METROPOLIS at the Castro

Posted on September 26, 2010
Filed Under contemporary, silent films

On Saturday I caught the newly restored METROPOLIS at a matinee at the Castro Theater in San Francisco. Wow.

We saw the digital version, accompanied by the Gottfried Huppertz score–essentially the version available on home video from Kino–which incorporates the long-missing footage discovered in Argentina a couple of years ago. The Argentine material, which totals more than 20 minutes of new footage, is 16mm, in not-especially-good shape, but it’s quite watchable and completely transforms the film. (Here’s DVD Savant on the restoration.) Josephat, Georgy and the Thin Man once again take their proper place in the story. A number of very short segments, snippets really, do wonders for the flow of the story, and the reinsertion of two major scenes clears up much that was obscure in the previous restoration. The main narrative now makes sense. Two-and-a-half hours flew by in the blink of an eye. Magnificent. The audience applauded enthusiastically as the credits rolled.

The most important scene still missing seems to be the confrontation and fistfight between Joh Frederson, leader of Metropolis, and Rotwang, the mystic-scientist heavy. The restorers insert distinctive title cards to fill in those spots where significant footage is still missing. There aren’t many such title cards–this appears to be very close to the version that premiered in Berlin in January 1927.

The Castro Theatre, with its vaulted ceiling and ornate balconies, is a spectacular venue in which to see a film. There were about 60 people in the audience, which is a good turnout, considering that this was the opening of the third exhibition of the film in San Francisco this summer, and it occurred on what was by universal assent the prettiest weekend of the year. I picked up Gary Giddens’ wonderful Warning Shadows: Home Alone with Classic Cinema for the flight home, which includes this very pertinent note:

[Movies] represented impulses beyond the courage and imagination of their audiences and required suitable structures to house them–nothing less than palaces, erected when American builders attempted to marry the geometrical opulence of art deco to the cheesier instincts of classical revivalism, which in picture-theater aesthetics included Mayan, Egyptian, Spanish, Chinese, and every other storybook style known to man. The grandest of them were sui generis cinematic churches, complete with balconies, organ lofts, and militarily outfitted ushers as sextons. Programs were distributed and souvenir booklets sold along with refreshments. Men were often directed to piss and smoke in subterranean closets, but women were invited to powder their noses in carpeted drawing rooms with mirrors, draperies, davenports, writing desks, telephones and decorative sculpture. Ceilings had domes, roofs had minarets, screens had curtains, and pits had orchestras or chamber groups. The acoustics were as carefully designed as the sightlines. The chandeliered lobbies were grander than the halls of any exclusive club. Dozens of these theaters survived, neglected and run down, into the 1960s and 1970s, at which time most of those that weren’t demolished were partitioned into multiplexes. Nothing in the history of America’s long disregard for its schizophrenic architectural style is more disheartening than the wanton destruction of these magnificent tributes to art and monopoly.

But the Castro lives, moving easily between live shows, new releases and the classics–Metropolis is sharing the bill with the current Twilight movie. Posters out front advertise a full slate of classic re-releases, and the theater is preparing for a huge Connie Francis show. If you’re fortunate enough to find yourself in the City by the Bay, carve out some time for an old-fashioned movie-palace experience–the Castro is just a great theater.

Lang’s masterpiece on the big screen is everything I hoped it would be. This Murnau Foundation restoration–I believe on film, not digital–is scheduled to play the Tivoli in Kansas City in a couple of weeks, and I intend to be there.

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