Customer Reviews

Metropolis (BFI Film Classics)

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The BFI Classics series features book-length monographs on films preserved in the British Film Institute archive. Although a wide range of figures, from TV presenters and novelists to screenwriters to journalists have contributed, the most satisfying books so far have been those by film theorists, intimate with films' cultural and critical contexts, and able to situate the classic film more satisfactorily.

Thomas Elsaesser is one of the most important film theorists of the last three decades, specialising in early and German cinema. His study of Fritz Lang's controversial masterpiece 'Metropolis' is exemplary, covering the production history, the films' many sources, the extraordinary Weimar culture from which it emerged, the original (largely negative) critical reception, the subsequent(even more negative) ideological interpretations that followed World War Two, and the film's current status as a post-modern classic of the city.

Elsaesser's clarity is all the more gratifying in that 'Metropolis', more than any other film, has been entangled in so many conflicting debates that the film itself tends to get lost; and exists in so many different cut versions that an 'original', director's version doesn't even exist. As fact gives way to theory in the second half, the study is a bit harder going, but Elsaesser is to be congratulated for showing how Giorgio Moroder, with his notorious 80s revamping of the film, 'revealed' it as much as he distorted it.

This was a terrific book. The author had a whale of a challenge on his hands, since, as he points out, Metropolis has been cut and recut many times since it premiered in Jan. 1927. In the book, he explains the difference between the different versions and also traces how critical response to the film has changed over the years. Finally, he also points out the many movies and videos that have "borrowed" from Metropolis since the 1980s.

The result, to me, was to show Metropolis as not a stuffed classic but a film that is always changing, always spinning off new interpretations, and generating imitators.

Metropolis is a work that seems to renew and remake itself every few years. First, it came out in different versions and different meanings. Is it a story about love lost or about science gone mad? It is fantasy or science fiction? Is it against the Nazis or for them? Was it made as a piece of art or to make money? Thomas Elsaesser explores one of the most amazing movies ever made. Yet also one that can't be pinned down. The meanings change with time and with those who view it. What does it mean to you?

Don't get me wrong, the idea of taking a list of the greatest movies and then writing a series of books detailing the movie and its impact is a fascinating idea. The book by Anton Kaes on "M" is a stellar example of how the movie and book compliment each other. But here, in another Fritz Lang film the idea is torture. I could never get what the author was trying to say, he rambled on and on and never got to a point. It is neither a book of film criticism, nor a book on the times depected, nor quite frankly of anything else. I love Metropolis, I have seen it many times, in both the Moreder version and the incomplete silent versions. It is a masterpiece, this book is not. Watch and read M instead.