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May 1984: Giorgio Moroder
Click to play.
Giorgio Moroder presents Metropolis (DVD Blu-ray Trailer)
Kino Lorber, https://youtu.be/leAVS0OC6Ts
If you’re curious, here’s one of the British versions.
Do you remember when this was announced?
I remember when it was announced.
A friend and I were chatting about it,
wondering about the claim that it was supposed to be more complete than anything seen here before,
even though it would be less than 90 minutes long.
We were both puzzled.
“Well, what about what we saw on PBS? That was a lot longer!”
Maddeningly, we could never learn where the PBS version had come from, where it had gone, where it could be seen again.
It opened with the Janus logo, but it was entirely unlike the Janus version, which made us even more confused.
It was as though it was a phantom that appeared out of nowhere and then disappeared again,
for the sole purpose of making the few people who tuned in sound delusional.
Totally maddening, totally totally absolutely maddening.
And frustrating, too.
The full story has never been told and may never be told, but here are the fragments that have been told.
First, here is what Enno Patalas said (Minden and Bachmann, p. 117):
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In 1980, the Hollywood composer Giorgio Moroder (Midnight Express)
came to visit me and told me that he wanted to add an electronic
score to a silent film — he asked whether I had an idea — a German
one? Surely there could only be one: Metropolis.
Then, when Moroder was working on his rock music clip version, I
drew his attention to the fact that the best original material was probably
to be found at MoMA; the copy lent to Moroder by the copyright
owner, the Murnau foundation, could only be a duplicate of this material,
of the next or even the following generation. When I heard the
Ufa history of the nitrate negative from Eileen Bowser, Iris Barry’s successor
in the MoMA Film Department, and when I heard further that it
had still not been copied to safety film, I persuaded her to do business
with Moroder, to let him pay for an interim positive and then to let him
draw his negative from that. This is the way they did it. During the
next FIAF meeting she thanked me for my advice. What would happen
now to the nitrate negative, I asked her, now that she had her fine
grain? She replied with another question: “You wanna have it?”
We only had to pay for the transport to Germany back in 1986 to
have the MoMA negative of 2,632 metres, including the inserted
MoMA intertitles, shipped to the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz, which made
the copy for us that became the basis of our further work. In 1987,
Gerhard Ullmann and Klaus Volkmer mounted a 3,153-metre working
and screening copy (the “Munich version”). all material and information
we had collected was incorporated into this copy on the basis of a
montage plan that was in turn based on the piano score, the screenplay,
and the censorship card.
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I read that passage above so many times, over and over and over,
and I thought I understood it, but I did not really understand it.
Now I think I do, though.
The Murnau-Stiftung did not have access to MoMA’s lavender, which had vanished somehow.
Perhaps it had gone up in flames?
Perhaps it had rotted?
Ufa’s camera negative had similarly vanished, probably during the confusion of WWII.
The Murnau-Stiftung had access only to the BFI’s copy negative,
which was an identical twin of the MoMA copy negative,
and derived a duplicating positive from that to derive yet another copy negative,
thereby losing significant quality.
I assume that happened in 1966, when the Murnau-Stiftung purchased the underlying rights to Metropolis —
actually, it purchased Ufa and all its holdings outright, as far as I know.
Moroder initially sourced the Murnau-Stiftung’s material,
but Patalas told him that other material, closer to the original, was at MoMA.
Since, unlike archives, Moroder had funding, he derived further copy negatives from MoMA’s nitrate copy negative.
He must have run off three.
One was for his own release, and the others he donated to MoMA and to the Murnau-Stiftung,
and now it all begins to make sense, yes?
So, Enno Patalas, in his published account, claimed that he was the one who informed Giorgio Moroder that the Murnau-Stiftung
had only a duplicate of the MoMA copy negative.
Okay.
Well, now we dig a bit more.
Robert Harris, in a pair of postings to Nitrateville, said something different.
