The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Fritz Lang · a silent film · 1927 · the 2010 restoration, with the footage recovered in Buenos Aires · screenplay by Thea von Harbou
Mode
Science-fiction epic of the future city; social parable, melodrama of father and son, and apocalyptic vision in one film
Mythos
Babel, the tower planned by heads that the hands who built it could not understand; the doubled woman, Madonna and Whore of Babylon in one face; the son who descends, takes a worker’s place and returns as mediator; the sorcerer in a medieval house inside the modern city
Phase
A few days in the city, from the shift change and the son’s first descent to the flood, the burning of the false Maria and a handshake on the cathedral steps
Presentation
Silent feature in black and white, German intertitles, three movements named as music; photographed by Karl Freund and Carl Hoffmann, effects by Eugen Schüfftan, architecture by Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut and Karl Vollbrecht, Gottfried Huppertz’s orchestral score; the 2010 restoration, the recovered footage set into the image with its seam left in view
Register
From the white frivolity of the Eternal Gardens to the Moloch’s mouth taking files of men; grandeur, terror, piety and melodrama pitched to the last row
Scale
One city held as one body: its master, its workers, its machines, its cathedral, its pleasure district and its catacombs; a father, a son and a dead wife and mother
Governing Proposition
A master’s son in a city of towers goes down to the workers who keep its machines running, and the master, with an inventor, has a machine made in the likeness of the woman the workers trust, to turn them against their own city. The wager of the film is that a city can be built on the screen as one body, head above and hands below; that its images can show labour fitted to the machine’s time and a crowd made a weapon by an image; and that a closing gesture can mend what those images have shown to be structural. The images carry the first wagers. The ending does not carry the last.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a shift change. Two columns of men in the same dark clothes pass each other at the same slack, synchronised step, heads bowed, and a lift takes the one column down. No one in either column is anyone. The film has stated its subject before it has introduced a character: labour fitted to the machine’s time rather than the worker’s, shown as a way of walking.
Above them is the city. Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut and Karl Vollbrecht built it as towers, bridges and air traffic, with the New Tower of Babel at its centre, where Joh Fredersen, played by Alfred Abel, governs the city from his office as a firm. High in it are the Club of the Sons’ stadium and the Eternal Gardens, white and frivolous, the world of Freder, his son, played by Gustav Fröhlich. Below are the machines, lower still the workers’ city, and beneath that the catacombs. The film is drawn in storeys, and its plot will be a series of descents and ascents through them.
Fritz Lang made it for Ufa, produced by Erich Pommer, from a screenplay by Thea von Harbou, who wrote her novel alongside it. Karl Freund and Carl Hoffmann photographed it, with Günther Rittau; Eugen Schüfftan’s mirror process made several of the city and stadium shots; Gottfried Huppertz wrote the orchestral score. It was first shown at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo in Berlin on 10 January 1927, at 4,189 metres, in three movements named as music: Auftakt, Zwischenspiel, Furioso. The film judged here is the 2010 restoration of the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung, which joins the 2001 restoration to footage found in 2008 in a 16mm duplicate negative in the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires: the version nearest the film first shown.
Movement II
Freder goes down. In the machine halls the M-Machine bursts, and in the smoke he sees it as a god: the title reads “Moloch!”, and the machine becomes a god whose mouth takes the files of men. The vision is borrowed and used once, and it is one of the film’s heights. It shows as sacrifice what the shift change showed as a walk: the consumption of men by the thing they serve.
He takes a worker’s place. He gives his clothes to Georgy, No. 11811, played by Erwin Biswanger, and stands at the clock-dial machine, moving its hands between lights. For ten hours the master’s son moves the hands, his arms spread as on a cross. The disclosure of the shift change is now made in one body, and the body is the master’s heir. Georgy goes up in Freder’s clothes, and the night he spends in the city, restored in 2010, now pays off.
Above, the master’s Thin Man, played by Fritz Rasp, goes about his pursuits, of Josaphat, played by Theodor Loos, among others. In the versions the century knew these threads were cut and the plot seemed to run on chance. Restored, they join: Josaphat’s loyalty, Georgy’s errand and the Thin Man’s watch are the plot’s joints, and the film is more necessary than its reputation. What still gives is duration, and Freder’s scenes, pitched to the last row, carry much of it.
Movement III
Beneath the workers’ city, in catacombs lit by candles and marked with crosses, Maria, played by Brigitte Helm, preaches to the workers. She tells them of Babel: a tower planned by heads that the hands who built it could not understand, raised by thousands of shaven builders and brought down. The city’s own tower bears the name. The parable is the film’s structure, set inside its story, and the ending will be written to answer it.
