Now that The Artist has won Best Picture along with four additional Oscars, it appears that silent films are making a comeback.
This Thursday, the Northwest Film Center will screen a restored version of Fritz Lang’s dystopian sci-fi classic, Metropolis (1927). The screening will feature live scoring by the Alloy Orchestra, which will perform on synthesizers, junk percussion and traditional instruments.
Now that The Artist has won Best Picture along with four additional Oscars, it appears that silent films are making a comeback.
This Thursday, the Northwest Film Center will screen a restored version of Fritz Lang’s dystopian sci-fi classic, Metropolis (1927). The screening will feature live scoring by the Alloy Orchestra, which will perform on synthesizers, junk percussion and traditional instruments.
Written by Lang and his wife, Thea von Harbou, Metropolis is set in a futuristic city of soaring skyscrapers and buzzing lights. The working class exists in the depths beneath the city, slaving away at the massive machines keeping it alive, while the wealthy elites rule in decadence aboveground.
The story follows Freder (Gustav Fröhlich), son of the city’s master, who abandons his life of excess after meeting the young priestess Maria (Brigitte Helm), who lives among the workers. Enamored by the woman, Freder makes his way into the heart of the metropolis, finding work at the machines while seeking his inamorata. What he finds is the sorrow and hardship of his people’s toil and the priestess’s proclamation that he is destined to mediate for peace between the workers and his father.
Meanwhile, his father (Alfred Abel) seeks the advice of a renegade inventor, a mad scientist hard at work on the construction of a robot of human likeness. Concerned with his continued control over the metropolis, he pushes the inventor to forge his robot in Maria’s likeness, in hopes of destroying her influence over the workers.
The images in Metropolis are striking, resonant, iconic. Churning machines grind away at their tasks, and throngs of working men act in robotic accord, whether marching or toiling through their daily business. The city is a sprawl of urban towers and webs of highways, pocked with dark catacombs where the workers pray after their shifts.
The actors share in the visual gravity of the film. Helm, the lead actress, delivers a stunning array of performances in multiple roles. As the priestess, she affects a serene, almost angelic manner. Conversely, her role as the insurgent robot is lascivious and impish.
Fröhlich also delivers a poignant performance. Purely through expression and body language, the actor transforms from a girl-chasing playboy to, well, a girl-chasing idealist.
The film is steeped in political allegory. The class tension between workers and elites bears striking resemblance to the modern-day conflict between menial workers and corporate capitalists, between the individual and government. Religion enters the story as well, with Maria embodying of both saint and sinner.
The Boston-based three-piece Alloy Orchestra, whose music will accompany the special film center screening, includes Ken Winokur, Terry Donahue and Roger Miller. The ensemble has worked with Lang’s film in its many iterations over the last 21 years.
“Metropolis is the first score we ever wrote for a theater here in our hometown of Boston,” said Winokur, Alloy musician and director. “We got a huge reception, and we’ve been playing it ever since.”
The film has undergone multiple edits over the years; having been shortened as it changed hands, the result was a loss of footage. In recent years, however, original footage has been recovered and restored.
“They keep restoring it as they find more footage of it, adding digital restoration into it and actually reassembling it, because the film had been scattered to the winds,” Winokur said. “Every time they’ve changed it, we’ve had to rewrite our score. We finally have the nearly complete version, which will show in Portland.”
Winokur, whose ensemble has scored over 30 silent films in its 21 years of performing, considers Alloy’s pairing with Metropolis to be particularly synergistic.
“The great thing about Metropolis, and how we came to it in the first place, is that it’s filmed much like our style of music,” he explained. “Even the style of our drum set, which is made up of a lot of junk metal and things that have been cast away by society. It looks like what’s going on onscreen.”
As a viewing experience, Metropolis on its own delivers a visceral picture of a steel-and-clockwork future, while telling a wordless and humane story. Paired with the live Alloy performance, the film promises to be a spectacle of appropriately metallic rhythm set to an industrial narrative about the robot apocalypse.
