ILX Film Club, The (1924-2019)

Oh and Brigitte Helm is an absolute genius.

Does the version you linked have an intermission, Camaraderie? Would like to tick this one off but I don't think I can do a single setting.

there's a note at the start of this that it includes a lot of once-lost material which has been recovered, tbh I would have preferred to see the cut-down version, but some of the deleted parts are worth including. I'll have a look for a shorter cut.

Just checked and no intermission, not even chapter breaks! Damn Fritz.

I did find a shorter cut, but the quality is terrible.

there's no intermission, but the version of the film Camaraderie linked to is divided into three parts - 'prelude', 'intermezzo' (beginning at 1:06:25) and 'furioso' (beginning at 1:34:49).

I think the full length version is by far the best, but maybe you need to see it on a big screen with the soundtrack blaring to really appreciate it? It's not a film that really suits being watched on youtube, with all the extravagant gestures and balletic elements.

the villain of the film is a grotesque personification of communist revolution, and the ending where the heroic son-of-the-billionaire makes his dad shake hands with the union leader is straight-up terrible.

The politics of the film are definitely crypto-fascist (society is on the verge of being torn apart by the division between workers and bosses, what is needed is a charismatic populist figure who can unite the whole city/nation in common purpose) and the screenwriter (and Lang's wife at the time) apparently became a supporter of the Nazi party. Goebbels apparently admired Metropolis enough he asked Lang to become head of UFA.

The plot is nonsensical

this is true, but I don't think it matters because it's not a realist film, it's more like a ballet or opera.

I love Metropolis and I love Moroder, but the 1984 Moroder soundtracked version is just dire. The soundtrack is ok to listen to as an album in itself, but as a soundtrack to the film it's dreadful. One thing that makes more a difference than I'd have expected (for the worse) is the replacement of intertitles with subtitles.

Intertitles are a silent film tradition that I've never liked, despite being a Godard fan. The only film I can think of where they really work to punctuate the images is Dreyer's Joan of Arc. Surely the technology existed to superimpose titles on images before 1930?

If you think Metropolis is nonsensical, try Sunrise.

the intertitles on Metropolis are more impressionistic though, you don't get the impression that you're supposed to be seeing every single line of dialogue the characters are saying. And they express things physically rather than via dialogue.

xxp it did (you make another film with just the subtitles and everything else black, project one over the other and film the result) but it's fiddly and messy - audiences expected intertitles at this point in any case.

xxp I will, this weekend!

another thing wrong with the Moroder version - in the original the score is constant, only stopping between the three chapters, the Moroder soundtrack is divided into individual tracks

ideally I would cut all the intertitles. just let the viewer either work out what's going on or just enjoy the experience without understanding the plot

have to keep this one though

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/CrazyTatteredBlackfish-size_restricted.gif

also the titles that go from the bottom to the top of the screen as the elevator is descending

ok, keep that one. the elevator ones were poorly re-made in the version I linked, just looked too shiny and computer-generated.

I thought there was another animated intertitle later on in the film (maybe during the whore of babylon part), but I can't seem to find it, maybe it's not in this version

projected metropolis a few weeks ago, silent w live accompaniment from our pipe organ: otm about its politics but if i couldn't let sentimental corporatism slide (even at a time like this) i wouldn't have any liberal friends, and this is metropolis. audience was thrilled.

subtitled dialogue (in anything) makes you look away from the image: bad imo.

(audience also didn't seem to mind the length; in 2023 being two and a half hours long makes you a brisk, zippy family entertainment)

(i minded it lol)

I am Grot

subtitled dialogue (in anything) makes you look away from the image: bad imo.

You always prefer dubbed dialogue in foreign movies?

Speech not synced to mouth movements is way more distracting imo. Why you’d want to replace Toshiro Mifune or Alain Delon with a second rate anglophone beats me.

Dubbed is the worst.

Ok I finished it.

Above all else I think the city is still a total marvel, can totally understand why so many subsequent creators wanted to play within that sandbox.

I don't know if I think of the story as nonsensical - perhaps I am more fond of pulp than most on this thread. Much of it was fun adventure stuff to me, lots of cool conceits (did Hammett take the title of The Thin Man from this???). It is def bloated but I can't say I was bored often - actually the closest I came was parts of the climax, which reminded me of modern disaster movies in a bad way.

The politics of the film are definitely crypto-fascist (society is on the verge of being torn apart by the division between workers and bosses, what is needed is a charismatic populist figure who can unite the whole city/nation in common purpose) and the screenwriter (and Lang's wife at the time) apparently became a supporter of the Nazi party. Goebbels apparently admired Metropolis enough he asked Lang to become head of UFA.

Add to this the subversive intellectual element which ruins the upper classes with Decadent Art and the lower classes with violent rabble rousing; the star on Rotwang's door I'm sure is supposed to signal sorcery but it's a bit too close to a star of David for comfort.

But at the same time, as per difficult listening hour's post, I think you can easily cast it as a liberal (pejorative) work instead: the mediator, after all, is not a military strongman, but an effete bleeding heart rich kid with a passion for social reform. Class conflict is cast as being fundamentally about miscommunication. The workers have indeed been given a hard lot in life and are right to protest, but for God's sake they should never resort to violence, and trying to wreck the system can only end in catastrophe - don't you see it's there to protect you, as well? In the end if we all just have a bit more heart things will turn out ok. Won't somebody please think of the children??

