Audio transcription
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Metropolis introduction by David Pendleton and Martin Marks. Friday July 18, 2014.
John Quackenbush 0:00
July 18, 2014. The Harvard Film Archive screened Metropolis. This is the introduction by David Pendleton, HFA programmer and also Martin Marks, pianist and film historian.
David Pendleton 0:15
[INAUDIBLE] —opening night of what we're calling “The Complete Fritz Lang.” Of course, there's an asterisk. Two of the very early Fritz Lang silent films that are quite rare, those prints are not going to be available this summer. They're not in the schedule. We knew this as we went to press. And so we'll be showing those in October or November. We'll have one more night then, as a little epilogue. Which is fine, because we've got plenty of silent cinema in the next few weeks, anyway, to keep all of you silent film fans and all of the local accompanists busy.
[LAUGHTER]
Although tonight, I want to make sure that you're all aware, tonight we're actually going to be listening to a recording of the original score of the film, instead of live accompaniment. But more about that in a moment. Let me just say a few words of introduction and a few announcements. First of all, if you have any electronic devices on your person, such as here in the front row, please make sure that they're turned off. And please refrain from illuminating them. We ask that you not text during the film, or go outside if you need to send a text, or check your texts. Also, I usually tell people, if you need to see what time it is, look on the wall. But in fact, they did some electrical work in the building, and that clock is wrong. So don't look at the clock.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm gonna be very brief, actually, because my brain is frazzled that we're running late. But it's a great pleasure for us to be presenting this Fritz Lang retrospective, who's not just one of the best known, and not just one of the most influential filmmakers, but a truly foundational figure, I think, in the history of cinema, for narrative, fictional storytelling.
He was born in Vienna in 1890, and made his first film in Germany in 1919. He left Germany in 1934—shortly after the National Socialists came to power—made one film in France on his way to Hollywood, and worked there for the next 25 years or so, before making his last three films back in Germany. So his career spans roughly about 40 films, it depends on how you count them. A lot of them are sort of two-part films that are sometimes seen as two separate films, sometimes counted together.
But they divide roughly into half made in Europe, and half made in Hollywood. The film that we're going to see tonight, Metropolis, of course remains his best known film, and perhaps the most influential science fiction film ever made. I mean, one of the great things about Lang, I think, as a filmmaker, is that he was drawn to material in which various ethical questions of right and wrong, freedom and oppression, etc., could be expressed through action. And he also had a marvelously elegant and classical way—very clean way—of presenting that action visually. And we'll see that in tonight's film.
I think I’m going to skip a bunch of stuff that I was going to say, but I do want to point out a couple of things. We're projecting this film digitally. Here at the Harvard Film Archive, we stand by a commitment to showing film on film, whenever possible. One reason we're not doing this tonight is because there have been many versions of Metropolis over the years. And we decided to choose the most recent version, which is seen as the most complete. There's no surviving print, apparently, that we know of, of the very first original release print. The film has been recut for distribution in various countries, etc.
But recently—a few years ago—a print was found in Argentina. A 16mm print—very scratchy—that contained footage that didn't exist in any of the other prints that people knew about. And so this version incorporates those. And this latest restoration was done digitally. There's no 35mm copy of it currently—at the moment. You'll know which is the new footage because, in fact, the shape of the frame of the 16mm film strip is different from the 35mm full aperture, silent frame. So for the image to maintain the same dimensions, whenever there's stuff in the 16mm copy, you'll notice a black band on the left of the screen and along the top. You'll also see that it's very scratched. It's been cleaned up as much as possible, but what's left is still fairly damaged, but so important, historically, that we're happy to show it to you tonight. The other thing that's nice about showing the digital copy is that we can play an optical soundtrack and still have the image run at the right speed.
And what's special about this copy is that it also restores the original score to the film. Here to say more about the film and its music, we're very fortunate to have one of the leading experts in this country on film music, somebody whom we're also very fortunate here at the HFA to have to accompany silent films for us, as he will a week from Saturday, with the wonderful Fritz Lang film Spies, that I invite you all to come back for. Please welcome Martin Marks!
[APPLAUSE]
Martin Marks 5:33
So. I know you don't want me to talk for very long, and I'll try to be brief. The Harvard Film Archive was my original home for playing movie music accompaniments—accompaniments for silent films. When I started working on my dissertation at the Harvard Music Department about music and silent film, Vlada Petric—then the man who founded all of this—said, “You must play! You must play!”