Witness his message of
Sun Jul 02, 2023 5:37 am:
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C. 1981, Tom Luddy
asked me to help Giorgio Moroder locate better elements, if they were available.
I spent a day at his home, discussing the facts and fiction that I knew at the time.
I should state, loud and clear, that at no time had I ever formally researched the subject toward an attempt at restoring the film.
After viewing parts of the print that he had been sent by his licensee in Germany, it became apparent that the element
that had been delivered was a dupe of the MOMA material, with their inter-titles intact.
That bit of knowledge was able to take him back
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As noted, I was involved tangentially.
I can tell you, as fact, that when I informed Giorgio that his German elements were a copy of MOMA’s he was surprised.
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Then it gets interestinger and interestinger.
Here is a quote from Martin Koerber’s “Notes on the Proliferation of Metropolis (1927).”
(Isn’t that title funny? Translations can be dangerous.
He meant diffusion, not proliferation, but in German the two words can both be rendered as verbreitung.
P.S.: No, I was wrong.
That was not what he meant at all.
He did not use verbreitung; he used überlieferung,
which means transmission, the handing down of, the passing on of,
and which can therefore mean lore, tradition, custom.
What a coincidence! That’s what my whole web essay is about!):
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Another nitrate copy, tinted in orange only, is on deposit from David Packard at
the UCLA Film & Television archive. I was allowed to inspect it, and it even contained
one short scene that was found nowhere else, but unfortunately the copy could never
be made available for the restoration. (The scene in question thus had to be lifted from
the Moroder version; obviously Moroder had access to this copy when he made his
version....)
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I wish somebody would identify that sequence.
Which bit was it? Please?
This Packard print really does need to be scanned to 4K or higher and proliferated to Wiesbaden or Berlin.
Now that you know a little bit about the background,
it is time to ponder and reflect upon the following quote from
Chuck Frownfelter,
“The Story Of Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS (1927),” Cinema Scholars, 25 December 2022:
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One day, during the early 1980s,
Oscar-winning composer Giorgio Moroder
(Midnight Express, Flashdance, Top Gun, Scarface)
happened to be at home and playing some music in the background while Metropolis aired on television.
He was suddenly struck by how effortlessly the music seemed to match up with the visuals.
A strange idea suddenly occurred to him:
how it might be fun to sponsor a restoration of the film and score it with an original contemporary soundtrack.
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It was on TV? He was in Los Ángeles at the time.
I’m curious.
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My oh my. That was the music that was ubiquitous in my life from ages 2 through maybe as late as 9, and I never knew what it was.
All day and all night, on the radio, on TV, over the PA systems at Macy’s and at Gimbels, everywhere. Nonstop.
And in all those years, I so desperately wanted to listen to it carefully, attentively,
but I never could, not even once, because people would talk over it, or cut it off midway, or play it at whisper level.
Then, when I was 9 or so, it just disappeared.
Now I know what it is: Bert Kaempfert, “That Happy Feeling” (1962).
It was a cousin of Guy Warren’s “Eyi Wala Dong” (1956).
Both songs were descended from Georg Bürger’s
“
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Metropolis was broadcast on
Friday, 5 September 1980, at 5:00pm, on KBSC independent channel 52 in Los Ángeles.
So far, so good.
We have a match.
Except for one problem: That’s not when Moroder saw the movie on television.
SIX MONTHS after he saw it on TV, he visited Enno Patalas, but he visited Patalas in 1980.
So, the sequence of events is impossible.
Fortunately, we can work out that he saw the movie not in the early 1980’s, but in late 1979, on
Monday, 26 November 1979, at 2:30pm on KBSC.
Now I wonder: Where did that copy of the film come from?
Who distributed it?
MoMA would not allow a commercial station to air its print.
The PBS license to the BBC2 edition had expired, and I am not aware of anyone else ever licensing it.
Janus Films did not release its films to commercial television.
Griggs Moviedrome was for the most part only for home use.
