I have recently seen the silliest film. I do not believe it would be
possible to make one sillier. And as this film sets out to display
the way the world is going, I think “The Way the World Is Going” may
very well concern itself with this film. It is called “Metropolis”; it
comes from the great Ufa studios in Germany, and the public is given
to understand that it has been produced at enormous cost. It gives in
one eddying concentration almost every possible foolishness, _cliché_,
platitude, and muddlement about mechanical progress and progress in
general served up with a sauce of sentimentality that is all its own.
It is a German film and there have been some amazingly good German
films. Before they began to cultivate bad work under cover of a
protective quota. And this film has been adapted to the Anglo-Saxon
taste, and quite possibly it has suffered in the process, but even
when every allowance has been made for that, there remains enough to
convince the intelligent observer that most of its silliness must be
fundamental. Possibly I dislike this soupy whirlpool none the less
because I find decaying fragments of my own juvenile work of thirty
years ago, “The Sleeper Awakes,” floating about in it. Capek’s Robots
have been lifted without apology, and that soulless mechanical monster
of Mary Shelley’s, who has fathered so many German inventions, breeds
once more in this confusion. Originality there is none. Independent
thought, none. Where nobody has imagined for them the authors have
simply fallen back on contemporary things. The aeroplanes that wander
about above the great city show no advance on contemporary types,
though all that stuff could have been livened up immensely with a few
helicopters and vertical and unexpected movements. The motor cars
are 1926 models or earlier. I do not think there is a single new
idea, a single instance of artistic creation or even of intelligent
anticipation, from first to last in the whole pretentious stew; I may
have missed some point of novelty, but I doubt it; and this, though it
must bore the intelligent man in the audience, makes the film all the
more convenient as a gauge of the circle of ideas, the mentality, from
which it has proceeded.
The word “Metropolis,” says the advertisement in English, “is in
itself symbolical of greatness”--which only shows us how wise it is
to consult a dictionary before making assertions about the meaning
of words. Probably it was the adapter who made that shot. The German
“Neubabelsburg” was better, and could have been rendered “New Babel.”
It is a city, we are told, of “about one hundred years hence.” It is
represented as being enormously high; and all the air and happiness are
above and the workers live, as the servile toilers in the blue uniform
in “The Sleeper Awakes” lived, down, down, down below.
Now far away in dear old 1897 it may have been excusable to symbolize
social relations in this way, but that was thirty years ago, and a
lot of thinking and some experience intervene. That vertical city of
the future we know now is, to put it mildly, highly improbable. Even
in New York and Chicago, where the pressure upon the central sites is
exceptionally great, it is only the central office and entertainment
region that soars and excavates. And the same centripetal pressure that
leads to the utmost exploitation of site values at the centre leads
also to the driving out of industrialism and labour from the population
centre to cheaper areas, and of residential life to more open and airy
surroundings. That was all discussed and written about before 1900.
Somewhere about 1930 the geniuses of the Ufa studios will come up to
a book of “Anticipations” which was written more than a quarter of a
century ago. The British census returns of 1901 proved clearly that
city populations were becoming centrifugal, and that every increase in
horizontal traffic facilities produced a further distribution. This
vertical social stratification is stale old stuff. So far from being
“a hundred years hence,” “Metropolis,” in its forms and shapes, is
already, as a possibility, a third of a century out of date.
But its form is the least part of its staleness. This great city is
supposed to be evoked by a single dominating personality. The English
version calls him John Masterman, so that there may be no mistake
about his quality. Very unwisely he has called his son Eric, instead
of sticking to good hard John, and so relaxed the strain. He works
with an inventor, one Rotwang, and they make machines. There are a
certain number of other rich people, and the “sons of the rich” are
seen disporting themselves, with underclad ladies in a sort of joy
conservatory, rather like the “winter garden” of an enterprising 1890
hotel during an orgy. The rest of the population is in a state of
abject slavery, working in “shifts” of ten hours in some mysteriously
divided twenty-four hours, and with no money to spend or property or
freedom. The machines make wealth. _How_, is not stated. We are shown
rows of motor cars all exactly alike; but the workers cannot own these,
and no “sons of the rich” would. Even the middle classes nowadays want
a car with personality. Probably Masterman makes these cars in endless
series to amuse himself.