[LAUGHTER]
So, I didn't know what I was doing. But I was trying to learn, and this became a great place to learn. And Metropolis was one of the films that I learned a great deal by playing for, over and over again. Believe me, I would, in a way, love to play tonight, because there's nothing more thrilling than finishing a film like this, and having an audience of your size start applauding. It's really good for the ego. But it's not good for you, in terms of what you will hear tonight, which is actually, frankly, better for an experience of Metropolis, especially if you're seeing it, maybe, for the first time.
So I will try to briefly explain why I asked that they run the soundtrack score. First of all, it's magnificently played by one of the best professional orchestras in Berlin: The Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, Rundfunk Orchestra. And it's conducted by a man who really knows his business. His name is Frank Strobel. And he was a vital part of this restoration, because the original premiere was accompanied by a score that was published in—as were very few silent film scores—but it was published by a major music publisher in Berlin and Vienna. And a copy of that score was then registered in the State Library of Germany, which is where I found it in East Berlin, along with several other published film scores from that period, in the late 1970s, just resting comfortably on the shelves. Very few people had done anything with it.
When I brought it back, and they started running Metropolis, I said, well, let me play that score. It will show people what the original idea of how this film should be accompanied was. Well, I quickly found out that that score was so complete, that the only way to make it work for all the bastardized versions, shown at the wrong speed, sometimes running under 90 minutes, for a film that originally ran two hours and 20, you just had to cut whole chunks out. Not only that, though, the score was so carefully cued in German. So I had to figure out what all the German cues meant. And sometimes that was hard, ’cause the cues were to things that weren't in the film, and I wasn't sure what was what. But the score was of a piece. It was composed by a man named Gottfried Huppertz. You'll see his name. He did a few of these. In fact, his first major work was with Fritz Lang for the Nibelungen films in the early ‘20s. And there he did the impossible. He took the most famous German myth,—and Wagner had written a big set of operas about that—and he rewrote Wagner in his own way. He rewrote new music that was like the Wagner system, but he did it in his own way. Lang must have liked him, because they worked together on Metropolis, six years later.
All right. There are many Metropolises, but this one was restored—they figured out where to put the footage, partly by looking at this score, which would accompany the premiere. Why did they publish it? Because they were proud of it. It was a big achievement to make a magnificent orchestral score that goes with the film. You will see that several of the interpolated sequences in the film take place in kind of mixed, weird environments, like the Yoshiwara nightclub in this futuristic city, which is some amalgam of New York, and Berlin, and Paris, and everywhere in the future. The Yoshiwara nightclub sequences were often accompanied by what the German musicians of the time thought of as jazz, which is a kind of revved-up foxtrot style, with lots of saxes, and jazzy accompaniment patterns, banjos, and other things going on, and piano. And that music is so completely different from the other kinds of music in the score, that its multiple worlds are being evoked by this score. What ties them together is a very dense system of interrelated motifs, or themes. And this is the Wagner system. And there are dozens of them that you hear over and over. But the orchestra color keeps changing, and the way that the harmonies keep changing, no pianist can play this in a way that does justice to it. So I defer to Strobel and the Orchestra and I just think this way you can imagine yourself—without the scratches—back when the film was being shown for the first few times in Berlin, before it was immediately cut.
I just want to say one other quick thing. There are many Metropolises, as we've heard. Through history there have been all kinds of versions, including the famous—infamous, notorious, Moroder Metropolis, with its disco score—
[LAUGHTER]
—and songs by all sorts of then pop artists, pop, art-rock artists, and disco music, and new tinting, and new titles, and all sped up to fit into 90 minutes or less. That was one. But that kind of started the modern fascination with Metropolis in the early 80s. Why is the film so perpetually popular? It combines, in terms of psychology, the Expressionism tradition of German art, and Freud. It combines that with the social criticism tradition, and the utopian thinking, of such people as Marx. And it combines that with sci-fi, in the romantic tradition of Mary Shelley and H.G. Wells, who used sci-fi as vehicles for social criticism.
And it's really much less about the future than about the world of the present. And so you kind of can see this film at many levels. And I think the music gets you deeper into that experience. Thank you. I hope to see you at Spies next week. Okay.
[APPLAUSE]
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