Kino International has announced the North American release of the new restoration of Fritz Lang's 1927 science fiction masterpiece
Metropolis, now with 25 minutes of lost footage and the original Gottfried Huppertz score. This new 147-minute version will be shown in all major markets throughout the US and Canada. The Blu-ray release is set for November of this year.
This new 147-minute version, being released as
The Complete Metropolis, premiered on February 12 at the Berlin Film Festival and will have its first US showing on April 25 at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood, as part of the TCM Classic Film Festival.
Seldom has the rediscovery of a cache of lost footage ignited such widespread curiosity as did the announcement, in July 2008, that an essentially complete copy of Fritz Lang's
Metropolis had been found.
When it was first screened in Berlin on January 10, 1927, the sci-fi epic ran an estimated 153 minutes. After its premiere engagement, in an effort to maximize the film's commercial potential, the film's distributors (Ufa in Germany, Paramount in the US) drastically shortened
Metropolis, which had been a major disappointment at the German box office.
By the time it debuted in the States later that year, the film ran approximately 90 minutes (exact running times are difficult to determine because silent films were not always projected at a standardized speed).
Metropolis went on to become one of the cornerstones of science fiction cinema foreshadowing
Blade Runner and
The Matrix to name just a few recent examples. Testament to its enduring popularity, the film has undergone numerous restorations in the intervening decades.
In 1984, the film was reissued with additional footage, color tints, and a pop rock score (but with many of its intertitles removed) by music producer Giorgio Moroder. A more archival restoration was completed in 1987, under the direction of Enno Patalas of the Munich Film Archive, in which missing scenes were represented with title cards and still photographs. More recently, the 2001 restoration combined footage from four archives and ran 124 minutes. It was widely believed that this would be the most complete version of Lang's film that contemporary audiences could ever hope to see.
But, in the summer of 2008, the curator of the Buenos Aires Museo del Cine discovered a 16mm dupe negative that was considerably longer than any existing print. It included not merely a few additional snippets, but 25 minutes of "lost" footage, about a fifth of the film, that had not been seen since its Berlin debut. The discovery of such a significant amount of material called for yet another restoration.
This was executed by Anke Wilkening of the Murnau Stiftung (Foundation), the German institution that is the caretaker of virtually all pre-1945 German films, Martin Koerber, Film Department Curator of the Deutsche Kinemateque and on the music side, by Frank Stoebel.
The result of their work was first seen by the public on February 12 at the 1,600-seat Friedrichstrasse Palast, accompanied by a 60-piece orchestra playing the original 1927 score by Huppertz. The public and critical response was ecstatic.
Wilkening has clarified that the integration of the rediscovered footage cannot be seamless. "The work on the restoration teaches us once more that no restoration is ever definitive," says Wilkening, "Even if we are allowed for the first time to come as close to the first release as ever before, the new version will still remain an approach. The rediscovered sections which change the film's composition, will at the same time always be recognizable through their damages as those parts that had been lost for 80 years."
Further information on
The Complete Metropolis and annotations of all recovered scenes - as well as images, clips and theatrical playdates - will be uploaded to the new
Metropolis website, which goes live on April 15.