Metropolis

Metropolis is probably the most famous silent film ever. At the time, it was also the most expensive that UFA had ever produced, costing 5 million marks at the time and bringing back only 75,000.
For that and many other reasons, the film was pulled and edited down from its original 3 and a half hour length.

Amazing techniques were used for special effects : much like Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen, the models were animated  one frame at a time. The result was so good that the the look of the film inspired Blade Runner and countless other works of art.

Animators at work

During filming, director Fritz Lang shot with several cameras and tried to keep at least three good takes of each scene. As was customary for silent features, he foresaw the need of several negatives, one for each main outlet. One negative was for the German market, one for the American market where the film was released by Paramount. As expected, the Americans cut many scenes and rearranged the order of the remaining ones.

Multi camera set up

In the summer of 1927, the German negative was also cut by 30 minutes and the deleted scenes were destroyed. It ended up in Russia after WW2, and was traded back to Germany in 1971. Only then did the restorers realized that several negatives had been around.
Amazingly enough, in spite of that, only one negative still survives partially today, in the Paramount edit version. The other versions we know only through copies.

Through the decades, the film was restored, reedited countless times and was presented with the same enthusiasm with various  classic or modern scores. In 1984 Giorgo Moroder even colorized the film which had subtitles and a pop score.
Ironically, it is thanks to censorship that the original intertitles and the correct order of the scenes could be restored: the censors had copied the complete content of the titles in sequence.

Fritz Rasp was almost entirely cut from the film

However, not until may 2008 when a 16 mm negative was found in Buenos Aires could the film have a chance to be restored closer to its original length. That negative was probably made in 1973 from a 35 mm copy. The transfer was made because the 35 mm copy was nitrate and highly flammable. Although the quality of the 16 mm copy is atrocious, the footage on it has never been found anywhere else since 1927.

Another element which helped a great deal when restoring the film was the music originally composed by Gottfried Huppertz which followed the montage closely.

Another recovered scene on 16 mm

Unfortunately, even that copy was still missing one sequence. But the bulk of the film is now visible. And the difference between the 16 mm portions and the original camera negative is a testament to the extraordinary story of this film.

You can now own the film on Blu-ray and see the amazing work of the restorers. I suggest Artem Demenok's documentary A trip to Metropolis if you want to learn more about it.

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That's all for today folks!