The Political Lessons of Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis'

A few days ago I renewed my acquaintance with Fritz Lang’s science-fiction thriller Metropolis. The Transit Films DVD edition I watched runs 124 minutes—a fifth of its original length is missing—but the movie retains much of the strange and appalling power it must have held for its audiences in 1927 in Weimar Germany.

The city of the title has an upper level, “the Club of the Sons,” enhanced by a recreational annex, the Eternal Gardens, where aristocratic youths cavort and improve themselves in hygienic sports and dalliances. On the middle level are the tremendous and demanding machines to whose workings the people from the lower level apply themselves 10 hours a day. The exhausted laborers leave the factory in shifts, through a tunnel leading to elevators that carry 40 persons at a time to their concrete shanties in the lower depths.

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