Metropolis as myth: Babel, the machine and the artificial woman
The Tower of Babel, Moloch, alchemy and the pentagram in Rotwang's house: the mythical and esoteric symbols of Fritz Lang's 1927 masterpiece.
Fritz Lang's Metropolis, premiered in Berlin in January 1927, is often remembered as the first great science fiction film. Yet the vertical city imagined by Lang and the screenwriter Thea von Harbou, who also wrote the novel on which the film is based, is built from ancient materials. Behind the skyscrapers and machines emerge the Bible, alchemy, the golem legend and apocalyptic iconography, woven into a kind of modern myth.
The Tower of Babel and Moloch
One of the film's most famous passages is the tale of the Tower of Babel, told to the workers in a catacomb. In Lang's version the tower does not fall because of the confusion of tongues but because those who designed it did not share the dream of those who built it with their own hands. The biblical myth thus becomes a social parable about the rift between thought and labour, which the film states in the form of a motto.
In another sequence a gigantic machine turns, in a character's vision, into the mouth of Moloch, the deity to whom, according to biblical tradition, children were sacrificed. The modern factory thus appears as a pagan temple devouring its worshippers. Lang uses the archaic image to make visible a very contemporary fear, that of man reduced to a cog.
Rotwang, the city's alchemist
Amid the skyscrapers stands an older house, low and medieval, inhabited by the inventor Rotwang. Its door is marked with a pentagram, and a large pentagram also looms behind the mechanical woman he builds. Rotwang is a borderline figure between scientist and necromancer: he works with alembics, electrical discharges and old books, and his laboratory looks like that of a Renaissance alchemist.
The creation of the artificial woman, achieved with rings of light rising along the metal body, is one of the most celebrated images of silent cinema. Here the myth of Pygmalion, the alchemists' homunculus, the golem legend and the electrical machines of early twentieth-century laboratories converge. The automaton takes on the appearance of the young Maria, played by Brigitte Helm in both roles.
The Whore of Babylon and the cathedral
The film also draws on the Revelation of John. Maria's mechanical double appears in a vision as the great Whore of Babylon, seated on a many-headed beast, and the statues of Death and the seven deadly sins, kept in a Gothic cathedral, come to life in the imagination of one of the protagonists. The Gothic represents the old spiritual order, set against the city ruled by technology.
The history of the film is also a history of losses. After the premiere, Metropolis was cut for distribution and many scenes seemed lost for ever. In 2008 a 16mm copy containing much of the missing material was found in Buenos Aires, and in 2010 an almost complete restored version was presented. Today we can therefore read more clearly its web of symbols, in which the ancient figures of the sacred and of magic are projected onto the future.