Critics celebrate Lang’s Metropolis primarily for its visualization of urban space. How does Lang glamorize or romanticize the city above ground? Think about the angles and proportions of buildings and other structures, the vantage point of the camera, his use of brightness and shadow.
6 thoughts on “Metropolis”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Throughout the movie, one can see a stark contrast between the upper world and the underground world. The upper world is depicted as a paradise, where its people are well fed and well clothed, and whose time are so plenty that they doodle away by playing sports, chasing around women clothed in a flapper style of the Roaring Twenties in an amorous game on an idyllic garden, and visiting Yoshiwara, which references a historical red light district in Japan during the Edo Period. The bird-eye shots from above over a setting that looks very much like Manhattan give one a sense of a world that celebrates the outcome of economic development. The rising skyscrapers in the upper world are rather unproportionally large compared to other elements in the city, such as transportation tools and people. This gives one a feel of the degree of economic development that the world in the story has reached. The frequent use of taxi service by many characters in the movie also illustrates the establishment of the service industry, which further highlights the level of economic development in the world. Moreover, the upper world is glamorized by the deliberate choice of showing only the outcome of industrialization and economic development and not its underbellies, and hence, it becomes an embodiment of a utopian world. In contrast, the underground world is depicted as a dystopian world, where the workers are clothed in uniforms and are exploited for their labor. The machineries seen in this world are huge, cranky, and heavy, and the workplace looks extremely hot, stuffy, and inhumane–the definition of a terrible working environment. In the very first few shots of the underground world, workers walk in the military formation and synchronize their movement and posture. With the lack of individual freedom in their movements and their obvious misery that is shown from their body postures, the underground world is further diminished into an unfavorable world that starkly contrasts the upper world.
On another note, moreover, the stark contrast between the upper world and the underground world reminds me of parts of H. G. Well’s The Time Machine, where Eloi is very much like the people of the upper world in the Metropolis and the Morlocks are very similar to the workers of the underground world. Furthermore, the uniforms worn by the workers and the huge machineries in their workplace remind me of Communism seen in Soviet Union, where industrialization was celebrated and workers called each other as “brothers.”
“Who is the living food for the machines in Metropolis?”
As others have already commented, the visual portrayals of “Metropolis”, especially when contrasted with the Depths, depicts a futuristic, mechanized utopia where everything, and everyone, is seemingly perfect. The shots of the city show an organized, efficient bustle around a clean, bright, landscape of towering buildings. In this sense, the city and all its inhabitants are being visually depicted as “perfect”. However, I think one can push this notion of perfection a bit further, as the movie seems to focus on the theme of humanity, especially how it relates with mechanics/the future. The well-oiled machines of the future (robots included) are indeed perfect: without error. And while those in Metropolis would want you to think that this is good, we come to see in their depictions and interactions with the workers in the Depths that this steely perfection is the antithesis of humanity, of kindness and compassion. Machines, for all their seeming perfection, are not alive and cannot feel. The movie seems to be making a social critique by saying that elite characters like Jon Fredersen may seem to have everything, but yet they lack that which makes them human. Like the quote says, they are the “machines of Metropolis”, in comparison with the living, breathing human realness of the masses. The scenes and visual depictions of the two contrasting worlds help to illustrate the central conflict of this film, what is perfect/flawed, human/inhuman, with drastically different tones, shadows, and brightness.
Fritz Lang glamorizes the city above in the film Metropolis through the way he portrays the workers in the first scene. All of the workers walk completely in unison. For example, their bodies sway together and each leg is perfectly in sync, which implies to the viewer that this is something they commonly do. While walking, not a single one of them lifts their heads up. They all hang their heads which immediately tells the audience that they are miserable, even though it’s clearly something they do everyday. Another way Lang makes the city above more attractive is through lighting and facial expressions. The lighting displayed on the workers in the city below is dark and gloomy, where we see unpleasant facial expressions as well as unglamorous buildings and machines. Once the movie pans up to the city above, we immediately see the bright light as well as the cheerfulness of the people in this city. They are smiling, laughing, and all wearing vibrant clothing. For example, when Freder goes to the city below, we not only notice the dim lighting, but we also see everyone wearing dark clothing except for Freder, who’s the only person or only thing visible in anything remotely bright. Aside from color and brightness, Lang also glamorizes the city above through infrastructure. Above ground, we see giant buildings, trains, cars, and airplanes. The buildings in the workers city appear simple and identical on the outside, compared to the larger buildings with unique designs and bright colors apparent in the city above. Furthermore, we see most of the workers walking, where in the city above ground we see them riding in cars or flying in planes, which are all various ways we see infrastructure play a role in glamorizing the city above.
