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GIORGIO MO RODER

ONTHE RE-MAKING OF .METROPOL

ls'

fter Lang's Metropolis,

there was Clark Kent's. After Clark Kent's, there was Giorgio Moroder's.
Last summer musician/producer
Moroder unveiled a reconstructed version of Lang's anti-Utopian classic, Metropolis. It was some looker. Moroder's two-and-ahalf-year effort had uncovered whole
scenes some thought had vanished into the

sense of Adam

Ant, Pat Benatar, Cycle V,

Loverboy, Bill Squier, Bonnie Tyler,

Queen's Freddie Mercury, and Yes'Jon Anderson. What radio programmers call
supposed mass tastes. "If you have earplugs," wrote Carrie Rickey inThe Boston Herald, "there's no greater movie experience than seeing the splendidly restored

"Album-Oriented" or "FM" rock. What critics tend to call formulaic pandering to

ether. Wash-like tints-sepia, blood-red, cool blue-bathed Lang's original black &
white tones. New sound effects went be-

Metropolis...." Gene Siskel summed it up in the Chicago Tribune: "Nice colors; dumb songs. "

Second Time Around

Moroder is again aware of such criticism

yond naturalism into impressionism.

Smooth-moving subtitles replaced the silent movie's intertitles, and contained what was said to be a newly authenticated version of Lang's and scenarist/bride Thea von

now that his masterful restoration is on video (out since mid-August). "There

Harbou's script. The restoration was no less than a cinematic miracle. "l had the chance to work with Fritz Lang, " says Moroder today, metaphorically and modestly. "l was working with one of the best. "
Yet Moroder-the disco/synth-rock impressario who launched Donna Summer and who knocked back a couple of Oscars for his Midnight Erpress and Flashdance scores-felt he needed something else to

were things I had to compromise, " he acknowledges. "l knew, for example, that when [Francis Ford Coppola's restoration of Abel Gance'sl Napoleon came out-not the live-orchestra version, but the regular
flopped terribly. The music was good, but it wasn't for the broad audience. If I had to go back and re-do Metropolis today, " he muses, "l would change a few songs, possibly. But if, for example, I had taken the songs out, which a lot of people have suggested, then I probably would not have been able to get the movie released. " As it was, it reached theaters not through a major studio but through an intrepid independent called Cinecom. "As long as peo-

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movie-it

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make the restoration saleable: a rock

score. So he wrote or cowrote 10 tunes,

BY FRAIIIK
LOUECE

mostly with lyricist Pete Bellotte. It wasn't, however, rock in the sense of avant-gardists Laurie Anderson, Philip
Glass, orJohn Cale, the likes of which may have proven unavailable. It was rock in the

l ll
U

ple's criticism is toward the film score, = that's OK, " says Moroder. "l'm a little hurt g o if they attack me personally. "
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85

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EA

ang's' Metropolis,' uta Moroder. The restoration was no less than a cinemotic miracle, restoring lost scenes, adding intpressionist sound
e.f.fects,

wosh-like tints, ondunlbrtunate ly-dumb songs.

Lang might've said the same thing. His Orwellian film of a mechanized future divided into ruling and working classes has almost always been chastised for its political

tropolis-Moroder paid a German government foundation $200,000 for the rights to Lang's classic.

new/old footage-from a deteriorating,

highly flammable "nitrate" (pre-1950 film stock). Then Moroder traced the original script and a hand-notated original score to the German Censorship Ministry in Berlin.
Using that source material, the multilingual

simplicity, overstated acting,

The restoration's final tab would

be

and

stereotypical characters. Set in A. D. 2026,

the story centers on Freder (Gustav

Frohlich), son of the malevolent Master of super-city Metropolis. When Freder falls inlove withMaria (Brigitte Helm), an earth goddess who organizes and uplifts the workers, his father engages the Strangelovian scientist Rotwang to convert a "female" robot to Maria's likeness. Eventually riots and a near-disaster ensue before Freder (the "heart") finally mediates be-

about l0 times that. This was something else he hadn't planned. "To be honest, " Moroder says now, "there was a point after a year and a half of work when most of
the music was done and I thought the mov-

ie was ready. But when I presented it to some of the studio executives, I had good
reactions but nobody wanted to release it. So I decided I had to do some additional work-try to find new footage, put new color in, have some additional songs. And that's when the real interesting part started.

disaster. ") While working with the script, Moroder uncovered some shiny filmic nuggets.

