A Few Notes about Metropolis and Pandora’s Box



When
METROPOLIS
Was on PBS

Sorry about the choppy opening. Ted Obrien recorded Metropolis on VHS in December 1978, but he made the mistake of not hitting the RECORD button until just as the movie began. Sorry about the degraded quality of the last 3 minutes. The movie was wrongly announced as “2 hr.” and so Ted inserted a T-120 tape to capture it. The tape ran out after 123 minutes, while the movie was still rolling. Ted later caught a showing on the Bravo channel, which ran a 16mm print of terrible quality, misprinted, heavily cropped, and overspeeded. He merged the two recordings together and this is the result. I was able to make some size and speed adjustments for those final three minutes, but I could only take it so far. Sorry. Please forgive the imperfections. If you have a better copy recorded from BBC2 or PBS, please let me know. If you can concentrate on the film that is buried behind the glitches, you will see that this edition was different from any other edition available in the US or in the UK.

NOTE TO AUDIENCES: When you buy a ticket to see Metropolis, or when you pick up a video copy of Metropolis, you really don’t know what you’re getting, because no two copies of this movie are at all alike. Some copies are so horrid that they are unwatchable, with inappropriate music or with no music at all. Other copies are dazzling and breathtaking. They are not the same at all. After more than four decades of tossing and turning, I decided to figure out why. How did Metropolis migrate from 1926 to 2023? Precisely how many times was it beaten to a bloody pulp along the way, and who were the perps? What are we seeing, and why?

A public-domain version.

A licensed version.

NOTE TO SCHOLARS AND ARCHIVISTS: The 2010 restoration of Metropolis is missing extant material. Check the Pathéscope 9.5mm prints from December 1931, which have several shots in the dance scene that are missing from all other copies. Check the 16mm print that Brandon Films distributed in 1954 and 1955, if you can find it. Brandon licensed it from the US Office of Alien Property, and it seems it had been copied from the Wardour print shown at the Marble Arch Pavilion in March 1927 (the dance scene was in Reel 8 rather than in Reel 6). That print must still be around somewhere. It would also be worth reviewing BFI items C-105565 (9,630'=2,935m) and C-105585 from 1975 (9,725'=2,964m), which for some reason are longer than one would expect.

There’s probably almost nobody who remembers this, but once upon a time, long long ago, PBS had a weekly series called “PBS Movie Theater.” On that series was a broadcast of Metropolis, and that was my introduction to the movie. I would soon learn that the edition shown on “PBS Movie Theater” was different from any other version of the film available in the US, then or now. It was rather rare even in Europe.


This is my forgery of the press photo, based upon several sources.
I’m certain that it almost exactly matches the original.

Before we begin, let’s get a few things out of the way. Everything you have heard about this movie — its year-and-a-half shooting schedule, its 36,000 extras, its astronomical budget that bankrupted the studio, Goebbels being so impressed by the film that he offered Fritz Lang control over the German film industry, Fritz’s flight that very night to escape his fate — and plenty other such tall tales, well, they’re all just a bunch of tall tales. The true stories have long been easily available in the published record, but some people just prefer sensationalism to facts.

By the way, I just discovered that Michael Organ’s Metropolis blog is up and running again: https://metropolis1927archive.blogspot.com/. Lots of good information there.

