This essay aims to compare the visual aspects of Fritz Lang’s 1927 film ‘Metropolis’ and the ever-expanding skyward modernist city of New York in the 1920s. Asking whether or not Lang’s vision of the future depicted in Metropolis with its frightening forecast of a mechanical authoritarian future is a fair representation of the underlying social dynamic in New York at the time.
Was the gleaming spectacle of height in fact a mechanism used to mask or control the conflicting reality?
The inspiration for Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis is thought to be based on his first impression of his view of The New York skyline on October 1924 from a ship’s deck approaching the harbour. Stating that,
“the view of the new York at night is a beacon of beauty strong enough to be the centrepiece of a film... There are flashes of red and blue, gleaming white, and screaming green... Streets full of moving turning spiraling lights and high above there are advertisements surpassing the stars with their light.”1
A superficial idea of the city highlighting the glitzy appeal as it appeared from that viewpoint. New York; a spectacle of exotic architecture creating fantastical illusions in a display of consumerism, showcasing the city as a symbol of modernity. It is also clear however that behind the illusion of the light show and fantastic display of an un-championed drive skyward echoing the progress and speed towards the future. Lang felt that there was an underlying dark presence lying beneath the whirlwind of the stupefying experience of lights and heights. The impression New York had on him was both of attraction and repulsion, of fascination and fear. He said that;
“the city was the crossroads of multiple and confused human forces (irresistibly driven) to exploit each other and thus living in perpetual anxiety.” 2
From this statement, we can see that for Lang New York held a darker meaning, an undercurrent, a threatening second layer, the “undercity” he would depict in Metropolis showing this social dislocation and representing it into filmic imagery. It was the notion of a covered-up repressed, uglier face of the modern city that fuelled his imagination, “at night the city did not give the impression of being alive; it lived as illusions lived... I know that I want to make a film about all these sensations.” 3
For Germans at this time of guilt and defeat Germans and so The Germans took refuge in worlds other than their own set in displaced and far away setting, and films that dealt with fantasy and the supernatural were popular. 4 For example, Fritz Lang’s metropolis is set in the future so the German people could distance themselves from the scenes going on in front of them. Using the photo-montages and depiction of a faraway dystopian future as an escapism from the harsh reality and feelings of discontent that they had 5 .
Metropolis depicts a world at odds with itself peopled by the phantoms of both mind and spirit. Lang combines the compositional contrasts of a modified expressionism with a skilful deployment of light to create this alien and malevolent city,6
the mass of workers are permeated by fate. They are constructed by the unknown; powerful forces high overhead in altogether bewildering skyscrapers, their world is dislocated within itself. The visions depicted in Metropolis communicate an ethos, a mood a sense of fatalism and disorder. The tortured characters of the under-city are part of an alien malevolent world, in which things are wrong between the individual and his world, showing man as only a part of his environment the mass of exploited workers are manipulated by fate or change though the societal hierarchy. The film Metropolis combines the values of the traditional German culture with an emotive evocation of contemporary disorder. The pessimistic overtones reflect on the German society’s experience of a drastic socio-cultural trauma 7 and as Lang later described as, “pessimism for its own sake.” 8 He also described the situation at the end of the First World War,
“all over the world young people engaged in the cultural fields, myself among them, made a fetish of tragedy, expressing open rebellion against the old answers and outward forms.”9
His outlook on the inter-war disillusionment was a repulsion towards the negative attitudes and loosened morals which were, of course, a worldwide phenomenon. The contrast between America and the sense of modernity associated with the jazz age a sense which focused on mass consumerism. Concerning the heightened depression felt in Germany because of the country's defeat. 10 Thus Violence and a sense of foreboding played a large part, in the concept of metropolis, and Lang’s abstract forces extended beyond the original impetus of German defeat, and take on more universal connotations of helplessness and paranoia 11 which are incredibly evident in the film metropolis due to the visually stylised set and emotive use of light and contrast especially in the dreamlike scenes.