Rotwang, played by Rudolf Klein-Rogge, lives in a medieval cottage with a pentagram on its door, among the towers of the future city. In the restored version his house holds a monument to Hel, whom he loved, Fredersen’s dead wife and Freder’s mother. The inventor has a motive now, and the machine he has built has a face it should not have. Old power lives inside the new: the city’s master goes for help to a sorcerer.
The master wants the workers turned on their own city, and the inventor grieves; between the two wishes the machine is given Maria’s face. In the laboratory the seated machine is made a woman: rings of light rise and fall around the figure, and it takes Maria’s likeness. The scene is transport and dread together, and it made a myth that has outlived the film: the machine-woman and the laboratory of her making, which the cinema has used ever since.
Movement IV
The false Maria is shown to the city’s men in the Yoshiwara, and she dances. Lang cuts to the men’s eyes, a montage of faces watching. Helm plays the machine with one eye half shut, a jerking gait and a smile that is wrong, and the true Maria still and inward, so that the two can be told apart by the body alone. One face is Madonna among the children and Whore of Babylon on the stage, the second made by the master’s wish and the inventor’s grief.
Freder falls into delirium. From the cathedral Death with his scythe and the Seven Deadly Sins come down to his sickbed. The vision rises, and the delirium runs long: the film has earned the height once and keeps it on the screen. The Zwischenspiel is where the cutting slackens, and the melodrama of father and son, which another form could carry as well, carries much of the time.
Below, the workers follow the image of the woman they trust. The Furioso begins. The crowd that walked in columns at the shift change now runs in wedges and columns against the machines, and the form knows what that means: the mob is the shift change gone the other way. The workers destroy the Heart Machine, and the flood rises through their own city. At the alarm gong the children raise their arms to the true Maria.
Movement V
The rescue from the flood is long. The false Maria is burned at the stake, and in the fire the flesh falls away to metal. There is a chase on the cathedral roof, and it is long too. The film has its grandeur in reserve to the end, and spends it.
On the cathedral steps the thesis is given as a title: the heart must mediate between “Hirn und Händen” (“brain and hands”). The master and Grot, the foreman, played by Heinrich George, shake hands, and Freder, who went down and came back, stands as mediator. The images have shown that the division of the city is its structure, the machine’s time and the flood that comes when the hands strike; the ending heals it with a gesture between two men. The film’s images do not consent to its thesis, and the thesis is what the film asserts. That is the work’s limit, and it is stated in its last shot.
Within months of its premiere the film as released was gone. Channing Pollock cut it for Paramount, removing the Hel subplot and Georgy’s thread and rewriting the titles; Ufa shortened its own release; in 1984 Giorgio Moroder tinted it and gave it a pop score. The film failed to recover its cost. For most of a century the world saw the city, the machine-woman, the flood and Babel, but not the joints of the plot. The 2010 restoration sets the scratched, narrower Buenos Aires footage into the clean image and leaves the seam in view, short passages still missing and bridged by titles. The laboratory, the robot and the stratified city of later films descend from it, and the seam is part of what survives.
Act III · The Twelve
Run the subtractive test. The architecture is required: a city in two storeys, a son who goes down, a woman doubled so that the master can turn the workers on their own city. The Babel parable in the catacombs is required, since the city’s central tower is the New Tower of Babel and the ending answers the parable. The restored footage makes the plot more necessary than the short versions were: Rotwang’s love for Hel, Fredersen’s dead wife and Freder’s mother, gives the inventor a motive and the machine a face it should not have; Georgy’s night in Freder’s clothes and the Thin Man’s pursuit of Josaphat now pay off. What gives is duration: Freder’s delirium, the long Yoshiwara crowd, the chase on the cathedral roof, the long rescue in the flood, each a spectacle the film has already earned once.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Credited fully for what the images disclose. The shift change, two columns of men in the same dark clothes at the same broken step with bowed heads, states as image an articulated condition: labour fitted to the machine’s time rather than the worker’s. Freder at the clock-dial machine, arms spread between its lights for ten hours, makes the same disclosure in one body. The Moloch shows the consumption of men as sacrifice, and the Furioso shows a crowd made a weapon by an image. What holds the axis at the foot of the page, with The Inner Law, is the meaning the film states: the heart must join brain and hands, and a handshake on the cathedral steps resolves what the images showed to be structural. The images know more than the thesis, and the thesis is what the film asserts as its truth.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Elevation is frequent and of every kind the axis names. The city itself, in Kettelhut’s and Hunte’s towers, bridges and air traffic, is grandeur sustained across the film rather than shown once. Terror: the M-Machine bursting and the Moloch’s mouth taking the files of men. Transport and dread together in the creation of the machine-woman, rings of light rising and falling around the seated figure. The Tower of Babel as a vision of thousands of shaven builders; Death with his scythe and the Seven Deadly Sins coming down from the cathedral to Freder’s sickbed; the flood rising through the workers’ city and the children’s arms raised to Maria at the gong. What holds it below the top: the height is chiefly of scale and design, and the human elevation, in Freder above all, is pitched high and often falls.