Tonight I saw the newly restored print of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) with a new live score by the Alloy Orchestra at the Coolidge Corner Theatre.
All I got was this lousy T-shirt and two hours and twenty-eight minutes of some of the best film and music I've seen together in my life.
(No, really. I got a Metropolis T-shirt. Someone make sure I don't wear it to death in a month.)
There may be a review tomorrow, or at least some kind of coherent writeup; mostly I will note that I cannot imagine how anyone ever thought it was a good idea to cut this film, because the missing footage is not in any way incidental or padding, it's crucial plotlines and backstory and small character moments and atmosphere and it was not even slightly clear from earlier cuts how awesome the ex-secretary Josaphat is. I thought in 2005 that I would never see the full version of Metropolis. If you count those five minutes of apocalyptic preaching and the confrontation between Rotwang and Joh Fredersen, I still haven't. But I'm a lot luckier than everyone who never lived to see this restoration—including Fritz Lang. Thank God for small museums in Buenos Aires. And for the kind of people who sell out an entire theater to see a movie made eighty-two years ago.
Mittler zwischen Hirn und Händen muß das Herz sein!
All I got was this lousy T-shirt and two hours and twenty-eight minutes of some of the best film and music I've seen together in my life.
(No, really. I got a Metropolis T-shirt. Someone make sure I don't wear it to death in a month.)
There may be a review tomorrow, or at least some kind of coherent writeup; mostly I will note that I cannot imagine how anyone ever thought it was a good idea to cut this film, because the missing footage is not in any way incidental or padding, it's crucial plotlines and backstory and small character moments and atmosphere and it was not even slightly clear from earlier cuts how awesome the ex-secretary Josaphat is. I thought in 2005 that I would never see the full version of Metropolis. If you count those five minutes of apocalyptic preaching and the confrontation between Rotwang and Joh Fredersen, I still haven't. But I'm a lot luckier than everyone who never lived to see this restoration—including Fritz Lang. Thank God for small museums in Buenos Aires. And for the kind of people who sell out an entire theater to see a movie made eighty-two years ago.
Mittler zwischen Hirn und Händen muß das Herz sein!
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