One is asked to believe that these machines are engaged quite
furiously in the mass production of nothing that is ever used, and that
Masterman grows richer and richer in the process. This is the essential
nonsense of it all. Unless the mass of the population has spending
power there is no possibility of wealth in a mechanical civilization.
A vast, penniless slave population may be necessary for wealth where
there are no mass production machines, but it is preposterous with
mass production machines. You find such a real proletariat in China
still; it existed in the great cities of the ancient world; but you
do not find it in America, which has gone furthest in the direction
of mechanical industry, and there is no grain of reason for supposing
it will exist in the future. Masterman’s watchword is “Efficiency,”
and you are given to understand it is a very dreadful word, and the
contrivers of this idiotic spectacle are so hopelessly ignorant of
all the work that has been done upon industrial efficiency that
they represent him as working his machine-minders to the point of
exhaustion, so that they faint and machines explode and people are
scalded to death. You get machine-minders in torment turning levers
in response to signals--work that could be done far more effectively
by automata. Much stress is laid on the fact that the workers are
spiritless, hopeless drudges, working reluctantly and mechanically.
But a mechanical civilization has no use for mere drudges; the more
efficient its machinery the less need there is for the quasi-mechanical
minder. It is the inefficient factory that needs slaves; the
ill-organized mine that kills men. The hopeless drudge stage of human
labour lies behind us. With a sort of malignant stupidity this film
contradicts these facts.
The current tendency of economic life is to oust the mere drudge
altogether, to replace much highly skilled manual work by exquisite
machinery in skilled hands, and to increase the relative proportion
of semi-skilled, moderately versatile and fairly comfortable workers.
It may indeed create temporary masses of unemployed, and in “The
Sleeper Awakes” there was a mass of unemployed people under hatches.
That was written in 1897, when the possibility of restraining the
growth of large masses of population had scarcely dawned on the world.
It was reasonable then to anticipate an embarrassing underworld of
under-productive people. We did not know what to do with the abyss.
But there is no excuse for that to-day. And what this film anticipates
is not unemployment, but drudge employment, which is precisely what is
passing away. Its fabricators have not even realized that the machine
ousts the drudge.
“Efficiency” means large-scale productions, machinery as fully
developed as possible, and _high wages_. The British Government
delegation sent to study success in America has reported unanimously to
that effect. The increasingly efficient industrialism of America has so
little need of drudges that it has set up the severest barriers against
the flooding of the United States by drudge immigration. “Ufa” knows
nothing of such facts.
A young woman appears from nowhere in particular to “help” these
drudges; she impinges upon Masterman’s son Eric, and they go to the
“Catacombs,” which, in spite of the gas mains, steam mains, cables, and
drainage, have somehow contrived to get over from Rome, skeletons and
all, and burrow under this city of “Metropolis.” She conducts a sort of
Christian worship in these unaccountable caverns, and the drudges love
and trust her. With a nice sense of fitness she lights herself about
the Catacombs with a torch instead of the electric lamps that are now
so common.
That reversion to torches is quite typical of the spirit of this show.
Torches are Christian, we are asked to suppose; torches are human.
Torches have hearts. But electric hand-lamps are wicked, mechanical,
heartless things. The bad, bad inventor uses quite a big one. Mary’s
services are unsectarian, rather like afternoon Sunday-school, and
in her special catacomb she has not so much an altar as a kind of
umbrella-stand full of crosses. The leading idea of her religion seems
to be a disapproval of machinery and efficiency. She enforces the
great moral lesson that the bolder and stouter human effort becomes,
the more spiteful Heaven grows, by reciting the story of Babel. The
story of Babel, as we know, is a lesson against “Pride.” It teaches
the human soul to grovel. It inculcates the duty of incompetence. The
Tower of Babel was built, it seems, by bald-headed men. I said there
was no original touch in the film, but this last seems to be a real
invention. You see the bald-headed men building Babel. Myriads of them.
Why they are bald is inexplicable. It is not even meant to be funny,
and it isn’t funny; it is just another touch of silliness. The workers
in “Metropolis” are not to rebel or do anything for themselves, she
teaches, because they may rely on the vindictiveness of Heaven.
