"Metropolis," as it was meant to be seen! (For real, this time.)

Published Fri, Oct 30 2009 6:42 AM
Few movies are as incomplete yet overwhelmingly influential as Fritz Lang's 1927 "Metropolis." Any movie you've seen with enormous, gigantic architecture set in an ominous future or a mythical past -- "Brazil," "The Hudsucker Proxy," "The Fifth Element," even this year's "The International" -- stole some of its moves from Lang's skyscrapers and underground dens. Brutally cut upon release and restored and re-released an impossible amount of times since, "Metropolis" is finally whole again. A complete 16mm copy was discovered at Argentina's Museo del Cine last year, and the complete restoration will premiere February 10 at next year's Berlin International Film Festival. There's a condensed version of how the print was found here, though a better rendition, from September 2008's Sight & Sound, is sadly not online. Basically, it'd been sitting, forgotten, in the archives until museum director Paula Félix-Didier's ex-husband remembered hearing about how a horribly degraded, two-hour plus...

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