Fritz Lang, “Metropolis” 1927
“Metropolis” is the classic silent-movie industrial dystopia from 1927. It portrays a futuristic city comprising a two-tier society of haves and have-nots who are kept unaware of each other’s existence. It had a budget of five million Reichsmarks, making it the most expensive film produced in 1927.
Numerous attempts have been made to restore the film since the 1970s. A new reconstruction of “Metropolis” was shown at the Berlin Film Festival in 2001, and the film was inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in the same year, the first film thus distinguished. In 2008 a damaged print of Lang’s original cut of the film was found in a museum in Argentina. After a long restoration process, the film was 95% restored and shown on large screens in Frankfurt and Berlin simultaneously on 12 February 2010.