Fritz Lang romanticizes the city above ground by providing numerous wide-angled camera shots that emphasize the vast, orderly, and sophisticated operation of this utopian city. In only the sixteenth minute of the movie, Lang implements a string of long, sweeping shots of the bustling heart of this city. In these fragments, the audience sees a highly complicated transportation system consisting of cars, trains, and planes interweaving with one another without error. Additionally, one can see how Lang also uses the depth and contrast of light against shadows to stress the grand scale of this city. For example, in the last image of the set described, the camera is drawn far back, capturing skyscrapers that run parallel to the audience’s view until our eyes reach a colossal building that dwarfs any car, plane, or even building pictured. This effect is strengthened by Lang’s choice to give the central and largest building the brightest lighting. Compared to the shadowed secondary buildings, the shining central building stands out, drawing attention to the magnitude of this flawless and orderly city. Another interesting strategy used by Lang to enhance the image of this city is his use of architecture and societal practices that humanity associates with modern or advanced societies. This is seen in how directly after the audience is exposed to the grimness and lack of autonomy in the underground world, we are introduced to the city above ground through a track surrounded by elegant Greek or Roman-inspired statues and architecture. In making this choice, Lang attempts to connect the image of this city to that of the brilliance and advancement attributed to the Greek and Roman civilizations in their time.
The city above ground in Metropolis is essentially, at least superficially, a utopia. Everything looks clean and orderly with eye-pleasing angles and geometric shapes. There are gardens and people are participating in sports and activities; everyone there appears to be in some way part of a leisure class. People look happy, the lights on the surface are bright, and the cameras typically show a bird’s point of view to emphasize the grand nature and scale of the city above ground. The scale is also an interesting consideration, as humans help give the audience a sense of how immense some of the sets were in this movie. To see what looks like hundreds of people running around a street in one shot look like little ants in a much bigger world certainly emphasizes the huge size of these buildings. In an era where a common belief was, to an extent, bigger is better, this movie certainly portrays a glamorized version of society. Finally, the contrast between the city above ground, the depths, and even the inventor’s house is a stark one. The dark shadows and clunky, ugly machines in the less glamorous settings in the movie further highlight the city above ground as an ideal world.
As the prompt states, visualization plays a major part in the movie. The way I want to analyze the movie is to compare its visualization to that of other movies that we have watched. Specifically, I think there are two big similarities between Metropolis and other movies that we have previously watched in terms of visualization. The first of these similarities is the dark appearance. Lang romanticizes the city by making the city be constantly dark. In no instance is any light shown which makes the color on the faces and bodies of characters that much more prominent. The same is true in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In this movie, the town that the movie takes place in is all dark making the pods of plants that ultimate hatch the bad guys that much clearer. In other words, both of these examples make the subjects at end more prominent by creating darkness around them. The second major similarity is the size of the surrounding structures in the film. Specifically, in Metropolis, the characters are extremely small compared to the buildings which shows that they are part of something that is bigger than them. The people are just a small part of the story in which the city is extremely important. The same is true in Star Wars as when people first see the spaceship, the ship is huge and the people within it are inevitably much smaller. This foreshadows that the movie is going to be much less about the individual characters and much more about these characters working together as something bigger (the spaceship that holds their common values). Although this response is kind of far-fetched and may be hard to follow, I think Metropolis effectively uses many aspects, many of which that can be found in other movies, in order to visualize certain aspects within the movie.