| Return home |  |
Return to previous page |
2001: The Munich Reconstruction
As mentioned above, it was in 1979 that Enno Patalas of the Münchener Filmmuseum began a reconstruction.
Through a series of marvelous coincidences, the Bundesarchiv had acquired the Paramount negative from Staatliches Filmarchiv.
This was the short version, about 7,667',
and one of the reels was a dupe negative, for whatever reason.
That was nice, but there was something better: The collection included the trims!
What trims?
Most certainly the trims from the 8,039' edition of early March 1927.
See Minden/Bachmann, pp. 119–120 .
Welllllllllll... yes, but there was more.
According to Enno Patalas in Metropolis in/aus Trümmern (Berlin: Dieter Bertz Verlag, 2001), p. 11,
the trims consisted of deletions from Channing Pollock’s (unreleased) 12-reel edition!!!!!!!
That means that the Pollock edition still does exist after all — or at least most of it does!
The Pollock version is an offense, but few if any people suspected that it still existed.
Patalas needed the trims to fill in the missing pieces of the puzzle,
and the result saw the light of day in 1987.
To my surprise, this 1987 “Munich Edition” was issued on
DVD, I think in 1999 or maybe in 1994, by Galeshka Moravioff’s company, Films sans Frontières in France,
with a piano score by
Moravioff himself.
That makes me wonder:
Why did Paramount hold onto the trims from Channing’s 12-reel edition?
Was there a nagging doubt that maybe it might need to be shown someday?
A nagging thought that Publix might someday soon change its mind?
If Paramount held onto the trims from 12-reel edition,
then why did it not hold onto the trims from the 16-reel edition?
Was that just bureaucratic goofiness, contradictory supervisors barking out contradictory mindless orders
just because they liked to bark out orders, without even understanding what those orders meant?
That was not the end of the story.
The Murnau-Stiftung hired
Martin Koerber to do further work, this time digitally.
How much this differed from the “Munich Version,” I do not know.
The image quality was certainly superior in this new edition.
The première was in
and the result was screened in
2001.
As with the “Munich Version,” this new “Murnau-Stiftung Version,”
was essentially a restoration of Channing Pollock’s US edition,
but with Channing’s rewritten titles again expunged and replaced with replicas of the original German titles.
There was a problem, though: Huppertz’s music could not be used due to rights tie-ups .
Bernd Schultheis composed a new orchestral score.
It is clear that the rights issues were settled soon enough,
and now it seems impossible to hear Schultheis’s score.
Koerber assembled he thought was the
definitive restoration, about 117 minutes (not 124; the DVD’s back cover is wrong).
It seemed to be the final word in reconstituting the mutilated film.
Deletions from Fritz’s original were explained with brief synopses flashed on screen.
As for Fritz’s original, worldwide searches had failed to yield even another frame
(because everybody neglected to check the 9.5mm edition),
and so it was thought that this was as far as the work could go.
Kino released this “Murnau-Stiftung Version”
on DVD in February 2003, on Friday the 21st, I think,
and it garnered some nice reviews.
This DVD included a delicious video that Patalas had made:
Click to play.
Metropolis - 1927 - The Metropolis Case Documentary
Movie Set, https://youtu.be/fkPEyzjyejI
If YouTube deletes this, download it.
The Universität der Künste Berlin made a
study version on DVD available only to educational institutions:
Metropolis Studienfassung.
Wish I could get a copy. Oh well.
The Progressive Silent Film List
explains that the 2001 restoration is based on four sources:
MoMA,
the material received in 1971 from Gosfilmofond (presumably the Paramount negative and the several reels’ worth of trims),
the 8,537' Wardour nitrate held at the BFI National Film and Television Archive,
and the Harry Davidson print.