Metropolis appears as a bleak and somewhat terrifying vision of the future. The workers are slaves repetitively working at menial tasks they remain nameless, exploited as a mass of people rather than individuals, in a half-crazed mechanised society.
The film metropolis boasts some of the finest sets in the history of cinema forecasting an ominous view of a malevolent future metropolis. An industrial world with skyscrapers clustered together reaching unimaginable heights displaying an image of hierarchy as the elite looked down upon the ant-like workers. Lang interpreted the city of the future as a kind of representation of heaven and hell: the world high above the city was a symbol of modernism full of Art-Deco and Gothic inspired buildings where the rich lived and down below in the murky underworld of huge machines were the workers a world which aimed to break their spirits. In the making of Metropolis, thousands of extras were employed and the use of special effects used effectively achieved the film's unique hallucinatory and dreamlike visions.12
Metropolis above all other things displays the fears the German people had towards technology. Metropolis depicts a dystopian and almost expressionist view of modern technology which was strongly associated with New York along with the use of art deco and gothic architecture as a backdrop, gives the impression that Lang viewed New York as an authoritarian and capitalist city. This idea becomes the main narrative throughout the film Metropolis. Metropolis represents technology and technocratic leadership as ultimately necessary for the future state, depicted both as detrimental, destructive and on the other hand crucial. Technology is the over-ruling power in Metropolis the workers are subject to this inevitable fate they are slaves of the world around them. Metropolis sets up an ambivalence created by the contradiction between needing the technology to make this future work and remain stable and how it is used to distract and control removing the worker's spirit, this unbalance creates a fragile tension within the dystopian future giving the audience a sense of unease. Among this tension, an ever-present technological gaze portrays the robot Maria as a reproducible spectacle. This sexualized view of technology can be mirrored in the idea that the New York use of skyscrapers sexualizes technology as the skyline is showcased as a display of power to make others fearful and in awe of this technological feat.
On one level, Metropolis tells the story of a futuristic city, ruled by Joh Frederson, who, fearing rebellion on the part of the city's workers, seeks to subvert all forms of proletarian solidarity and political consciousness. As he is depicted in the film, Frederson exercises power by monitoring his vast empire through various types of information technologies, quickly and violently responding to any signs of opposition. And it is his information-driven quick-strike capabilities, made possible by his technologically augmented modes of perception, which help perpetuate Frederson's rule. Throughout the film, Frederson's gaze is used to suggest that technological vision is a tool of authoritarian domination. Beneath his city is an underworld of gigantic machines, where the underclass toil gruelling ten-hour shifts, transforming their physical energy into the electrical and gas power to support the upper city, the city is therefore built on the strife and struggle of the straining, de-individualised labourers expending their energy in the central power station. The destruction of the workers through this industrial labour is a question of human behaviour within the context of mass culture and industrial capitalism and whether or not this relates to real capitalism or is just a fictional idea, I think. Lang's montage opens up the spectator's understanding of the machine-human interface in a way that suggests the negative dialectic. By simply associating the torture of work with the instrumentalism of time, The image of the mechanical clock hides the human and economic interests which also contribute to industrial labour’s potentially enslaving character.Maria argues that there must be a mediator between the "brain" that plans and the "hands" that build: a "heart," which allows them to understand one another. When one of the workers asks her, "Where is our mediator?" however, Maria's discourse becomes more conservative she responds, "Be patient, he will surely come." used to distract and enslave like the jazz age in America a distraction and escapism from the corrupt truth that we are all slaves. Captivated and ostensibly satisfied by her powerful and sympathetic account of their problems, the workers remain passive; and, thus, they perpetuate their miserable and enslaved mass existence. Prehistory suggests a vision of historical development as the constant repetition of the same. Since Maria's spectacle shows that revolution accomplishes nothing but destruction and that the rulers will never learn to temper their domination, she suggests that there is nothing an individual can do to alter his or her fate tying in with the Fatalist view popular in German cinema at the time showing man as only a part of his environment. The individual is manipulated by fate or change whether it be natural or through society. The social unrest due to the dominating forces of technological control is represented through the eyes of Maria as a constant state of struggle between two unequal and incomplete "halves" - a struggle which periodically results in a terrifying cataclysm, followed by the recreation of the same unwilling