Brigitte Helm's later life is uh interesting too

Helm was involved in several traffic accidents, and was briefly imprisoned. According to the Nazi Party's Press Chief Obergruppenführer Otto Dietrich's book, The Hitler I Knew, Adolf Hitler saw that manslaughter charges against her from an automobile accident were dropped.

Helm married her second husband, Dr. Hugo Kunheim, an industrialist, after her film contract expired in 1935. Helm stated that she retired from films because she was "...disgusted with the Nazi takeover of the film industry..." In 1935, she moved to Switzerland, where she had four children with Kunheim. In her later years, she refused to grant any interviews concerning her film career.

Sunrise next week, eh? Murnau I find very hard going, unless there's a vampire or a demon to liven things up.

of course i use subtitles to watch movies in languages i don’t speak. that doesn’t make them good for the movie.

Add to this the subversive intellectual element which ruins the upper classes with Decadent Art and the lower classes with violent rabble rousing; the star on Rotwang's door I'm sure is supposed to signal sorcery but it's a bit too close to a star of David for comfort.

i wondered about this too.

But at the same time, as per difficult listening hour's post, I think you can easily cast it as a liberal (pejorative) work instead: the mediator, after all, is not a military strongman, but an effete bleeding heart rich kid with a passion for social reform. Class conflict is cast as being fundamentally about miscommunication. The workers have indeed been given a hard lot in life and are right to protest, but for God's sake they should never resort to violence, and trying to wreck the system can only end in catastrophe - don't you see it's there to protect you, as well? In the end if we all just have a bit more heart things will turn out ok. Won't somebody please think of the children??

I think apart from 'effete' most of this could apply to fascism as much as liberalism, but there's not always a clear distinction between liberal/progressive corporatism and the fascist kind, particularly in this era (e.g. Mosley's New Party). There's an argument that fascism is not right-wing per se (or left-wing) but centrist, both fascism and liberalism promise an alternative to class conflict by appealing to a greater authority that supposedly transcends it, the nation for the fascism and abstract principles that are above/beyond politics for liberalism.

and even if he's a an effete bleeding heart rich kid rather than a military strongman, having the class reconciliation be embodied in a single chiasmatic person with a populist following pushes it more towards the fascist side (but this is probably just the nature of cinema, an individual hero obviously more cinematic than abstract humanist principles)

Does he have a populist following tho? At rhe very very end maybe, mostly he's ignored.

Metropolis also exists pretty much in isolation - there is no evidence of other cities, other cultures. The subversive within is there and as I said coded in an anti-semitic manner, but he is also in the end just a dude grieving for his dead wife. Can fascism truly exist without the threat of an Other?

I think he has a populist following in that he turns out to be the mediator, the figure of destiny that all the workers are explicitly waiting for even when they don't know who exactly who it's going to be.

of course i use subtitles to watch movies in languages i don’t speak. that doesn’t make them good for the movie.

Sometimes I think that subtitles have a negative effect, not because they disturb the purity of the image itself, but because they draw on a different, verbal part of the mind than the image and distract from it. So I wonder, "do I like this subtitled film because in fact I prefer reading"?

some of us have ears that don’t work good!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Sunrise_-_A_Song_of_Two_Humans.jpg

Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans, F.W. Murnau, 1927
Morbsies #60
Sight & Sound Critics #11
Sight & Sound Directors #33

Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn) at 3:32 10 Mar 23

If you think Metropolis is nonsensical, try Sunrise.

Daniel_Rf at 6:42 11 Mar 23

Sunrise next week, eh? Murnau I find very hard going, unless there's a vampire or a demon to liven things up.

I mean, I'd let him choke me at least once ...

https://i.redd.it/x74u3p1kv6h51.jpg

He is a bit too much into choking women and throwing them off boats, not really acceptable character traits even in a beefcake.

The sexual politics of Sunrise are bat shit even for the period.

otoh he was quite kind to the drunken piglet

Sunrise screened yesterday at a local arts theatre: about 25 people, no walkouts. The presenter did adequately but didn't prepare the uninitiated for Murnau's marriage of late 19th century tropes about city vs country, the infantilzation of a certain kind of feminine object of desire. This is a movie whose male lead chokes his lover, walks out on his wife, tries drowning her, returns to her, and tries choking the lover again; and at the same time Murnau, refreshingly, objectifies O'Brien, arranging him in one scene to look like a Harlequin romance model reversed.

I'd forgotten the comedic bits, i.e. dude obsessed with woman's shoulder strap.

the tone was just wildly all over the place, the whole fairground sequence was so out of place, and then "I know I tried to drown you this morning but let's go sailing at night!" think I could easily write pages about how bad it was and how much I hated it, but in truth it was wonderful and I absolutely loved it.

otm

I had the good luck for my first viewing of Sunrise to be on a big screen, and I went in not knowing much except it was supposed to be great. Thought it was pretty amazing visually, and yes also crazy.

I've seen Sunrise maybe 3 or 4 times through the years and it never fails to amaze me how much its pieces shouldn't work together but, ultimately, absolutely do. Best movie to ever win a best picture Oscar outside of All About Eve.

finally saw SHERLOCK JR yesterday and loved it. the film within a film conceit, culminating in proposing to the girl at the end after seeing it done on the screen, so well executed and I imaging it felt especially fresh 100 years ago. the stunts were awesome and mostly didn’t detract from the story. only major issue I had was the female lead who was kind of a zero

Enjoyed sunrise, my favourite part was the photographers face when he saw his remade statue