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The myth is built, and it bears weight. Babel is the film’s structure: the parable of a tower planned by heads that the hands who built it could not understand, set inside a city whose tower is named for it, and closed when head and hands meet. The doubled woman is load-bearing: Maria the Madonna among the children and Maria the Whore of Babylon on the Yoshiwara stage, one face, the second made by the master’s wish and the inventor’s grief. Freder descends, takes a worker’s place and his cross, and returns as mediator. Rotwang’s house, a medieval cottage with a pentagram on its door in a futurist city, is particular, and the film made myths that outlived it: the machine-woman and the laboratory of her making. Held below the top because the myths are stacked as much as built: Moloch and the Sins are borrowed images used once, and the mediator’s role is asserted more than earned.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance is German expressionist design (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920), Lang’s own monumental Die Nibelungen (1924), Griffith’s Babylon in Intolerance (1916), the Italian spectacle, and the literary city of the future that runs from Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes. The departure is real: a feature-length film of the future city, built and filmed at a scale no science fiction had attempted, with effects that had to be invented for it, the Schüfftan process and the machine-woman’s creation among them, and a design whose subject is the city as a whole. The stake was ruinous: the film failed to recover its cost, and how far it brought down Ufa’s finances is argued. Held below the top because the narrative is a swerve of scale on an inherited melodrama, not a new way of telling.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. The form is vertical and choreographic. Above and below are its grammar: the gardens and the stadium high, the machines lower, the workers’ city lowest and the catacombs beneath, so that the plot is a series of descents and ascents and the flood rises through the whole order. The masses are drawn as geometry, wedges and columns, and the workers’ crowd in the Furioso keeps the same shapes when it turns to destruction: the form knows that the mob is the shift change gone the other way. The three movements are named as music and paced so. What holds it: the share of the film that is container, the melodrama of father and son, the Thin Man’s pursuits and the intertitles that carry the thesis, any of which another form could carry without loss.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Ninety-nine years of return are the evidence, and the return has been unusually literal: the film itself kept changing, and each new version, in 1984, 2001 and 2010, was a new reading. Siegfried Kracauer, in From Caligari to Hitler (1947), read it as the coming of the authoritarian order; later criticism read the machine-woman as the fear of technology and the fear of women made one figure; others have read its politics as a corporatist fantasy, its design as the source of a century’s urban imagery, and the restored Hel subplot as a key to Rotwang. Formally the design and the effects are studied without end. What holds the axis: the readings converge, the thesis is shallow and known, and much of what the film yields on return is in what it shows rather than what it means.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 1920s: Battleship Potemkin, Sunrise, The General, Napoléon, The Passion of Joan of Arc. The intrinsic force: the film established the science-fiction feature as a monumental form and the designed city as a subject of the screen, a synthesis of expressionist design, mass choreography and invented effects more than a reorganisation of film language. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is among the widest of its decade, through the laboratory of Frankenstein (1931) and its descendants, the robot that runs to C-3PO in Star Wars (1977), the vertical, stratified city of Blade Runner (1982) and nearly every dystopian city since, the figures of the mad scientist and the machine-woman, and use far beyond film, in posters, advertising and music video. Reach outruns force here, and the force is chiefly visual.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Survival weighed in order: form, presence, fabric, across ninety-nine years. The long loss is the charge. Within months of the premiere the film as released had left circulation: Channing Pollock’s American cut for Paramount removed the Hel subplot and Georgy’s thread and rewrote the titles, Ufa shortened its own release, and the version first shown was presumed lost until 2008. For most of the century the world saw an altered work, and from 1984 a tinted version with a pop score: presence was wide, but presence of something else. Since 2010 the form is nearly whole, short passages still missing and bridged by titles, the recovered footage scratched and coarse, which is fabric and the smallest charge. Presence has never lapsed, and the surface dates as history, not fashion. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most; the long loss holds it at 8.5.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Command of the medium bears weight wherever the film is great. The design is total and consistent. Freund’s and Hoffmann’s photography of the city and of the catacombs holds miniature, set and mass in one light. Lang moves crowds of hundreds as shapes, in the shift change, the flood and the Furioso. Brigitte Helm’s double performance is the finest in it: Maria still and inward, the machine with one eye half shut, a jerking gait and a smile that is wrong, so that the two can be told apart in one frame by the body alone. Huppertz’s score carries the movements. The costs: Gustav Fröhlich’s Freder is pitched to the last row, much of the supporting acting is broad even for 1927, and the cutting slackens in the middle movement and in the chase.