It’s never too early to think about Halloween and, really, it is just right around the corner. If you really want to do something extra special and cool this year, why not sport this awesome needle felted costume inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis by Etsy shop RaeStimson?
My approach to this art project was to create an outfit that had the appearance of what I imagine a 1920’s sci-fi costume would look like.
This is a one of a kind costume. If you wish to purchase it I will adjust it to your size before sending it to you. Send me your measurements and please allow an additional two weeks before shipment.
It’s selling for $800.00 which seems a bit pricey for cosplay couture to me, but then again, I have no idea how long it would take to make something like this.
A great find by Mike Novak at Smithsonian Magazine proves that movie fans were just as interested in “special effects” as any fan of Star Wars, Alien, Terminator 2, The Matrix, or Avatar—a June 1927 issue of Science and Technology magazine laying out the innovative techniques behind Fritz Lang’s masterpiece Metropolis.
Metropolis is one of the greatest, most astonishing movies ever made—it still holds up. Indeed, it’s arguably the only movie from the silent era that has widespread currency among younger viewers today. That’s how good it is. Imagery from Metropolis is something of a staple in our culture—you can often spot it in random montages of miscellaneous footage, and especially in Queen’s video to “Radio Ga Ga,” which ends with the words, “Thanks to Metropolis.” (I should hope so!)
If you’ve seen the movie, the crowd scenes and the close-up shots of electricity surrounding certain characters—these shots are done so well that you hardly stop to ask how they were done. It turns out that Lang’s brilliance didn’t stop at composition and thematic storytelling—he was tinkering at the very edges of what could be done in motion pictures, a theme that is right at home with—and yet at odds with—the moral and message of the movie itself.
Be sure to see the rest at Smithsonian Magazine; Novak’s explanations of the various pictures are excellent.
Here’s part 1 of the recently restored Metropolis:
After the jump, parts 2 and 3 of the restored movie….
Never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Fritz Lang explains how his meeting with Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Mad Man of Nazi propaganda, made him flee Germany the very same day.
Director of Metropolis and M, Lang had been called to see Goebbels over his undisguised attack on Hitler in his 1933 film, The Testament of Dr Mabuse - which the Nazis had banned. Instead of the expected interrogation and inevitable incarceration, Doctor Goebbels offered Lang the unexpected position of Head of the National Socialist Film Studios. Goebbels explained that both he and Herr Furher hoped the director would accept. Goebbels then offered his advice on the ending of The Testament of Dr Mabuse, which he had found unsatisfactory. Instead of Mabuse going mad, it would have been better if the mobs had destroyed him with their wrath.
It’s a good story, even if the facts don’t add up. One that’s worth retelling - just to hear Lang build up the dramatic tension with his powers of descriptive narration.
When asked how he felt about the fact he’d received £400,000 to make Caravaggio in 1986, and the director of Chariots of Fire, Hugh Hudson had received 4 million to make his film, Derek Jarman replied, ‘Fortunately, I’m one hundred times more intelligent than Hugh Hudson, so it doesn’t matter.’
It certainly didn’t matter as Jarman’s output, during his 20-year career, pisses from a great height on Hudson’s work. What Jarman would have made of this year’s London Olympics, with its recurring reference to Chariots of Fire, would certainly have been interesting. Yet, Jarman was never fooled by his position as an outsider, he was well aware that there ‘is a complicity between the avant-garde and the establishment, it’s symbiotic, they need each other,’ as he explained to Peter Culshaw in the NME, April, 1986.
‘..all avant-garde gestures have been appropriated by just those people they sought to undermine. Dada was conceived as a full-scale assault and now Dada sells for millions. But what people never point out about me is that I’m probably the most conservative film-maker in the country. I’m not talking about Thatcherite-radical conservatives, who are anti-traditional and destructive, and who see progress as heaven, I mean more like the conservatism of groups like the Green Party.’
The artist Caravaggio fascinated Jarman, because ‘he was the most inspired religious painter of the Middle Ages and was also a murderer.’