and authoritarian social formation. Maria' is presented as the producer of spectacle, used to captivate and distract keeping the capitalist ideals unharmed she mirrors the spectacle of the Manhattan skyline. However, the spectacle that she is preserving a disruptive element within Metropolis that is met not with pleasure and fantasy, but rather with fear and anger. Her visual nature in addition to her ability to produce captivating sounds and images represents a challenge to Frederson's form of panoptic control: revolutionary mass media productivity, a highly influential quality which he feels he must use to his advantage. The robot Maria's sexuality is represented in the film as the source of the Maria cyborg's dangerous ability to incite and manipulate a crowd while retaining the true Maria's ability to captivate. The Maria cyborg is shown to excite and, at the same time, enrage the crowd of men. The Maria cyborg's sexual spectacle mesmerises the masses who populate the nightclubs of Metropolis this situation is devised by Federson to test the cyborgs powers of producing mass hysteria, though this spectacle he also gauges an awareness of the problematic nature of his mechanised vision., an awareness that he can use this Maria to take control of the gullible mass or lead to destruction.
Lang emphasises the workers' barbaric stupidity, making it easier to swallow the authoritarian message about the ultimate necessity of a strong brain or leader. Furthermore, by getting rid of the demonic side of technology through the burning of the cyborg, the film banishes the primary source of anxiety towards technology. The film ends with the fulfilment of Maria's prophecy: the "brain" and the "hands" are finally brought together by a "heart" which can mediate the differences between them. This double reconciliation which closes Metropolis - a sudden and breath-taking conclusion which re-establishes both the broken family and the broken state - has such a sudden and overwhelming impact that, for a moment, it makes its viewers forget the obvious: nothing in the future state has (if truth be told) changed. All the original power relations remain the same Frederson still rules, and the workers still mechanically obey. Metropolis allows a technological gaze, to intertwine with the authoritarian society, destabilised during certain moments in the film, are in the end affirmed without question. Lang's final word on cinema is thus not a positive one. By legitimating the authoritarian order, the visions and spectacles produced by Fredeson and Maria, like Lang's film itself, ultimately serve domination. Although moments of the film give rise to spectator self-consciousness and a negative and associative type of montage dialectic which generates free sets of associations, the montage strategies which structure the film's authoritarian narrative ensure that Metropolis ends on a final note of stasis and inevitability. As the ambivalence about technology expressed by Lang suggests, German technological modernisation during the Wiemar Republic did not bring with it the social progress for which most Germans had hoped. Instead, the authoritarian forces, briefly and only partially pushed from power by the events of 1918-19, began to appear more open and assert increasingly greater political and military control. As Lang's film suggests, by Wiemar's middle phase German authoritarianism could easily be coupled with a pro-science, pro-technology stance. As the Wiemar Republic gradually dissolved in the late twenties and early thirties, technology and the myth of progress were taken up more and more by members of the revolutionary right. 13
Metropolis depicted better than many others the mythic aspect of New York’s dominant vertical dimension realised through the skyscrapers and its image as the pragmatic modern metropolis.14 New York is a prime example of the modernist ideal to dominate history and dispel all traditions and conventions an idea which was at the core of modernist sensibility, creating a distinctly American and capitalist architecture. The futurists were fascinated by the duality and multiplicity of modern life. This was an environment of visual and perceptual excess and New York was beginning to paint a picture of extreme American architecture the vertical element signified proud capitalism, and so skyscrapers became modern icons testifying to the individualistic spirit of American capitalism.15
The perception into the future seemed to stem from the cultural stimuli of the present the dynamic force ever speeding forward for the sake of progress a perception of reality that only functions when all associations with utility and morality, along with historical and political issues, are kept out of consideration for the sake of the aesthetic effect.16
By the end of the 1920s the skyscraper had become the utmost expression of modern architecture and in many ways, New York and its highly influential style in the first two decades of the 20th century already appeared as the realisation of the city of the future.17 Lang too had realised New York’s influence as a modern metropolis and early premonition of his vision of the future as the backdrop of metropolis Exhibits an authentic and scarily close vision of the city of the future, and as New York was commonly regarded as the city of the Avant-Garde, the cubist and the futurist city. Lang must have been aware of the influence that New York’s image as the paradigmatic metropolis exerted on the imagination and as we can see with figures one and two the depiction of Metropolis is terrifyingly similar to that of 1920’s New York.
