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Metropolis (Restored Authorized Edition)Rating:
Release Date: 18 February, 2003 Retail Price: $29.95 OUR Price: $24.99 You SAVE: $4.96! Cast: Complete Cast (6 total) |
Metropolis (Restored Authorized Edition) Reviews
Great film art, frustrating transfer
"Metropolis" is one of the great early films, as the ton of material written about it attests. The transfer presented on Kino is extremely crisp and is made from the best sources. There are wonderfully informative extras: one can tell Kino was trying to do its usually excellent best. However, the projection speed is absurdly fast: I must agree with others who have pointed this out. It is true that certain movements are intended to be "jerky," but that is irrelevant to the actual *speed*. People just move much too quickly throughout; it is simply inaccurate and detracts strongly from the film's mood and pace. Kino's own running time is listed as 124 minutes, and it is only 118 including the resoration credits. It may be that something was lost in translation to NTSC from the European standard, but even if that is the case, a 6-minute difference would not account for a film sped up this much. A big diappointment. Kino should redo it. Projection speed has never been a problem in Kino's wonderful transfers: "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," "Nosferatu," "The Golem." It's a shame that it ruins something as important as "Metropolis."
A beautiful rendering
This is the best verison of Lang's Metropolis that I've seen, and in several ways. The image quality stands out immediately, an amazing bit of film restoration. I'd believe that part of that very clean appearance came from the editors' access to multiple prints and editions of the film. Using digital techniques, they could pick the best of the bunch for each frame, but also (at least in theory) combine information from the multiple copies of each frame.
Another fine feature of this film took a bit longer to sink in. It had scenes that I'd never seen before. According to the editors' notes, the original had been edited down to a shorter film many times and in many different ways. By comparing the various abridged versions, the current editors were able to piece together a much more complete version of the film. In a few places, the recovered scenes really changed the way I understood the movie. Even so, they say that as much as a quarter of the original appears to be lost, filled in with intertitles to indicate the missing scenes.
Above all, Metropolis is an enduring statement of style. It captures the melodramatic excesses of the silent-film style perfectly. It also demonstrates the Art Deco style of the era in which it was made. The editors, in creating new title frames for this version, also used a bit of typographic style that was once common but now long out of use. Rather than using bold, italics, or underlining, they would s p a c e words to be emphasized - an economic use of type, back in the day when the additional cost for additional families of movable lead type would have been prohibitive. What is most striking is how the style of this movie lives on. "Bladerunner," for example, mimics the pyramidal palace of commerce that appears in this movie's opening. It even copied minor scenes, like one where a blind is drawn over a wall-sized window. I do not think less of Bladerunner's director for invoking Metropolis's imagery, instead I think that much more of Lang's enduring vision.
//wiredweird
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