Metropolis (Silent)...

I picked up the re-remastered version of Metropolis recently. According to Wikipedia...

Metropolis is a 1927 German expressionist film in the science-fiction genre directed by Fritz Lang. Produced in Germany during a stable period of the Weimar Republic, Metropolis is set in a futuristic urban dystopia and makes use of this context to explore the social crisis between workers and owners in capitalism. The film was produced in the Babelsberg Studios by Universum Film A.G. (UFA). The most expensive silent film ever made, it cost approximately 5 million Reichsmark.

Metropolis was cut substantially after its German premiere, and much footage was lost over the passage of successive decades. There have been several efforts to restore it, as well as discoveries of previously lost footage. A 2001 reconstruction of Metropolis, shown at the Berlin Film Festival, was inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in that same year. In 2008, a copy of the film 30 minutes longer than any other known surviving copy was located in Argentina. After a long period of restoration in Germany, the restored film was shown publicly for the first time simultaneously at Berlin and Frankfurt on February 12, 2010.

According to GFT on Amazon.com...

Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS was very successful with both critics and audiences when it debuted in 1927 Berlin--but it was thereafter edited for distribution by Channing Pollock, who disliked it and removed great chunks of the film and substantially altered the storyline. The resulting film was admired for its visual style, but it proved a critical and box office disappointment. Neglected in the wake of sound, surviving prints of the film were left to corrode and decay--and when it began to reach the home market via VHS and DVD the results were very hit or miss; Blackhawk released a fairly credible version of the truncated film to home video, but for the most part the quality of these releases varied from barely mediocre to downright unwatchable...

A great chunk of METROPOLIS--perhaps as much a quarter of more--has been forever lost, but this Kino Video DVD release offers the single best version of the film available. The previously cut footage that still exists has been restored; gaps in the film have been bridged by the occasional use of stills and explanatory title cards; the film itself has been painstakingly and digitally restored; and the soundtrack is the Gottfried Huppertz original created for the film's 1927 Berlin debut. In seeing this version of METROPOLIS, I was struck by how very differently it reads from the previously available truncated version. The visual style and the story itself are much more exciting and cohesive, and in the wake of this restoration it becomes impossible to deny the film status as landmark of international cinema.

GFT continues to ramble on...

...There has been complaint that this restoration runs at incorrect speed and the performances are therefore unnecessarily jerky. I did not find this to be the case. In certain instances the movement is deliberately jerky and mechanical--the workers are a case in point--but beyond this there is nothing for which the difference between silent acting and modern acting techniques cannot account. There has also been some complaint that the title cards should have been left in their original German and translated via subtitle. There is a certain validity to this, but it seems a minor quibble; title cards were typically translated in the silent era itself...

According to Jason Blosser on Amazon.com...

First, the recovered print allowed the restoration team to properly edit the film to match its original cut - the previous edit was assembled according to the best available notes (and the original script) and some of it was conjecture. Next, what you realize when watching the film with this new footage, is that the editing was extraordinary for the time. Few other films of the era use quite the same aggressive pace of cutting, and this really enhances the dramatic experience. Finally, you're actually getting to see HUGE portions of the story that had previously only been told with descriptive title cards. So what's been added? More of the Yoshiwara nightclub sequence is now included. The character of The Thin Man becomes a much greater and more menacing presence in the new cut - not only tracking down Josaphat and 11811, but also appearing as a monk to Freder and revealing a Bible image of the Seven Deadly Sins that is visually identical to Machine Maria's frenetic dance. In the previous cut, you'd see title cards when the workers storm the M-Machine, when Freder and Josaphat break through the bars of the air shaft to free the children, when Rotwang kneels before his monument to the real Hel, when the worker mob finds and chases Maria, etc - now you get to see all of that. The result is that you FEEL the tension build - the film experience is much more dramatic and gripping now. As was the case with the original King Kong, film audiences back in 1927 must have just been completely freaked out by Fritz Lang's Metropolis. It's still an extraordinary experience today, some 83 years later, and with this new restoration that's more true now than ever.

This is actually my third trip to Metropolis -- once on VHS and twice on DVD. I picked up the previous remastered version running about two hours. So, when a newly re-remastered version running at nearly a half hour longer than the previous version, became available, I had to pick it up. For those of you who have difficulty with movies that are not in color, you may find that having to read your movies without spoken words or even sound effects, may be a bit of an acquired taste. In 1984, Italian music producer Giorgio Moroder released a truncated version with a soundtrack by rock artists including Freddie Mercury, Loverboy and Adam Ant. The soundtrack for Metropolis (1984) has 10 tracks and I liked 4 for a total of 40%, which works out to a 2 out of 4. My favorite track is an instrumental track titled Machines.