Metropolis remains one of the most significant testimonies of its age, an example of its political conflicts hopes enthusiasm and most importantly fears the German people had for the new technology and American ways. Moreover metropolis has also the merit of having been an important turning point in the development of film architecture, and for discourses of visionary urbanism, metropolis also visualises the way in which German culture experiences the changes of new urbanism,18 as the city of the future appears as an apocalyptic or vaguely biblical environment, a sort of mystical Babylon. The visual space of metropolis, the negative dystopia which characterises the urban civilisation of the future, is negatively characterised. Above one has the skyline of skyscrapers, down below, the workers in a dark pit.
New York City in the first two decades of the twentieth century was indeed the visual incarnation of the contradictions of modernity. It was at the head of modernist technology and design, mechanisation, improvements in transportation, and a general rise in the standard of living had stimulated a rapid industrial expansion. To cater to the demands of the expanding markets, factories gradually replaced the small-scale artisan workshops that up to that point had been the backbone of industrial production. The growth of the manufacturing system propelled New York City, to the forefront of economic production, and with that came the influx of people leading to severe pressure in the demand for housing.
Figure 4: View of 1920’s New York.
In the 1920’s zoning became the principal inspiration behind a new style in skyscraper design and the new vision of the modern metropolis.
Zoning described by its creators was used, “ to stabilise and conserve property values, to relief the rapidly increasing congestion in the streets and the transit lines, to provide greater safety in buildings and the streets and in general to make the city more beautiful convenient and agreeable.” 19 The impression the modern city of New York was a brand new future city, a city of vertiginous towers shimmering skyward as a symbol not just of the achievements and power of American capitalism but of man’s enlightenment.20 New York had become a superficial and aesthetically pleasing spectacle of exotic, illusionary architecture showcasing the technological triumphs, thus these mechanical marvels showcased early 20th-century progress towards an ever-advancing future. To the elite overlooking the city with a leisurely gaze from one of the sparkly towers, it seemed romantic and exhilaration juxtaposing completely with the crawling mass they looked down from this great height upon who were unaware of the city around them and above them unless they cared to look up.21
Figure 5: Workers in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, 1927.
This Vertical drive skyward exemplified another social phenomenon entirely the new forces associated with the soaring heights of the skyscrapers signified on the one hand a confusing frightful and extreme consolidation of industrially based financial power. And on the other; the city's seemingly inhuman capacity for competition along with the growing insidiousness of its commercial values and the whole disquieting process of change. This analogy portrays skyscrapers as the metaphor for the darker side of modernity. As they appeared bewildering and stupefying. Delivering an escapism, or fantasy that aimed towards a consumerist society. An illusory world in which Acquisition and consumption were the main means of achieving happiness. Within the cult of the new; democratisation of desire and monetary value as the predominant measure of all value in society.22
Figure 6: Workers in 1920’s New York.
And so the dramatic surge upwards in New York illuminated spectacularly the transition from a 19th-century producer’s ethic to a new 20th-century consumer’s ethic which instead emphasised fashion, style superficiality and artifice.
Reflecting on this I think that although when Metropolis was made the German people had a fixation on the bleak and negative views of the future, leading cinematic imagery to be mostly bleak and pessimistic. Lang’s use of the themes and impressions of New York as a seemingly frightening vision into a tyrannical future is justified.