That leaves two possibilities:
either Brandon Films or Thunderbird.
Since it was a two-hour time slot, we can eliminate Brandon, because the Brandon edition was 119 minutes at 24fps,
and that would have left insufficient time for commercial breaks.
Could this have been from Thunderbird? How odd.
This is confusing, and it is only now becoming slightly clear to me.
KBSC Channel 52 was a special channel.
It was an over-the-air broadcast station, local, during the daytime hours.
At night, there was a switch, with a change of logo, to
ONTV,
the very first such station, which was just beginning to blossom into a small subscription network.
The ONTV programming was
scrambled.
Viewers who wished to watch the programming needed to pay for a subscription in order to get a descrambler,
or they had to get a 13-year-old to defeat the protections with a couple pennies’ worth of wire.
(“I
remember that all it took was a 3-foot-long piece of twin lead being attached to the 300 Ohm
connections on the TV and the regular coax on the 75 Ohm connection. You would
slowly cut ½-inch sections off of the twin lead till you attenuated the
signal of the scrambling being injected. Later you could use the little
barrel descramblers that were getting common on cable TV of the era.”)
When local programming ceased each evening, there was an announcement to the effect of,
“You are now watching ONTV. Please turn on your decoder box.”
(Here is an example.)
ONTV showed exclusive broadcasts occasionally,
but mostly it showed brand-new Hollywood movies.
Here is an example of a monthly schedule,
which demonstrates that there were just three or four programs per night.
So, was it the local station or ONTV that showed Metropolis?
The TV schedules in the newspapers let us know.
On
Monday, 26 November 1979, Metropolis was broadcast at 2:30pm, but ONTV did not come on until 9:45pm.
On
Friday, 5 September 1980, Metropolis was broadcast at 5:00pm, but ONTV did not come on until 7:30pm.
That is definitive.
It was local programming, and my best guess is that it was a Thunderbird print.
Indeed, if it were a Thunderbird print, that would help to explain
why Moroder preferred to watch the film while he had rock music blasting on his radio.
Moroder decided to convert a German silent into something resembling a string of music videos,
and my guess is that he saw an aftermarket, or a parallel market, in issuing those songs one by one to MTV or some similar outlet.
In 1980, he asked Patalas for suggestions on which German silent would be appropriate.
Patalas, probably hoping this would lead to funding for preservation, suggested Metropolis.
Moroder was able to access at least three important sources unavailable to Patalas:
the Harry Davidson print, John Hampton’s print or fragment, and David Packard’s print.
By 1984, Moroder’s revamped edition was on movie screens,
and that is when Moroder gave a different version of events.
Annette Insdorf,
“A Silent Classic Gets Some 80’s Music,”
The New York Times vol. 3 no. 46,127,
Sunday, 5 August 1984, sec. 2, pp. 15, 20:
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...Admitting that the project
was sparked by the success of Abel
Gance’s reconstructed and newly
scored “Napoleon” — and by the suggestion
of “someone at Paramount
that I do something with a silent
movie” — he recounted the genesis of
the project. “I didn’t plan to reconstruct
‘Metropolis,’” he said, “but
the problem was the lack of a definitive
print. When I bought the rights,
all I wanted to do was put the music
on the movie.”
He first saw “Metropolis” at the
age of 17 “and then again quite
often,” he said. “I knew it didn’t need
a classical score — which I’m not too
good at anyway. Then I watched 20 silent
movies to make sure there was
nothing better than ‘Metropolis’ for
this project, and did a 15-minute
tryout just to see how it would work. I
was really excited, and started to inquire
about the rights.”...
...Six
months later, Mr. Moroder met Enno
Patalas of the Film Museum in Munich,
an expert in German silent film.
He told the composer that he found
some footage of “Metropolis” at the
Library of Canberra in Australia. “I
thought I had the official version,”
Mr. Moroder recalled, “but then I
heard of this footage and started to
read about ‘Metropolis,’ and finally
realized that I had to reconstruct it.”
