 35mm prints.
Then, after BBC2 surrendered its audio accompaniment,
the tape made its way back to East Germany,
which shot it off to Russia to marry it to a dupe neg.
Soviet bureaucracy was enough to demoralize anybody, and so the job was carelessly done.
The DIF must have purchased a few prints of that to ship out to cinemas that preferred to have an audiotrack.
I bet that’s what happened.
And I bet that the edition shown on ZDF television was this lousy new Russian print.
Whatever became of that Fitzwater/Davies audio master? Does anybody know?
Anyway, what Enno Patalas recalled probably answers one of my principal questions, a question of cosmic importance:
Where did BBC2 get Metropolis?
Almost certainly from the DIF.
Somehow, the DIF had in its collection the BBC2’s electronic audiotrack.
My guess is that a stipulation of the contract is that the DIF would earn that soundtrack once BBC2’s license expired.
Armed with the 105-minute copy negative and with the 126-minute accompaniment on time-coded audiotape,
the DIF paid a cheap lab to marry the two elements.
Nobody apart from a few sound technicians understood that the accompanying soundtrack was designed to fit a 20fps showing, not 24fps.
The sound technicians, being mere sound technicians, did not have the ear of any of the executives.
The sound technicians, being mere sound technicians, had no interest in conveying this information, because they didn’t care;
they were just performing a job to earn a biweekly paycheck.
The sound technicians, being mere sound technicians, understood perfectly that had they made any mention of this,
they would have been fired for insubordination.
On the off-chance that the sound technicians had cared to convey this information,
they realized it was a lost cause, because no executive on earth would have understood or cared in the least
or would have even had the patience to hear any explanations.
When a mere technician tries to explain a problem to an executive,
the executive will erupt in fury and will shut that mere technician up forever, most likely by immediate dismissal.
Since this work was done in the USSR, multiply the frustrations by 389,957.
So, what did the techies do?
They overspeeded the tape by 20% in order to create a new audio negative.
Now you know why the image and the sound were so utterly ruined.
Only after you have lived through such experiences repeatedly, for decades, can you read between the lines and detect this story.
This between-the-lines background story is not merely obvious, it is screamingly, painfully, agonizingly obvious.
If you have never worked in the technical end of movies, you will be convinced that my summary is a load of codswallop,
invented by a paranoid mind, absent any evidence.
If you have ever worked in the technical end of movies, you will recognize that my summary is exact.
Upon signing its contract with Brandon,
the DIF paid the Russian lab to run off a handful of prints and shipped those prints to Brandon.
Brandon had a standing contract with Janus, and Janus wanted to put the film back into its catalogue.
Nobody at Brandon or at Janus ever bothered to watch, inspect, or even spot-check this edition.
Just like they say: Do what you love, and the money will follow.