As an experiment, I am trying to feel smug rather than superfluous when it turns out that other critics and I have noticed the same kind of thing. Per Fiona Moore in The Black Archive #43: The Robots of Death (2020):
Insanity, again, is a common theme to both Expressionism and The Robots of Death. David Collings' performance as Poul sinking into madness upon seeing the gore-encrusted hand of a robot is a visual echo of the scene in Metropolis in which Freder sees what he thinks is his beloved Maria – but is actually her robot double – in the arms of his father; he collapses, wide-eyed and moaning, becomes catatonic, and experiences surrealistic visions in which the Maria-Robot becomes the Whore of Babylon. While we don't get to see what, if any, visions Poul is experiencing, the parallels are clear.
Of the same scene, I wrote:
He held himself together even after the killings began—and guessed the nature of the perpetrators, half insight, half paranoia, long before anyone else from his planet had a clue—but the sight of a dead robot with its silver hand sheathed in human blood pushes him over at last. He disintegrates with the head-clutching horror of silent film: "No! Oh, no! Please, no!"
The silent film I had in mind was in fact Metropolis (1927), although I was not picturing Gustav Fröhlich's Freder but Alfred Abel's Joh Fredersen, as described later on that same year. The physical language matched more closely, but missed out on the likeness of robot-triggered deranging revelations, which does reward comparison—the robots of Kaldor aren't self-willed human-hating rebels any more than the Maschinen-Mensch is an unfaithful Maria, but Poul isn't wrong to see the end of his world spiraling out from the proof that its robots are not fail-safe and the intercutting of Freder's delirium with the man-maddening dance of the false Maria accurately tunes him in to the apocalyptic mood overtaking Metropolis. In the case of both characters, their collapse out of sanity makes a window for the audience on the fragility of their world.
I am sufficiently out of joint with time that I hadn't realized until just now that Metropolis was part of the batch of art that entered the U.S. public domain at the start of this year. Honestly, if asked, I would have guessed it had been in the public domain for years. It's not as though people haven't been remixing the movie for decades already, cf. this entire conversation, but I look forward to seeing what results this change of states produces nonetheless.
Insanity, again, is a common theme to both Expressionism and The Robots of Death. David Collings' performance as Poul sinking into madness upon seeing the gore-encrusted hand of a robot is a visual echo of the scene in Metropolis in which Freder sees what he thinks is his beloved Maria – but is actually her robot double – in the arms of his father; he collapses, wide-eyed and moaning, becomes catatonic, and experiences surrealistic visions in which the Maria-Robot becomes the Whore of Babylon. While we don't get to see what, if any, visions Poul is experiencing, the parallels are clear.
Of the same scene, I wrote:
He held himself together even after the killings began—and guessed the nature of the perpetrators, half insight, half paranoia, long before anyone else from his planet had a clue—but the sight of a dead robot with its silver hand sheathed in human blood pushes him over at last. He disintegrates with the head-clutching horror of silent film: "No! Oh, no! Please, no!"
The silent film I had in mind was in fact Metropolis (1927), although I was not picturing Gustav Fröhlich's Freder but Alfred Abel's Joh Fredersen, as described later on that same year. The physical language matched more closely, but missed out on the likeness of robot-triggered deranging revelations, which does reward comparison—the robots of Kaldor aren't self-willed human-hating rebels any more than the Maschinen-Mensch is an unfaithful Maria, but Poul isn't wrong to see the end of his world spiraling out from the proof that its robots are not fail-safe and the intercutting of Freder's delirium with the man-maddening dance of the false Maria accurately tunes him in to the apocalyptic mood overtaking Metropolis. In the case of both characters, their collapse out of sanity makes a window for the audience on the fragility of their world.
I am sufficiently out of joint with time that I hadn't realized until just now that Metropolis was part of the batch of art that entered the U.S. public domain at the start of this year. Honestly, if asked, I would have guessed it had been in the public domain for years. It's not as though people haven't been remixing the movie for decades already, cf. this entire conversation, but I look forward to seeing what results this change of states produces nonetheless.
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