Programme notes CH 01 — The Silent Signal
Metropolis
A city of towers above, a city of shifts below, and a machine wearing a woman's face.
The most expensive film of the silent era, cut apart by its distributors within months of release and passed down the century in fragments. The version transmitted here is the one America saw: Channing Pollock's recut for Paramount, an hour shorter, its hero renamed Eric and its tycoon John Masterman, its politics rewritten into a title card about the heart. Its incompleteness is part of its biography. Lang's city became the default image of the future; every skyline in science fiction pays it rent. The robot Maria's transformation still looks like a transmission from somewhere else.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Fritz Lang
- Photographed by
- Karl Freund
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
Fritz Lang, twice: the city as a machine that consumes its workers, then the city as a set of small rooms that do the same job more quietly. The architecture shrank; the trap didn't.
The machine as co-star, 1926 and 1927: Keaton loves his locomotive like a person; Lang fears his Machine like a god. Between those two feelings sits the whole century's argument with technology.