Metropolis 100

Metropolis 100

About the show

Matthew Nolan composer
Neil O’Connor composer
Sharon Phelan musician
Lisa Dowdall musician
Erik Friedlander musician

Directed by Fritz Lang, 1927, 150mins, Germany
Presented with a new live score by Matthew Nolan and Neil O’Connor alongside guest musicians Lisa Dowdall, Sharon Phelan, and Erik Friedlander.

A special presentation of the most unique cinematic achievement from the silent era, Metropolis. Fritz Lang’s sci-fi epic will be screened in its original format, as seen by German cinema-goers for the first time in January, 1927. The new score by Matthew Nolan and Neil O’Connor will provide a contemporary musical accompaniment to this great modernist classic. 

Fritz Lang's 1927 epic Metropolis may be the most influential film ever made? It certainly spawned the cinema of futurism, and watching it today – now in an important new restoration – it's uncanny to see how many shadows of cinema yet to come it already contains. Things to Come, Blade Runner, Alphaville and The Matrix are all there in embryonic state. Set in a dystopian city of the future (or allegorical present), the story recounts a battle between Metropolis's overlord Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel) and an inventor, Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), who wears a prototype of the Dr Strangelove mad hand. Rotwang engineers urban apocalypse by having his robot impersonate social activist Maria (Brigitte Helm). The anti-Maria foments unrest among the city's oppressed workers, while driving the city's wealthy sons to lustful violence with her astonishingly lubricious nightclub dancing. The film's futurism is still breathtaking, from its Art Deco titles to the neon spiral in Rotwang's lab: this is surely must the first film to imagine people communicating by video screen. And Rotwang's creation is not the first film robot, but it was the first to be sexy and streamlined. Resembling C3PO's chic sister, the robot transmutes into even stranger human form, played by Helm with mad, drunken eyes.

Screening in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut Irland.

A film from the collection of the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau Foundation (www.murnau-stiftung.de) in Wiesbaden.

Supported by Micromedia.

Rating: PG
Presented by Matthew Nolan Music

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