Moroder retranslated the script. (Most versions in the U.S. carry a Museum of Modern Art translation Moroder terms "a

The most impressive was the rediscovery of a pivotal character named Hel whom
an American censor had excised years be-

tween the rulers (the "head") and the

workers (the "hands"). Despite thematic echoes of Germanic mythology and Biblical philosophy, it was pretty thin stuff. Lang himself later disavowed the movie. Nevertheless Metropo/rs is visually stunning. And while that com-

"

fore because the name was "improper. " Hel was Freder's dead mother and the
long-ago subject of Rotwang's affection; the very reason, in fact, that the scientist had created a "female" robot. Moroder, however, couldn't find any pictures of Hel. A still of her tombstone turned up at the Cinematheque in Paris, but it was

Suburbon Sprowl
The "interesting part" hinged on the fact

that the ostensibly authentic versions of Metropolis playing the college and arthouse circuit really aren't. As Moroder discovered while speaking with German silent-film expert Enno Patalas of the Filnr Museum in Munich, Metropolis exists in several'versions. Most had long ago been truncated for every reason from censorship to fitting in enough showings per day. Moroder finally decided-both for a commercial hook and given his own creative

bination may sound like a description of Star Wars, there's no confusing Lucas' special effects with Lang's Expressionist-based visions. For with Metropolis' sinister montages, eye-of-God camera, and rat's-maze overview of the architecture of human existence, Lang melded Teutonic myths with contemporary Expressionism arguably better than any of his peers in
Germany's cinematic golden age.

unusable-prompting Moroder to reconstruct the monument and re-film it. Mean-

while, Fritz Lang's former agent, Forest Ackerman, found a few stills in his own

files-stills which close a plot hole concerning a worker with whom F'reder
changes places. Moroder, using a technique pioneered by the restorers of the Garland/Mason A Star is Born, filmed the stills using camera movement to simulate motion. Finally Moroder heard about a collector in San Diego. "This was toward the end of my work. I didn't discover anything new there except that the San Diego copy had subtitles instead of intertitles. I thought that was so much better that even though

urges-that

he wanted nothing less than to

Moroder appreciated that. Still,

he

hadn't planned on any massive detective work when he first broached the idea of restoring a great silent movie. He'd simply

been impressed with Coppola's 1981

revitalization of Gance's 1927 Napoleon. After a Paramount executive suggested Moroder do something along those lines, the composer thought it natural to work with one of his favorite films. "l first saw Metropolls when I was 17, " he recalls, "and I'd seen it many times since. While I was looking around for a movie to do, Ihad Metropolrs playing on a
screen one day, and there was music in the babkground and I thought-this is it. " After checking out about 20 other silent

create the compleat Metropolis. This meant globe-hopping, both in person and by phone. One of the first stops was the Australian Library of Film in Canberra. There, Patalas had told him, were eight "lost" scenes bequeathed through a film-collector's will. These included one of the reconstruction's most evocative images, that of Olympian-style games set in a veritable Colosseum. Moroder also found

I'd already done the (retranslated) title

flicks-and surviving rock-star David

Bowie's own passing fancy inrevivingMe-

scenes of a decadent ruling-class pleasure-palace where the ersatz Maria performs a dizzyingly erotic strip-dance. "l was calling all over the world to find footage, " Moroder remembers. "One time we even tracked down some guy on a boat out of India, but he wasn't who we thought he was. " The search took Moroder to Los Angeles, where film collector John Hampton supplied a small but choice amount of

cards, I decided to go back and put in subtitles. "

Wotch Your Speed

A few more aesthetic decisions had to be made. The most important, perhaps, concerned the film speed. Unversed audiences aren't aware of it, but silent movies aren't supposed to look sped-up. They only look that way because they were filmed at
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Moroder

anywhere from 16 to 20 frames per second, and we project films today at a standard24 frames per second. Film museums

generally have variable-speed projectors, and try to run silent films at the proper
speed. Some video companies, too, most notably Video Yesteryear, likewise try to slow down silent films for video releases. In the case of. Metropolis, says Moroder, "l asked a lot of filmmakers about the possibility of slowing it down. It turned out not to be possible. First of all, commercial cinemas don't have the proper projectors, as museums do. And if we'd cut, say, one frame out of every two, you get a jerking motion, which is not good at all. The only way would have been to transfer it onto video (at the proper speed), and then take it back. But then you'd lose so much quality it would have been terrible. " How about for Vestron's video release? "That would have

meant redoing all the music, which

wouldn't have been in sync anymore. " For that reason and because of the subtitles saving time, the 87-minute restored version is shorter than some others. In any case, Moroder has given us a masterpiece. No one could seriously accuse him of "ruining" Metropolis-all the other versions will exist as long as there are VCRs, museums, or film buffs. As for Moroder's and his collaborators' songs, if you don't like them, just turn down the volume or dub in your own songs. That's
video.

"The only thing any creator can

do,

"

avows the composer, "is to do something the way you think is right. If it turns out to be right, great. If not, then obviously I made some mistakes. " But did you do right by Fritz Lang, one of filmdom's greatest lights? Yes, Ul

Giorgio!