Missing scenes from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis discovered

July 2, 2008

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

For 80 years the original version of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” has been considered lost. The ZEITmagazin shows details from the missing scenes of the 1927 masterpiece for the first time in its Thursday edition, and reports exclusively on how the film was tracked down in the archive of the Museo del Cine (Cinema Museum) in Buenos Aires.

Through this new discovery, key scenes from the silent film become more intelligible, minor characters now have leading parts.

Rainer Rother, Artistic Director of the Deutsche Kinemathek Museum in Berlin and the series of “Retrospectives” at the Berlinale, examined the footage for ZEITmagazin and comes to the following conclusion: “Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s most famous film, can be seen through new eyes.” For him the find represents a “sensational discovery”.

Prof. Martin Koerber, the restorer of the most recent version of “Metropolis“, who also examined the footage, confirms like Rainer Rother the authenticity of the material. He adds: “No matter how bad the condition of the material may be, the original intention of the film, including all of its minor characters and subplots, is now once again tangible for the normal
viewer. The rhythm of the film has been restored.”

Enno Patalas, the film historian and former director of the Munich Film Museum, who has been working on the reconstruction of the film since the 1970s, and was responsible along with Martin Koerber for producing the 2001 version of “Metropolis” current until today, talks of the “most authentic material that we know” after viewing the scenes.

Helmut Possmann, director of the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau Foundation, the holder of the rights to “Metropolis“, said to ZEITmagazin: “The material believed to be lost leads to a new understanding of the Fritz Lang masterpiece.” Following the discovery, the Murnau Foundation sees itself as “responsible, along with the archive in Buenos Aires and our partners for making the material available to the public.”