Product Description

This volume explores the cultural phenomenon of "Metropolis", its different versions, its changing meanings, and its role as a storehouse of databse of the 20th century.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #295828 in Books
• Published on: 2000-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

Customer Reviews

The de-mystification of 'Metropolis.'
A nationalistic, psychosexual declaration of a warped, but dynamic Weimar Germany, Fritz Lang's flawed masterpiece 'Metropolis' has confused and confounded its critics since the year of its release. Finally, with Thomas Elsaesser's book, we have a knight in shining armour galloping to the films defence.

Elsaesser succeeds wonderfully in this book by hinting that it is perhaps 'Metropolis's' critics who deserve the epithet 'flawed,' rather than the film itself. A French critic at the time declared that in 'Metropolis,' 'one only finds ponderousness, pretension and puerility.' The German communists hated its 'bourgeois capitalist ideology. In Italy and Turkey the film was banned due to its 'Bolshevik tendencies.' Kracauer, in his book, 'From Caligari to Hitler,' labelled 'Metropolis' as 'proto-Nazi.' H.G Wells, declared that 'Metropolis' was 'quite the silliest film' he had ever seen. Even Luis Bunuel, a great admirer of Lang and his films, who appreciated 'the plastic-photogenic basis of the film,' deplored its story telling elements, which he viewed as 'trivial, pretentious, pedantic, hackneyed romanticism.' Bunuel's viewpoint seems to have been the one that has predominated to this day, - excellent visuals, dodgy story! Elsaesser sweeps these myopes away by acknowledging that, 'Metropolis,' like any classic, 'receives, or rather provokes ever new interpretation...each generation's reading has been as much a barometer of a period's own preferences and ideological preoccupations as a statement about the film.'

'Metropolis' then, has always been a bit of a blank canvas, a canvas on which we can all project our own fears, desires, dogmas and fantasies. Ruthlessly cut into shorter versions for the world market, the meaning and subtleties in 'Metropolis' were irreparably altered. We will never witness an authentically restored version of 'Metropolis,' because 'no-one exactly knows what the first night audience saw.' Elsaesser, however, lays no blame at the critics' or money-men's doors, but prefers to view 'Metropolis,' like any great work of art, as a living organism, open and exposed to constant transformation and re-invention. He acknowledges Giorgio Moroder's revitalised 1980's version, complete with colour tints and a rock n roll soundtrack, as a 'bold move' whose musical score, 'by its deliberate anachronisms, induces one to discover Lang's images afresh...he turned Metropolis above all into a space to inhabit, rather than a story to follow or an ideology to work through and demystify.' On a more negative note, Moroder, responsible for placing the film high up in our post-modern pantheon, re-created the film by imposing a traditional 'hollywood-type continuity editing,' giving the narrative a unilinear direction. This reversed Lang's methodology, which hinged on 'the interpolation of disorienting or disrupting visuals into the classic match-cut sequence, making what is represented seem ambiguously motivated and always happening at one remove.'

An indecipherable masterpiece, a prophesy of the holocaust, or an overrated kitsch joke? In this wonderful, intelligently objective book, Elsaesser offers us a plethora of critical opinions on which to base our own judgements, enabling us to watch this immortal and misunderstood masterpiece with refreshed, invigorated eyes.