After a long period of negotiation
with the Australians, he received a
videotape of their version, which contained
approximately eight scenes
that were new to Mr. Moroder.
Having learned that John Hampton,
a collector in Los Ángeles, had
an original nitrate — and therefore
chemically volatile — copy of “Metropolis,”
Mr. Moroder checked it
out, but confessed how scared he was
“because he had that footage in the
trunk and it could have exploded at
any second! But he had a few things
which nobody else had.” The next
stop was the Censorship Ministry in
Berlin, where he consulted the original
cue cards, as well as the original
score with hand notations of the conductor.
I found that two major things
were missing,” he said excitedly.
“One is the character of Hel, which
an American editor took out in 1927
because he thought the name wasn’t
right for American audiences! I
couldn’t find any picture of Hel [the
hero’s dead mother]. By pure coincidence,
someone from the Film Museum
went to the Cinémathèque in
Paris, and in this disorganized place,
he found 400 pictures in an album.
One showed the tombstone of Hel, but
I couldn’t use it because it was a production
still and you could see the
cameraman’s head! So I recreated
the monument and filmed it.”
The second missing element concerned
a worker with whom the hero —
the son of the man who dominates Metropolis —
changes clothes. In the
files of Forest Ackerman, Fritz
Lang’s former agent, the musician-cum-sleuth
discovered a few stills
which explained where the worker
had gone: Yoshiwara, the Temple of
Sin, about which Mr. Moroder added
approximately 45 seconds with the
stills.
He remembers this period as one of
“making phone calls all over the
world, trying to find new footage. I
got a clue that a guy had
a 9.5 millimeter
copy of ‘Metropolis’ in San Diego.
I went there and found that
the copy was made with subtitles.
Somehow the movie flowed much better.
So, although this was after the
music was done, I took out all the cue
cards which had dialogue and made
them subtitles.”
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Curious, yes?
He said he first saw Metropolis when he was 17.
So, when was he born?
On 26 April 1940.
That means he saw that movie sometime in 1957 or early 1958, and I don’t think it was in release at that time.
Did he see it at a museum or at a library?
By the way, he said he found a unit still of the Hel monument:
 The photo that Moroder found but couldn’t use. |
 Moroder’s invention. |
 The true image was later found. The sculpture is a miniature inserted onto the frame by mirrors. |
Now let us hear more from Moroder, from the little insert that accompanies the Kino Blu-ray edition:
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Growing up, I was an avid fan of classic movies and Metropolis was always
one of my favorites. A decade into my career as a composer for motion
pictures, I began a three-year endeavor to restore the film, with an eye towards
introducing it to new audiences. It was 1981, and by then Metropolis had
almost disappeared from circulation. I gathered elements of the film from all
over the world to create and restore the most complete version of Metropolis
possible (at the time)....
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You have by now noticed that Enno’s version of events does not match Moroder’s.
Yet it is easy to harmonize the variant accounts, and I suspect that they all do in fact fit together:
| 1957 | Moroder sees 16mm print of Metropolis at a museum |
| 26 Nov 1979 | KBSC Channel 52 (not ONTV) broadcasts Metropolis |
| ca May 1980 | Moroder visits Patalas, asks for suggestions, but does not specify Metropolis |
| ca May 1980 | Patalas suggests Metropolis |
| ca May 1980 | Moroder outbids Bowie |
Is that what happened? Heck if I know. But it fits, whether it’s right or wrong.
As we witnessed above, Enno Patalas and Bob Harris each took credit for telling Moroder that the Murnau-Stiftung edition was a mere copy of the MoMA edition.
Can we harmonize those two stories?
Maybe.
Postulation: Harris informed Moroder that the material that the Murnau-Stiftung had supplied was copied from MoMA’s edition,
and when Moroder ran that idea by Patalas, he confirmed that it was true.
Is that what happened? Heck if I know. But it fits, whether it’s right or wrong.
