Metropolis
In a futuristic city sharply divided between the working class and the city planners, the son of the city's mastermind falls in love with a working-class prophet who predicts the coming of a savior to mediate their differences.
This film begins with a title card detailing how nearly a quarter of the film has been lost. I don’t believe I was aware of this fact before my initial viewing of this film, and it’s not something I could entirely disassociate myself from during the rest of my watch.
Cultural memory can be considered both fragile and defiant. Lang’s film, as well as the art destroyed under the Nazi regime a few years after the release of Metropolis, may come to illustrate two poignant forms of cultural loss—one accidental, the other intentional. Destruction, in this context, is not simply the physical removal of objects but a means of controlling memory itself. When the Nazis declared certain artworks "degenerate," they were not merely erasing physical pieces but shaping the narrative of cultural identity and collective history. What was deemed "acceptable" was preserved, while what was "othered" or "dangerous" was erased, often with violent intent. This act of destruction itself becomes a form of historical narrative, one that reflects the power dynamics of those in control, dictating what will be remembered and what will fade into oblivion. Therefore, Metropolis is an artifact that transcends its creators, as analysis has been shaped and reshaped over time. Yet, its legacy is not without complications. Thea von Harbou, the screenwriter, later aligned herself with the Nazi Party. This dissonance raises questions about the intersections of art, ideology, and memory: how can a work that critiques industrial exploitation and authoritarian control be reconciled with the personal politics of its creators? The answer lies in the collaborative nature of cinema and the ways cultural memory evolves. Fritz Lang, who fled Germany to escape Nazi rule, rejected such authoritarianism, and the film’s resonance today reflects not von Harbou’s politics but the enduring power of its themes, shaped by those who have preserved and reinterpreted it over decades.
In contrast, the fragmented history of Metropolis is the result of circumstance: distributors' cuts and archival mishaps rather than ideological malice. Yet, even in its incomplete form, the film's preservation and ongoing restoration efforts confront the fragility of cultural memory and challenge the notion of a static or final version of history. If we contend that meaning is fleeting and impermanent, yet still worth pursuing, memory praxis involves us engaging with fragments of the past in the knowledge that they are incomplete, thereby valuing their transitory significance.
Consider Metropolis: when it premiered in 1927, Lang’s science fiction epic was certainly captivating (a German critic from the Berliner Morgenpost suggested that the film’s most spectacular scenes were met with “spontaneous applause”). But within months, the film was drastically cut to satisfy distributors, much of it being discarded. For decades, this film was known only in its truncated form, its cinematic grandeur reduced to a shadow of itself. Fortunately, in 2008, a near complete print in Buenos Aires surfaced in a film archive (“For me, she is not dead, Job Fredersen, - for me, she lives - - !”), though even still, segments are missing. Perhaps I’ve become more sentimental as I’ve gotten older, but while watching this film, I couldn’t help but simultaneously marvel at both the amazing expressionistic sets while mourning the absences lost due to a precarious history.
In contrast, the destruction of art under the Nazis was calculated and ideological. Works by Chagall, Kandinsky, and many others were condemned as “degenerate” and systematically removed from museums, auctioned off, or destroyed in public spectacles meant to cleanse German culture (famous pictures of book burnings document these events). This destruction, fueled by ideological control, was an active attempt to shape the future of cultural memory, imposing a specific vision of the past that justified political power. Yet even here, sketches discovered in attics, canvases repatriated decades later, and catalog entries that outlasted the paintings they described, bear witness to what was lost and invite us to imagine what once was.
What unites these stories is our human impulse to resist forgetting. Efforts to restore Lang’s film or recover Nazi-looted art are not simply acts of preservation; they are acts of defiance. They assert that even in incompleteness, fragments carry meaning, and that cultural memory is not static but alive as it is shaped by our efforts to engage with it. In the absence of wholeness, the process of recovering itself becomes meaningful as a way of reconstructing narratives, even if they can never be fully restored.
And yet, this tension between destruction and recovery reveals the paradox of engaging with fragmentations: often, their significance is amplified. The missing segments of Metropolis do not diminish the film’s power but add to its mystique, as its viewing experience becomes a meditation on both loss and resilience. Similarly, scattered remnants of Nazi-destroyed art become symbols of resistance against the forces that sought their destruction. In other words, they are symbolic of a cultural defiance.
In particular, the score of Metropolis serves as a fascinating example of cultural resonance. Beyond the chord progression later repurposed for Kubrick’s The Shining, the film integrates the motif from the French national anthem, La Marseillaise. This choice infuses the film’s dystopian landscape with a symbolic evocation of revolutionary ideals—liberty, equality, and fraternity—that starkly contrasts with the oppressive hierarchies depicted on screen. Intentional or not, such musical choices reflect the film’s historical context while inviting reinterpretation by modern audiences. Kubrick famously adopted this macabre progression (historically a funeral procession) for his own horror masterpiece, which evokes new meanings, shaped by his cultural (and no doubt, socio-political) worldviews. Lang’s dystopian vision thus finds an afterlife in the foreboding corridors of the Overlook Hotel (and subsequently the minds of over-analytical conspiracy theorists everywhere). These examples underscore how memory, like art, is an evolving, interconnected phenomenon, where fragments of the past are woven into contemporary contexts. The strains of La Marseillaise and Kubrick’s reimagined progression may then be seen as historical fragments both enduring and transforming a resilient cultural memory.
Lang's film stands out for many reasons, but its portrayal of cultural memory—through both its partial loss and fragmented restoration—engages with history in its broken form. Instead of perfection, memory asks us to find meaning in what endures. The ongoing efforts to recover lost works, whether it's Metropolis, art destroyed by the Nazis, or others, suggest not only the importance of the past but also our ability to create new significance from its pieces.
