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2008: Argentina Redux
Gottfried Huppertz plays the violin in Yoshiwara.
He also wrote the orchestral score for the Berlin première of Metropolis.
Then things got even better.
Eddie Muller
published the story for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.
He goes into more maddening detail than I had encountered before.
It is the story of a fight between good (a researcher) and evil (bureaucracy).
This is one of the rarest examples of a bureaucracy winning numerous battles,
committing many atrocities, but ultimately losing the war.
Hard to believe.
I’ve never seen anything like this in my own life, and I never expect to.
In a nutshell, a researcher thought that a government agency held a complete print of Metropolis,
but the agency adamantly refused him access, refused to check, refused to care.
Totally stonewalled him.
It was a 20-year battle.
Variety also published its own account, but it wasn’t quite accurate.
As you can see from Aitam Bar-Sagi ’s
“‘Metropolis’ around the World,”
the authentic edition of Metropolis played not just at two cinemas in Berlin,
but also at one cinema in Vienna,
at three cinemas in Hungary,
at four cinemas in the Netherlands,
at one cinema in Estonia,
at two cinemas in Czechoslovakia,
and quite possibly in other places as well.
So there were at least 13 authentic prints.
Remember, exchanges often hold one or two emergency-backup prints, just in case.
That was all in addition to what happened in Argentina.