Wednesday | October 12, 2005 7:00 pm

Metropolis

Live piano accompaniment by Yakov Gubanov
Screening on Film

Directed by Fritz Lang.
With Brigitte Helm, Alfred Abel, Gustav Fröhlich.
US, 1926, 35mm, black & white, silent, 105 min.

The greatest science-fiction film of the silent cinema, Metropolis was made by Lang at Berlin's Ufa studio with an unprecedented budget for its huge sets, inspired by the New York skyline. Set in the twenty-first century, the story is derived partly from medieval legends, partly from the dystopic vision of a future of intensified conflict between capital and labor. Photographed in Expressionist style and designed to display powerful geometric symmetries, many of the film's sequences are unforgettable, especially the dramatic laboratory creation of the robot-woman.

PRECEDED BY

Coney Island at Night

Directed by Edwin S. Porter.
US, 1903, black & white, 4 min.

"Actualities"–early shorts depicting real-life scenes–reached a new level of aestheticization with this film. Porter's camera sweeps across Coney Island's nighttime light displays, "capturing" the scene as it was, but also imbuing it with a dreamy quality that is distinctly cinematic.