As behind the fantastic display of heights lay a social unrest and displacement between the elite and the workers which was not documented. Instead the city of New York used its architectural feats to display a sense of capitalism that was designed and put forward to be desirable.
However I do believe that this new city had slight undertones of darkness and social unrest, putting forth a sense that the future was to be solely based on capitalist ideology moving away from specialised trades and the idea of community, in favour of something mechanical and mass-produced. Aiming towards a future that was focused on speed and progress over substance and equality. Meaning that the rich could live in luxurious lives in a world separate from the struggles of the working class.
In this essay, I have tried to put forward my feelings in that behind the spectacle of modernity that was the dazzling display of skyscrapers there was an undercurrent of corruption. However, I do believe that the film Metropolis exaggerates these feelings to fit into the defeatist and fatalistic inner monologue of the German people due to the experience of a drastic societal trauma and change. Lang even admits that the expressionism movement in art and film with its concern with the state of German society was “pessimism for its own sake”.23
#fritzlang #lang #newyork #metropolis #cinema #germancinema #film #1920s #blackandwhitefilm #fritzlangsmetropolis #architecture #modernism #art #expressionism
Bibliography:
1 Anna Notaro, “Futurist Cinematic Visions and Architectural Dreams in the American Modern(ist) Metropolis”, Irish Journal of American Studies, Vol. 9, (2000): 174-175, Article Stable URL:
2 Holger Bachmann, Fritz Lang's Metropolis: cinematic visions of technology and fear (New York: Rochester, 2000), 5.
3 Ibid.
4 JENSEN, CINEMA OF FRITZ LANG (New York: A.S Barnes and co,1969), 13.
5 Leif Furhammar, Folke Isaksson, Politics and film, trans. Kersti French (London : Studio Vista 1971),30.
6 Andrew Tudor, Image and influence: studies in the sociology of film (London : Allen and Unwin 1974), 160.
7 Ibid, 168.
8 Ibid, 174.
9 JENSEN, CINEMA OF FRITZ LANG (New York: A.S Barnes and co,1969), 13.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid, 14.
12 Metropolis ,directed by Lang, Fritz, 1890-1976 Published London : Channel 4,1993.VHS.
13 Matthew Biro, “The New Man as Cyborg: Figures of Technology in Weimar Visual Culture,” New German Critique, No. 62 (Spring - Summer, 1994), pp. 71-110, accessed April,1,2014, DOI: 10.2307/488510.
14 Anna Notaro, “Futurist Cinematic Visions and Architectural Dreams in the American Modern(ist) Metropolis”, Irish Journal of American Studies, Vol. 9, (2000): 174-175, Article Stable URL:
15 Gail Fenske, The skyscraper and the city: the Woolworth Building and the making of modern New York (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2008), 4.
16 Wigoder Meir, “The "Solar Eye" of Vision: Emergence of the Skyscraper-Viewer in the Discourse on Heights in New York City, 1890-1920”, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians Vol. 61, No. 2 (Jun, 2002): 154, accessed April 7, 2014, DOI: 10.2307/991837.
17 Anna Notaro, “Futurist Cinematic Visions and Architectural Dreams in the American Modern(ist) Metropolis”, Irish Journal of American Studies,Vol.9,(2000):173-174,Article Stable URL:
18 Ibid.
19 Carol Willis, “Zoning and "Zeitgeist": The Skyscraper City in the 1920s”, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Mar., 1986): 47, accessed April 8,2014, DOI: 10.2307/990128.
20 Ibid, 49.
21 Wigoder Meir, “The "Solar Eye" of Vision: Emergence of the Skyscraper-Viewer in the Discourse on Heights in New York City, 1890-1920”, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians Vol. 61, No. 2 (Jun, 2002): 164, accessed April 7, 2014, DOI: 10.2307/991837.
22 Gail Fenske, The skyscraper and the city: the Woolworth Building and the making of modern New York (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2008), 54.
23 Andrew Tudor, Image and influence: studies in the sociology of film (London : Allen and Unwin 1974), 174.
Comments