Newly restored version of silent film classic Metropolis on TCM tonight (cinema, Paramount)
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Consistently listed at the top of the best silent film lists, Fritz Lang's 1927 classic Metropolis will be shown on Turner Classic Movies tonight at 8 PM EST. This appears to be the recently discovered and restored version that was completed just this year as the running length on TCM's schedule list it at 149 minutes adding 24 minutes than what has been available and shown for many years.
Full of Germany's post WWI vision of the future including raised freeways, video phones and robots, this was likely the first science fiction film created.
from AMG... In the somewhat distant future (some editions say the year 2000, others place it in 2026, and, still others -- including the original Paramount U.S. release -- in 3000 A.D.) the city of Metropolis, with its huge towers and vast wealth, is a playground to a ruling class living in luxury and decadence. They, and the city, are sustained by a much larger population of workers who labor as virtual slaves in the machine halls, moving from their miserable, tenement-like homes to their grim, back-breaking ten-hour shifts and back again...
Gonna watch tonight. Thanks for reminder Ghengis.They say only 3 to 5 minutes missing from original 1927 version.Thats pretty amazing considering the passing of time.Silence is Golden.
Well, they may have "restored" missing scenes, but the film was wildy inconsistent in quality. Some scenes looked very clean, while others were loaded with vertical scratches. I'm sure a lot of that could be digitally cleaned up.
I'm guessing the poor quality was due to the fact that the restored scenes came from the film found in Buenos Aires that was shot on 16mm rather than 32mm like the rest of the film. Splicing it in can't have been easy and Robert Osbourne did say that viewers would notice a difference in the quality. Just a thought.
But still, I was expecting a full digital restoration, not just some added footage. In the same way that you can use a tool like Photoshop to clean up scratches and dust specks on photographs, a film can be cleaned up frame-by-frame to remove flaws.
I'm guessing the poor quality was due to the fact that the restored scenes came from the film found in Buenos Aires that was shot on 16mm rather than 32mm like the rest of the film. Splicing it in can't have been easy and Robert Osbourne did say that viewers would notice a difference in the quality. Just a thought.
This is a fact! Saw it at Film Forum earlier this year...and they explained the difference between the film quality. The restored bits were apparently in extremely bad shape and they did the best they could! Great visionary movie!
"On July 1, 2008, film experts in Berlin announced that a 16 mm reduction negative of the original premiere cut of the film, including almost all the lost scenes, had been discovered in the archives of the Museo del Cine (film museum) in Buenos Aires, Argentina.The find was authenticated by film experts working for Die Zeit. Passed around since 1928 from film distributor to private collector to an art foundation, the Metropolis copy arrived at the Museo del Cine, where it stayed undiscovered in their archives. After hearing an anecdote by the cinema club manager — who years before had been surprised by the length when this copy was screened — the museum's curator and the director of the film department of the Museum of Latin American Art reviewed the film and discovered the missing scenes. The print was in poor condition and required considerable restoration before it was re-premiered in February 2010."
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(film)
The story did change with the additional scenes, especially in the beginning. I often wondeer why I spent all this money on an HDTV to watch TCM and old westerns.
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