The best, and I mean the BEST, writing about Metropolis was by Ann J. Drummond in her master’s thesis submitted to the University of Glasgow in July 1987, Metropolis: An Historical and Political Analysis. The BEST. She supplies the contexts I had not even suspected that explain the principal idea behind the story. She explains that the German Republic, especially in the early 1920’s, had adopted the Taylorist methodology of factory production. Every motion made by every employee was methodically governed to produce maximum efficiency, and thus maximum profits. The people, working 10-hour shifts, lived like slaves and when on the clock performed exactly as automata, relentlessly. Not a breath, not a moment, not a movement of a muscle was to be wasted. Every movement was designed to maximize profits. Anything less was considered laziness. This regimen was leading to resentment and even to violent and armed revolt. The recent Bolshevik revolution in Russia was serving as an inspiration. Yet the industrialists in the Reichsverband der Deutschen Industrie (RDI, Reich Association of German Industry), fiercely promoted their methodology and would not budge an inch. Ufa was the studio that produced Metropolis, and one of the Ufa board members, Paul Silverberg, gave a speech to the RDI in September 1926 (while Metropolis was being filmed) in which he urged “a peaceful arrangement with labour,” a “social partnership.” Drummond summarized “that it would be in the longterm interests of capitalism to defuse working class opposition with limited reforms.” Silverberg continued that “Industry is holding its hand out to labour.” The other members of the RDI vehemently objected. At the same time, labor organizations were beginning to argue that a consensus with capital would be the only route to peace. This was also when Australian social psychologist Elton Mayo was arguing for “better communications between workers and management, the importance of supervision (in which the foreman played a key role), and the recognition of informal group life within the factory (which catered for the ‘natural’ social needs of the worker and provided an outlet for frustrations and dissatisfaction).” Metropolis, like Mayo, took its stand for a centrist position, and lashed out at both hypercapitalistic repression and at violent revolt. It proposed consensus and coöperation as the only peaceful solution. Once you have this knowledge under your belt, Metropolis makes a thousand times more sense, because you can understand what it is referencing. Absent this knowledge, Metropolis becomes nought more than a silly and contrived story with bad acting.

Contents
01 — 1926: Where It All Started
02 — Dec 1926: Paramount’s Regrettable Ideas
03 — Aug 1927: Québec
04 — Feb 1927: Paramount Slashes the Export Negative, Too
05 — 1927: France
06 — 1927: Sweden
07 — 1927: Belgium
08 — Nov 1927: Italy
09 — Nov 1927: Turkey
10 — Apr 1928: Australia
11 — May 1928, Argentina
12 — Jun 1928: New Zealand
13 — Aug 1927: Ufa Copycats Paramount
14 — Dec 1931: Pathéscope
15 — Aug 1936: Iris Barry
16 — Jul 1948: The British Reissue
17 — Jun 1952: The Australian Reissue
18 — Cropping
19 — 1 January 1953 Was Really 1 January 1955
20 — Jan 1955: Brandon Films and the 55th St. Playhouse
21 — Aug 1957: The Anzac
22 — 1960: Griggs Moviedrome
23 — Mar 1963: The Nordwestdeutscher Filmverleih (NWDF) Edition
24 — 1965: The Revised Nordwestdeutscher Filmverleih (NWDF) Edition
25 — Piecing the Puzzle Together
26 — Jul 1967: The Anzac
27 — Sep 1970: The Toy That Grew Up
28 — 1971: Behind the Iron Curtain
29 — May 1972: Janus Films
30 — 1972: Thunderbird Films
31 — Jun 1972: The Eckart Jahnke (“FIAF”) Edition
32 — Aug 1975: BBC2 “Tuesday Cinema”
33 — May 1977: PBS Movie Theater
34 — Jul 1977: The Janus Edition Comes to Albuquerque
35 — 8mm, Super 8, and 16mm Home Editions
36 — βeta and VHS and VCD
37 — 1983: The Electronic Metropolis
38 — Confusion
39 — The Metropolis Family Tree
40 — May 1984: Giorgio Moroder
41 — Oct 1986: The Anzac
42 — Shopping for a Video That Did Not Exist
43 — Can We Find the BBC2/PBS Version?
44 — Can We Find the May 1972 Janus Films Version?
45 — 2001: The Munich Reconstruction
46 — 2005: New Zealand Redux
47 — 2008: Argentina Redux
48 — Feb 2010: Restoration Redux
SUP — Dec 1977: When Pandora’s Box Was on PBS