Thor Joachim Haga, “Keeping up the Energy — A Conversation with Composer Giorgio Moroder,”
Montages International Edition, 16 November 2015:
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First of all, I loved the film.
It took me about two years to research.
I had a very hard time finding the prints.
The Murnau-Stiftung doesn’t have anything or very little.
The majority I got from The Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Then I found
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So, Hampton had only 16 seconds, not the entire movie?
I’m confused.
Precisely which 16 seconds?
I’m dying to know.
Whatever happened to this fragment, or print, or whatever it was?
Does anybody know?
I need to study it.
Moroder was absolutely correct that the Murnau-Stiftung had very little material on the film.
As we know, all that the Murnau-Stiftung had was the 1963 Nordwestdeutscher edition with the Riethmüller score, cropped from the BFI copy negative,
and the 1965 Nordwestdeutscher edition with the Elfers score, which was slightly trimmed from the 1963 edition.
That was it.
The Murnau-Stiftung had nothing else, I am quite sure.
That is why Patalas referred Moroder to MoMA, and that led him onto a two-year global hunt for more material.
Now, take a wild guess.
Which edition did Moroder not check?
The Eckart Jahnke restoration from 1972!!!!!
Why didn’t he check it?
Probably because nobody ever bothered to tell him about it.
The censors had long before slashed the scene with the courtesans almost to nothing,
and so in Moroder’s version we see only a flash of it.
That scene was much more complete in the Eckart Jahnke edition.
There were surely other differences as well, but I have not checked the two editions against one another, shot by shot.
Anyway, the Eckart Jahnke edition is about 2,000' longer than the Moroder edition.
As far as I can tell, Moroder derived his edition from only four sources:
MoMA, Davidson, Packard, and Hampton.
I remember reading in the weekly Variety that when Moroder premièred his edition of Metropolis
at the Cannes festival, he decided to make it look more modern by instructing the projectionist
to crop it to 1:1.66 (.497"×.825").
The Variety journalist wrote that this was a most unfortunate decision.
Correct.
Metropolis absolutely should not be cropped.
Yet it was cropped when it reached cinemas shortly afterwards.
When the Moroder edition of Metropolis opened in Santa Fé in January 1985 at
El Paseo,
I decided to chance it one night.
I entered the lobby and asked if I could visit the booth.
Sure!
I went up.
The booth had a single machine with a platter.
(My vague memory is Century picture and sound, with Strong xenon, but I won’t swear to it.
Wish I could remember. Oh well. I can hardly remember anything about that booth or about that cinema.)
There was a young guy there,
and I saw that he was running Metropolis at 1:1.85 (.446"×.825"), standard American widescreen.
 On the film approx. .600"×.825" |
 Projected in American widescreen approx. .446"×.825" |
 On the film approx. .600"×.825" |
 Projected in American widescreen approx. .446"×.825" |
I looked at the print and saw that it was an optical reduction to Academy 1:1.375 (.600"×.825").
I asked why he was running it in widescreen.
The young guy said that the distributor had shipped in a loaner aperture and lens along with the movie,
but he had no idea what they were for and so he just left them on the shelf.
I explained to him what they were for, but he burst out,
“They don’t make those kinds of lenses anymore!”
I explained about focal lengths, and what they were and what they did, and I assured him that all focal lengths are still being manufactured.
He got a sly smile and began to get excited. “Let’s try it.”
So he closed the dowser in mid-scene and swapped the lens,
but there was just a massive blur of light all over the auditorium.
The focus ring was fastened tightly from the last cinema, and it would take a minute to loosen it and adjust the focus.
He yanked it out of the machine and plopped in the regular lens again.
I gave up and went home.
I never saw the Moroder edition until it popped up at the SUNYAB Woldman Theater in
Norton Hall on Monday, 19 November 1991, 7:30pm.
