The Architecture of the Apocalypse: Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis Film Review

Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis is a frightening depiction of a future where social inequality is represented vertically: the intellectual elite live extravagantly in magnificent skyscrapers, and the industrial working class labor tirelessly under the earth’s surface. It critiques modernity and technological progress, yet at its ending finds hope following the apocalyptic collapse of Metropolis; likewise, the style of New Objectivity emerges later in the Weimar Republic to counter the anti-realist, Expressionist style of the film. While the film’s complex narrative is crucial to its commentary on ambition, greed, and technology’s influence on the individual and society, this essay focuses on a single idea — hierarchy. From examining set-design and visual storytelling — the plot’s ‘architecture’ — we can understand the conceptions of hierarchy between humanity, machinery, and the city in Metropolis.

Although Lang was an atheist, he believed in religion’s usefulness in teaching ethics; in Metropolis, the Christian faith is especially relevant to demonstrating the hierarchical relationship between man and machine. The authority of God, the “Mightest Architect,” over man is affirmed (if not defined by) his act of creating the universe. Humans, too, are creators, and should naturally assume authority over their creations. In the film, the inventor Rotwang both symbolizes and performs man’s capacity to create. More importantly, he conveys the ability of an invention to destabilize the natural hierarchy of God, man, and machine. When Rotwang’s robot Maria is unveiled, it sits beneath a large pentagram painted on the wall. This visual imagery of a mystical symbol behind the robot Maria is a parallel opposite of the catacombs scene with towering Chritsitan crosses behind the real Maria. In this instance of set-design, it is clear that Lang visually contrasts the anti-religious robot with the devout Maria. While Maria faithfully enforces the existing hierarchy, the machine has a ‘witch-like’ ability to subvert it and becomes powerful over man. As Andreas Huyssen explains in his essay ‘The Vamp and the Machine,’ the machine-woman is essential to the film’s commentary of technological domination, the “demonic, inexplicable threat” to man. This domination is seen in the robot’s manipulation of the male gaze at the Yoshiwara club, and her success in persuading the workers to revolt violently.

The second and more obvious instance of this hierarchy occurs in the industrial accident scene, where the set-design of the machine hall fades perfectly (according to Freder’s hallucination) to the terrifying image of the ancient god Moloch, from the Biblical myth. Then, to even further connect the industrial machinery to a man-eating God, it fades again to a third design: a hybrid of the steaming machine with levers and controls and the face and gaping mouth of Moloch. In true Expressionist fashion, Lang uses the set-design in Freder’s hallucination to connect the accidental death of the worker to a ritual sacrifice to the machine. As film critic Anton Kaes suggests, this scene conveys how “scientific progress began subjugating the factory worker.” Both the set-design of the hybrid machine-God Moloch and the mystical symbol above the robot conveys the corrosion of the hierarchy: humans “become slaves, not masters, of the machine, which now for the first time develops its devilish and occult power.”

Lastly, technology’s elevated hierarchical status is conveyed through visual representations of time. The opening progresses from images from the rhythmic movement of pumps and turning gears, and a clock that reaches the end of the ten-hour shift and signals a shift change. In Kaes’ point of view, “the first few seconds of the film graphically illustrate the city’s clocklike exactness and tireless energy.” Time is represented as the rhythm of industrial progress, the making of history, and is a source of constant pressure to the workers. Furthermore, as Michael Cowan points out, the “meticulous choreography of cadenced bodily movement” develops the idea of “the temporal disciplining of the body,” in which “the body’s natural rhythms are subordinated to the rhythms and the tempo of the industrial clock.” With images of the clock and the synchronous, repetitive actions of the workers, Lang uses visual storytelling to comment on technology’s influence on human conceptions of time. In Metropolis, time has been distorted by the city’s industrial demands, it has become a source of pressure and stress, and has pushed the workers to behave according to a strict rhythm. While this idea is conveyed with Expressionist exaggeration, it nonetheless connects well to Walter Ruttman’s Berlin: Symphony of a City, which takes a realistic, documentary-style approach to capture time as it passes on a day in Berlin. It also conveys time with rhythmic (though not choreographed) everyday movement of Berlin citizens, yet it does not leave the same negative impression.

Metropolis critiques the lustrous vision of the city that subdues the working class. This is developed by the scene where Maria tells the story of the Tower of Babel and launches a ‘film within a film,’ yet it is also more subtly conveyed through set-design. Lang’s inspiration for the city of Metropolis was from the brightly lit, luxurious and dazzling buildings of Manhattan, and this is clearly reflected in the design, except with dramatic geometric shapes and slanted angles that evoke the futurism and immensity of the city — Fredersen’s headquarters, the New Tower of Babel, is at the center. The city’s abundance of light (which is even mentioned by Freder when he says, “all of us in the city’s light”) contrasts the darkness of the catacombs. Similarly, Freder’s initial outfit is light-colored, until he switches to the dark-colored worker’s clothes. Metropolis, located above the worker’s city, full of brightness and decadence, is an emblem of progress and ambition, yet also of oppression and moral corruption.

One of the most crucial lines of the film is, “The mediator between head and hands must be the heart!” It is not a message, but an assertion: it is necessary to connect the intellectuals with the workers, and this must be done through an ideological mediator. In the film, Freder takes on the role of this mediator, but the ending is still open-ended. The film asks of the Weimar Republic, “who is our mediator?” It wonders whether Germany is headed towards bountiful economic progress stimulated by technology, or if it is nearing an apocalyptic reality, with greater social inequality and weakened power of man over its creations. To achieve the visual effects of Metropolis, the cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan invented the Schüfftan process, which involved the use of mirrors in front of the camera to superimpose the actors onto the miniature sets. At the same time, the most striking reflections in Lang’s film are those of the Weimar anxieties of modernity, the destabilization of traditional hierarchies, and an uncertain future ahead.

References

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2. Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, “Oration On The Dignity Of Man,” Henry Regnery Company, 1956, pp. 5.
3. Huyssen, Andreas. “The Vamp and the Machine: Technology and Sexuality in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.” New German Critique, no. 24/25, 1981, pp. 221–237. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/488052. Accessed 23 Mar. 2020.
4. Kaes, Anton. “The Phantasm of the Apocalypse: Metropolis and Weimar Modernity.” Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City, edited by Gyan Prakash, Princeton University Press, Princeton; Oxford, 2010, pp. 17–30. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7sw4m.4. Accessed 23 Mar. 2020.
5. Grant, Barry Keith, Fritz Lang: Interviews. Conversations with Filmmakers Series. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2003.
6. Cowan, Michael. “The Heart Machine: “Rhythm” and Body in Weimar Film and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.” Modernism/modernity, vol. 14 no. 2, 2007, p. 225–248. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/mod.2007.0030.
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