Metropolis is almost a hundred years old. Watching this still astonishing vision, it crossed my mind that it feels as though it is perched between two centuries. Just as someone my age feels as anchored in the last century as this one, the film seems to be looking back to the 19th, from whence the great struggle of labour arose. The workers are despatched to labour and live in the lower depths, whilst the rich inhabit soaring spaces in the sky. The scene where the top hatted toffs are overrun by the workers, filmed from above, like some kind of choreographed Brownian motion, seems to encapsulate this conflict, which the 20th century would seek to ameliorate or export or dress up in other costumes where everyone more or less dresses the same, no matter which class they belong to.
The vision of the future contained within Metropolis is still, dare one say, futuristic. Just as in Blade Runner, which it surely influenced, the visionary world feels in some ways more representative of our actual world than the actual world does, like a future we are driving towards at full speed, the details coming in to focus but never quite arriving. Another thing one notes watching the film in its entirety is to what extent the images Lang constructed have remained embedded in the visual culture. Watching it is a bit like seeing a Shakespeare play were you find yourself hearing phrases which are now part of the language. The robot, the man-clock, the skyline, these are all now visual reference points which popular culture has recycled. In a sense it feels as though this is more than just Lang placing his signature on the way we think, it is all that remarkable coalescence of inter-war German thinking, with post-imperialism, revolution and fascism boxing together on a pinhead, seeing which will prevail.
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