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the Club of the Sons’ stadium and the Eternal Gardens, white and frivolous at the top, and the catacombs with their crosses and candles at the bottom. A law joins them: the city is one body, head above and hands below, and everything in it, the gardens, the machines, the cathedral, Rotwang’s magic, the Yoshiwara, is a part of that body out of its place. The futurist tower and the medieval cottage obey the same law, since Rotwang’s sorcery is the old power inside the new. What holds the axis at the foot of the page, with The Unconcealment, is the end, where the law breaks: the images have shown the division to be the city’s structure, and the ending heals it with a gesture between two men to which the film’s own images do not consent.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Judged on what a silent film of some two and a half hours holds. Labour, in the shift change and the machines; capital and the state, in Fredersen’s office at the top of the tower, which governs the city as a firm; technology, as power, as god and as forger of persons; the family, in father, son and Hel, the dead wife and mother whose loss drives the plot, fully only in the restored version; the sacred, in the catacomb preaching, the cathedral, Babel and the Apocalypse; eros, in the Yoshiwara and the Sons; the crowd; childhood, in the flood. They are held in one figure, the city as body, not merely listed. What holds the axis: consciousness is thin, every person is a type, and the inner life of no one, Maria included, is given.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime and Pressure on Tradition at 8.8, then The Archetypal Deep and The Made at 8.7. A city that rises to grandeur and terror again and again, in its towers, the Moloch, the making of the machine-woman, Babel and the flood; a reach that runs through the laboratory, the robot and the stratified city of nearly every dystopia since; a Babel and a doubled woman that bear the structure’s weight; and a making in which the design, the photography, Lang’s crowds and Helm’s two performances in one face carry the film.
Limiting Dimension
The Unconcealment and The Inner Law at 7.6: images that disclose labour fitted to the machine’s time and a crowd made a weapon by an image, and a thesis, the heart between brain and hands, that the film asserts against them; and a city that obeys one law, the city as one body, until an ending that heals by a gesture what the images showed to be structural. Above them, The Inevitable at 7.7: an architecture that is required, carrying duration that is not, in the delirium, the Yoshiwara crowd, the roof chase and the long rescue in the flood.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.7 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.2, The Made at 8.7, The Inner Law at 7.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: Pressure on Tradition at 8.8, The Archetypal Deep at 8.7 and The Swerve at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Imperishable meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 7.6 falls nine tenths short of it: the film’s stated resolution takes back what its images disclose. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.6, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.0. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work is held below the summit by one condition, The Unconcealment at 7.6 against the 8.5 the Epochal Gate requires, and by its aggregate, 8.3 from a sum of 99.5, against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Metropolis in the 2010 restoration of the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung, shown first at the Berlinale in February 2010 as The Complete Metropolis, with Gottfried Huppertz’s score: the 2001 Murnau restoration joined to the footage found in 2008 in a 16mm duplicate negative held by the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires, judged as the version nearest the film first shown at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo, Berlin, on 10 January 1927, at 4,189 metres. Short passages still missing are bridged by titles, and the recovered footage, scratched and of lower definition, is left in view; restoration is repair. Channing Pollock’s American cut for Paramount (1927), Ufa’s shortened German release (1927), Giorgio Moroder’s tinted version with a pop score (1984) and the 2001 restoration are not judged; they and the long loss bear on survival only. Directed by Fritz Lang for Ufa, produced by Erich Pommer, screenplay by Thea von Harbou from her novel, photographed by Karl Freund and Carl Hoffmann with Günther Rittau, special effects by Eugen Schüfftan, architecture by Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut and Karl Vollbrecht, with Brigitte Helm, Alfred Abel, Gustav Fröhlich, Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Fritz Rasp, Theodor Loos, Heinrich George and Erwin Biswanger. No print, script or title list was consulted. Every axis is judged on the German intertitles; English renderings are the desk’s own and a reader’s aid. Two titles are held to the word and quoted in the original. How far the film’s failure brought down Ufa’s finances is contested and is not judged. Facts that could not be verified, among them the running times of the restoration and of the other versions, the length of the recovered footage and of what is still missing, the cut from which the Buenos Aires copy was made, the film’s cost against others of its country, and its place on registers of world memory, are not given.