Of course, Woldman normally ran older movies at 1:1.85 (.446"×.825")
because unless a previous projectionist had specifically written in very large handwriting with indelible marker “1.33”
on the leader and tail of each reel,
the entire staff just assumed it was 1:1.85.
I knew that would happen again that night. I knew it I knew it I knew it.
Besides, all their apertures were misfiled, misshapen, lopsided.
Fortunately, I also knew that there was one projectionist there who trusted me and I hoped he would be on duty that evening.
He was!
I told him to plop in the longer lenses.
No! Wrong! I misremembered!
By this time I had taught him that it was better to roll down the different screen.
There were two roll-down screens, one wide but not tall, and other tall but not wide.
He no longer had to swap lenses to project the Academy aperture, not once I taught him this trick.
He rolled up the wide screen and dropped down the tall one,
and then I handed him the Academy apertures that I had in my pocket, and he used them.
That is how I at long last got to see the Moroder edition of Metropolis projected properly.
Though the Moroder edition had some material I had never known about before, it was overall less complete
and far less satisfying than what I had seen on PBS.
(Oh. The faculty member in charge of Woldman told me that unless a print says 1.33, it isn’t. So there.
So I sent a letter explaining the various formats to him.
He read it and he ran up to my projectionist buddy screaming at the top of his lungs, screaming bloody murder.
“THIS IS TOO COMPLICATED!!!! WE ARE NOT PROFESSIONALS!!!!!
IF I EVER SEE HIM IN HERE AGAIN I’LL F____N’ KILL HIM!!!!!
I’LL F____N’ KILL HIM!!!!!”
My projectionist buddy told me about that the next day, and, meh, that’s what all cinema and theatre managers are like.
That’s how they all behave.
All of them.
They’re a different breed.
What else can you expect?
I was hoping this guy would be different, but how could I have been so dumb?
That’s why I don’t work in theatre or cinema anymore.
Anyway, Woldman no longer shows movies.
The machines and the screens were moved away decades ago and
the auditorium has since been remodeled.)
So, no, the Giorgio Moroder edition was not a restoration
(and Giorgio is two syllables, not three).
Moroder incorporated a little bit of footage and a few stills that had not been seen in over half a century, but footage was trimmed.
Snip snip snip snip snip, everywhere you turn.
A second trimmed off of one shot, a few frames off of the beginning of the next shot, another two seconds off the end of the following shot.
He was trying to pick up the pace, apparently.
It worked, and I learned a great deal by watching that clever editing,
but Moroder and/or his crew reworded the titles and thus changed the plot.
Some shots were modified with newly filmed backgrounds and other shots were slowed down by frame duplication.
It was sort of funny to see that mirror shot of the stadium.
The original seam was quite obvious, but now it had a second seam because Moroder matted in a new sky.
(I thought it was a glass shot, then I read that it was front projection, but it was a mirror shot.)
The two parts of the image weaved differently, making it more obvious yet.
Most of the titles were chopped out and replaced with subtitles at the very bottom of the image.
The lab optically reduced to the Silent image to Academy for projection at .600"×.825", and,
since cinemas would crop the film to .446"×.825" or even smaller,
the distributor, Cinecom International Films, contacted each cinema, got the make and model of projectors
and got the screen height and throw,
and so knew which apertures and lenses to loan each cinema for the duration of the booking.
Just like I mentioned above.
Wasn’t that nice?
But we saw what happened in Santa Fé and I can guarantee you that the exact same thing happened nearly everywhere.
I’m being too generous.
The same thing probably happened EVERYWHERE (except at a single screening at Woldman).
You just can’t win. Really. Don’t even try.
If you try, you’ll just get frustrated and angry when everybody ignores you; so don’t even try.
This is why employers hated having me as an employee,
and this is why my coworkers hated having to deal with me.
I was meticulous and insisted on getting every detail right.
And that is why everybody from top boss down to the janitor hated my guts.
They all thought I was just trying to show them up.
My view was that they were all just terribly insecure.
