Metropolis: redux @ FringeWorld, Perth (06/02/12)

Fri 10th Feb, 2012 in Gig Reviews

Metropolis – A 1927 German silent film by Fritz Lang, hacked and slashed by Paramount to remove one quarter of the footage and later painstakingly reconstructed by several people over the course of the next 83 years to recreate the magic of the original. Never widely well received, except by cult expressionist and dystopian film buffs, 80s synth pop composer Georgio Moroder failed to improve it when he wrote an original score for the film and released a sped up version with subtitles instead of the intertitles of the original, and won an award for worst original score.

Moroder’s travesty served to inspire a new interest in the film, and in 2008, a film museum in Argentina discovered the original cut of the film including most of the scenes thought to have been lost on Paramount’s cutting room floor. Eleven more scenes were discovered in the national Film Archive of New Zealand, and after several years of restoration work a new version was released with only about 8 minutes lost in total.

In a dystopian future, the Marxist argument has been played out to its completion and the workers are reduced to weary soldier ants working underground to keep the wheels of industry turning whilst the owner of the means of production and his family live in a world above them, in ignorant luxury. Freder, son of Fredersen discovers the suffering world below via the invasion of his luxurious playground by a beautiful girl (Brigitte Helm) surrounded by a puddle of urchins and sets out to right the wrongs. The beautiful girl is doppelgängered by a mad scientist to become a sexy robot to sow dissent among the workers, Revolution ensues…

In 2011, Miles Phillip an Australian composer and electronic artist produced a score for the restored film that truly conveys the story Lang told in 1927. Melbourne Fringe audiences got a look at it last year, and thanks to Fringe World, and the Bakery, and a small Perth audience spent 145 minutes on seat edges, mouths agape, mesmerised and marvelling at how a film made almost a century ago could be so cutting edge. Metropolis’ expressionistic imagery is exactly the kind of lo-fi storytelling that modern film makers often unsuccessfully contrive to create.

We know that the music to a film can make or break it, and nowhere is it more evident than in a silent film. Phillip’s new score repositions the film as a masterpiece that might just as easily have been written and produced today.

The soundtrack itself stands alone as a musical odyssey, carrying the listener into the dark and light places of the mind and evoking sinister imagery underlying a beautiful façade, and is the perfect vehicle for the film’s story.

If you saw it and loved it, you can vote for it in the Fringe World People’s choice awards