Metropolis (1927) by Fritz Lang

• Based on a novel of the same title by Thea von Harbou (Lang’s wife)

• Silent film set in the year 2026 in a futuristic city

• Metropolis (the City of Mothers, the Mother of all cities): from Greek mētropolis “mother state”, from mētr- “mother” + polis “city”

• Very important for its striking visual images of modern anxiety over technology and urbanization

Weimar period in Germany (1919–33).

After the nation’s defeat in World War I, a new constitution and Republic were formed. This attempt to set up a liberal democracy basically failed with the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in 1933.

verticalityverticality

Vertically organized city- Blade Runner

OPENING CLIPOPENING CLIP

MACHINE AGE

Futurism

• “Hence we must prepare for the imminent, inevitable identification of man with motor. We must admit that we look for the creation of a nonhuman type in whom moral suffering, goodness of heart, affection, and love, those sole corrosive poisons of inexhaustible vital energy, will be abolished.”

--Marinetti, 1911

MACHINE AGE

• By the 1920s, industrialization was altering the general understanding of work.

• With industrialization workers began to be thought of as human machines.

• “Every sense organ is injured by the artificially high temperatures, by the dust-laden atmosphere, by the deafening noise, not to mention the danger to life and limb among machines which are so closely crowded together, a danger which, with the regularity of the seasons, produces its list of those killed and wounded in the industrial battle.” (Karl Marx, Capital)

Modern Working Class

Modern Working Class• “Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the

division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. ... In proportion as the use of machinery and division of labour increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by the increase of the work exacted in a given time or by increased speed of machinery, etc.” (Marx and Engels, “The Manifesto of the Communist Party”)

Clip- MODERN TIMES by Charlie

Chaplin

Clip- MODERN TIMES by Charlie

Chaplin

Robot Maria• Lang’s image of a robot

Maria embodies a duality of technology’s attractions and subversions

• I- Robot Maria’s seductive power played out in its dance before the city’s elite, and the ease with which she lures the workers into rebellion

• II- A force of destruction and potential human replacement

robot maria’s dancerobot maria’s dance

the virgin and the vamp

workers’ revolt

The WitchRobot

The New Woman of the 1920s

femme-fatalesexual, independent, and

pitiless

anxieties about the increased power of

women

Ambivalence of Modernity

• On the one hand, the modernist city gives birth to its own destruction embodied by the robot

• On the other hand, the impressive setting of the modernist city, with its oversized architecture, its celebration of machinery, and its reduction of humans to orderly masses, fetishizes the surface aspects of modernity.