‘Imagine if Shakespeare had been a murderer - it would completely alter the way we see his plays. [Caravaggio] was particularly taken to heart by the Romans because he painted real people. The girl next door was Mary Magdalen. Or in Death of a Virgin he painted a well-known prostitute as a virgin. It was the equivalent of Christine Keeler being put up over the high altar at Westminster Abbey.’
Jarman felt a tremendous parallel between Caravaggio and his own life, and he believed that ‘the cinema of the product precludes individual voices…’
‘...and I think unless one can put one’s own voice into a film, then there’s an element of dishonesty in it.’
In this short interview Derek Jarman talks about his life and films, Caravaggio, The Last of England and War Requiem, taken from Spanish TV’s Metropolis from 1989.
According to the great director Fritz Lang, it was his meeting with Joseph Goebbels, the Mad Man of Nazi propaganda, that led him to flee Germany the very same day.
As Lang tells it, this fateful meeting came sometime around Goebbels’ ban on Lang’s 1933 film, The Testament of Dr Mabuse, which was outlawed for its veiled attack on Hitler and his vile policies. Amongst the oft quoted similarities between Lang’s film and the insane Furher, was Dr. Mabuse’s devilish plan for a 1,000 years of crime, and Hitler’s desire of a 1,000 year Reich. The unstated connection between brutal criminality and looney-tunes Nazis was there for all to see.
It’s a good story, but one that has little bearing on fact, as it now appears that the meeting never took place. Goebbels’ diaries have no mention of the alleged meeting, and Lang’s escape from the jackboot of National-Socialism didn’t happen until several months after the alleged job offer from Dr Joe.
More damaging in hindsight was Lang’s failure to make any reference to his own Jewish ancestry. His mother, Paula was Jewish, though she converted to Catholicism after marrying Lang’s father, Anton. Instead Fritz described himself as an “Austrian director”, at a time when the persecution of those of Jewish faith was a brutal reality on the streets of Germany. Indeed describing himself as an “Austrian director” could have been construed as aligning himself with the birth country of the Furher.
Later, while living in the safety of the United States, Lang said in his entry for Current Biography - “While many famous Jewish directors had to flee Germany because of the ‘Aryan’ work decrees, Lang, a Christian, fled only because he is a believer in democratic government.”
Okay, so Lang could argue that man made laws had no rule over him, as he believed in the Higher Court of his Christian God. Fine. But why persist in re-telling a fanciful tale forty years on?
Almost everyone tells lies, and the lies are not important. Some people are loved because of their ability to tell great lies, and we listen expectantly for them to tell their biggest and best whoppers. And so it is with Lang, as he tells tale after tale in this entertaining and immensely watchable interview with director of The Exorcist, William Friedkin. From running away from home, to surviving by his wits, to making his classic films Metropolis and M, to meetings with criminals and murderers - one killer kept the hands of victims under his bed, to his meeting with the Nazi Mad Man, to Hollywood and after, Lang, looking rather like Dr Strangelove, describes his hugely fantastic life.
A new HD presentation of the Giorgio Moroder-scored version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis will take place at Cinefamily in Los Angeles for ten screenings from October 7th through October 11th:
The legendary rockin’ alternate version of Fritz Lang’s silent sci-fi classic, on the big screen for the first time in almost thirty years! In 1981, electronic music pioneer/three-time Oscar-winning composer Giorgio Moroder began a years-long endeavor to restore Metropolis, the very first attempt since the film’s original 1920s release. During the process, Moroder gave the film a controversial new score, which included pop songs from some of the biggest stars of the early MTV era (Pat Benatar, Billy Squier, Freddie Mercury, Bonnie Tyler, Adam Ant, Jon Anderson and more!) Missing footage was also re-edited back into the film, intertitles were removed and replaced with subtitles, and sound effects/color tinting were added, creating an all new experience, and an all-new film. But for more than a quarter century, Moroder’s Metropolis has remained out of circulation, until now. Utilizing one of the few remaining prints available, Kino Lorber has created a brand-new HD transfer in the best possible quality — just as it was seen in its August 1984 release!
More information at Cinefamily’s website. Tickets are $10, free for members. Kino Lorber are going to release the Moroder version of Metropolis on DVD and Blu-ray by year’s end.
