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The most magical experience I’ve ever had watching a movie wasn’t in a regular movie theater. It used to be a movie theater, but today it’s the home of my hometown symphony: the beautiful Jacobs Music Center in downtown San Diego. Once a Fox Theatre movie palace, Jacobs maintains its 20s and 30s grandeur as a gorgeous destination for live orchestra and jazz, but also the occasional film screening with live music. In 2018, I got to see Russ Peck perform his own organ arrangement of the score for ‘Metropolis’, a silent science fiction epic of truly epic proportions by Austrian filmmaker Fritz Lang, accompanied by the film. I was truly star struck. I made sure to get Peck’s autograph on my ticket after the show, and have been more than obsessed with this movie and broader film history ever since. There is something magical about old...

Part I. A Filmmaker’s Apotheosis

April 20th, 1938 marked Adolf Hitler’s 49th birthday. In the past five years, he’d rebuilt Germany from destitute anarchy into a burgeoning war machine, repudiated the Versailles Treaty and, that March, incorporated Austria into his Thousand-Year Reich. In Nazi Germany, fantasy co-mingled with ideology, expressing an obsession with Germany’s mythical past through propaganda and art. Fittingly, Hitler celebrated at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo in Berlin, Germany’s most prestigious cinema.

There, Nazi officials and foreign diplomats joined dignitaries of German kultur. Present were Wilhelm Furtwangler, conductor of Berlin’s Philharmonic Orchestra; Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and confidante; actor Gustaf Grundgens, transformed from Brechtian Bolshevik to director of Prussia’s State Theater; and movie star Emil Jannings, Oscar-winner of The Lost Command and The Blue Angel, now an Artist of the State. Also Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, who nationalized German cinema in...

Metropolis original poster Who says silent movies don't make money? Michel Hazanavicius' The Artist has grossed more than $100 million worldwide, in addition to winning a total of five Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor (Jean Dujardin). And now comes an original poster of Fritz Lang's 1927 Ufa classic Metropolis, which you can buy now for $850,000 at Movie Poster Exchange. The information below is from Mpe: Posters from this all-time classic science-fiction film are the rarest of the rare and this, the most famous image ever associated with the film is no exception. Created by art deco artist Heinz Schulz-Neudamm, this poster depicts the classic image of the automation Maria and the fantastic cityscape of Metropolis itself. There are four copies of this poster known to exist. Two of them are in permanent museum collections (Museum of Modern Art and the Austrian National Library Museum) while...

Chicago – One of the cinematic highlights of my life happened earlier this year when I was lucky enough to see “The Complete Metropolis” on the big screen. Fritz Lang’s legendary film is not only riveting by virtue of being one of the most influential of all time but the story that developed after it was made is a historically fascinating one. Almost a century after it was released, we can now see “Metropolis,” recently released on Blu-ray, in a more complete manner than ever before.

Blu-Ray Rating: 5.0/5.0

The fact is that most early filmmakers and film watchers had no concept of where we would be today in terms of the longevity of the medium. Most historians estimate that a majority of the films released before 1930 are completely gone, likely destroyed and never to be found. Even the films we do have from that era are often truncated with whole reels lost to history.

Metropolis returns on DVD and Blu-ray November 16Fritz Lang's 1927 sci-fi classic Metropolis will be re-released on both DVD and Blu-ray in a fully-restored "complete" edition on November 16. This new release will contain 25 minutes of lost footage which was found in a museum in 2008, making this 147-minute version the most complete version of the film since it's initial premiere. The new DVD will be priced at $29.95 Srp while the new Bd will be priced at $39.95 Srp. You can take a look at the special features below and read more about the history of the film and its restoration:

Metropolis takes place in 2026, when the populace is divided between workers who must live in the dark underground and the rich who enjoy a futuristic city of splendor. The tense balance of these two societies is realized through images that are among the most famous of the 20th century, many of which presage...

Rating: 5.0/5.0

Chicago – Not since the restoration of Orson Welles’s “Touch of Evil” has a butchered cinematic classic been brought to such startling new life as “The Complete Metropolis.” Though Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece “Metropolis” may never be restored to its original cut, this latest theatrical re-release is as close as film preservationists have ever gotten to recreating the legendary science-fiction epic in its entirety.

The twenty-five minutes of new footage added to this cut of “Metropolis” are nothing short of miraculous, especially in light of how they were found. Two summers ago, a 16mm back-up copy of the film’s original 35mm nitrate print was discovered in Buenos Aires. Though the print was badly damaged, it offered a wealth of missing scenes, as well as a complete blueprint for the film’s editing. Despite its permanently scratched surface, the Murnau Foundation decided to add the new material into the...