I lost that battle every last time.
It’s impossible to get away with doing your job properly. Impossible.
In principle, I have nothing against the Moroder version, provided it is projected correctly,
and provided that audiences are given to understand that it is not the original film, but a modification,
and that something resembling the original can be seen elsewhere.
Actually, I quite enjoy Moroder’s version.
Not the sort of music I would normally listen to, but it was okay on the film.
No objections. The image looked pretty good, too.
I wish he had not trimmed the scenes, but the trimming was rather tasteful and it taught me a great deal about editing.
Yes, I’m a hypocrite.
Normally I decry the alteration of so much as a frame of a film, by anybody,
but I cannot bring myself to gripe about what Moroder did.
Why?
Because this was an early step towards the rehabilitation and repopularization of the film.
Not a perfect early step, but a good one, and the result is engaging.
As with the Riethmüller and Elfers and Fitzwater/Davies editions,
it is a work of art in its own right.
Whether one likes that work of art or not is not the issue.
Some people hate Moroder’s edition, but I have no idea why.
It’s not the original film, true, but it doesn’t pretend to be.
I consider it a gateway, an addictive foretaste
of yet greater pleasures hidden away in repertory houses and in the dark corners of video shops
and in museums and in archives.
At least the Moroder version was tinted.
That much was right, thank heaven!
Also, please remember that it was Moroder, at his own expense, with his own labor,
who unearthed previously unknown materials on this movie,
and thereby got a second round of restorations going.
We owe him a massive debt of gratitude.
Gustav Fröhlich attended the Paris première of Moroder’s version of Metropolis in August 1984,
and he was delighted with the new version, finding it quite beautiful.
Now, those who had seen a MoMA print or a Janus print or the PBS broadcast had seen pretty nice copies of Metropolis.
Those who had seen public-domain copies had not seen nice copies.
Let me show you an example of a public-domain copy side-by-side with the Moroder edition:
My guess is that those who had seen a public-domain copy of Metropolis absolutely refused to see the movie again,
no matter what claims were made for it.
My guess also is that those who had seen a public-domain copy
but who were nonetheless dragged kicking and screaming to a Moroder screening were totally blown away.
The film had not looked so good, so sharp, so clear, so vivid in decades.
Though it was far from perfect, the improvement in visual quality was monumental, well-nigh revolutionary.
Now, I want you to think about something.
As you can see from sifting through the movie reviews in 1984 and 1985,
as well as from scrolling through online comments from fans,
there was and remains a great deal of hostility towards Moroder’s edition.
Oddly, nobody seemed to notice that nearly every scene was trimmed. (Am I the only person who can see that?)
Actually, since no critic seemed to notice, that suggests to me that
no critic who reviewed the Moroder edition had ever seen any edition of the film previously.
Many fans and scholars were indignant that rock songs had been added, that captions replaced titles,
that tints were added sometimes with color mixes that could not possibly have been achieved in 1927.
They took grave offense at the result and decried it as
a ruination of a piece of art, a desecration, a work of vile and crass commercialism.
Okay. Fine. Whatever.
So, ask yourselves, why was the hostility reserved for Moroder, and not for the deplorable public-domain copies
of which the image on the above left is a representative example?
Why are fans of the film, why are film scholars, not incensed about that earlier travesty?
As for the endlessly repeated complaint that the latest Kino Blu-ray edition
should have been remastered from the latest restoration
rather than pulled from a release print from 1984, no it should not have!
Moroder’s version was largely from the German takes,
while the latest restoration is largely from the US takes.
They don’t match.
At all.
Run them side by side to see what I mean.
Even if they did match, who in his right mind would want to do all that processing work all over again?
And to what avail?
The best that could be done is some stabilization and dirt-and-scratch removal,
but even without stabilization and dirt-and-scratch removal, the image already looks
more than acceptable as it stands.
It looks better than what most people saw on screen in 1984, that’s for sure.