But Rotwang, the inventor, is making a Robot, apparently without any
licence from Capek, the original patentee. It is to look and work like
a human being, but it is to have no “soul.” It is to be a substitute
for drudge labour. Masterman very properly suggests that it should
never have a soul, and for the life of me I cannot see why it should.
The whole aim of mechanical civilization is to eliminate the drudge and
the drudge soul. But this is evidently regarded as very dreadful and
impressive by the producers, who are all on the side of soul and love
and suchlike. I am surprised they do not pine for souls in the alarm
clocks and runabouts. Masterman, still unwilling to leave bad alone,
persuades Rotwang to make this Robot in the likeness of Mary, so that
it may raise an insurrection among the workers to destroy the machines
by which they live, and so learn that it is necessary to work. Rather
intricate that, but Masterman, you understand, is a rare devil of a
man. Full of pride and efficiency and modernity, and all those horrid
things.
Then comes the crowning imbecility of the film, the conversion of the
Robot into the likeness of Mary. Rotwang, you must understand, occupies
a small old house, embedded in the modern city, richly adorned with
pentagrams and other reminders of the antiquated German romances out
of which its owner has been taken. A quaint smell of Mephistopheles
is perceptible for a time. So even at Ufa, Germany can still be dear
old magic-loving Germany. Perhaps Germans will never get right away
from the Brocken. Walpurgis Night is the name-day of the German poetic
imagination, and the national fantasy capers insecurely for ever with a
broomstick between its legs. By some no doubt abominable means Rotwang
has squeezed a vast and well-equipped modern laboratory into this
little house. It is ever so much bigger than the house, but no doubt he
has fallen back on Einstein and other modern bedevilments. Mary has to
be trapped, put into a machine like a translucent cocktail shaker, and
undergo all sorts of pyrotechnic treatment in order that her likeness
may be transferred to the Robot. The possibility of Rotwang just simply
making a Robot like her, evidently never entered the gifted producer’s
head. The Robot is enveloped in wavering haloes, the premises seem
to be struck by lightning repeatedly, the contents of a number of
flasks and carboys are violently agitated, there are minor explosions
and discharges. Rotwang conducts the operations with a manifest lack
of assurance, and finally, to his evident relief, the likeness is
taken and things calm down. The false Mary then winks darkly at the
audience and sails off to raise the workers. And so forth and so on.
There is some rather good swishing about in water, after the best film
traditions, some violent and unconvincing machine-breaking and rioting
and wreckage, and then, rather confusedly, one gathers that Masterman
has learnt a lesson, and that workers and employers are now to be
reconciled by “Love.”
Never for a moment does one believe any of this foolish story; never
for a moment is there anything amusing or convincing in its dreary
series of strained events. It is immensely and strangely dull. It
is not even to be laughed at. There is not one good-looking nor
sympathetic nor funny personality in the cast; there is, indeed, no
scope at all for looking well or acting like a rational creature
amid these mindless, imitative absurdities. The film’s air of having
something grave and wonderful to say is transparent pretence. It has
nothing to do with any social or moral issue before the world or with
any that can ever conceivably arise. It is bunkum and poor and thin
even as bunkum. I am astonished at the toleration shown it by quite a
number of film critics on both sides of the Atlantic. And it cost, says
the London “Times,” six million marks! How they spent all that upon it
I cannot imagine. Most of the effects could have been got with models
at no great expense.
The pity of it is that this unimaginative, incoherent,
sentimentalizing, and make-believe film, wastes some very fine
possibilities. My belief in German enterprise has had a shock. I am
dismayed by the intellectual laziness it betrays. I thought Germans
even at the worst could toil. I thought they had resolved to be
industriously modern. It is profoundly interesting to speculate upon
the present trend of mechanical invention and of the real reactions
of invention upon labour conditions. Instead of plagiarizing from a
book thirty years old and resuscitating the banal moralizing of the
early Victorian period, it would have been almost as easy, no more
costly, and far more interesting to have taken some pains to gather
the opinions of a few bright young research students and ambitious,
modernizing architects and engineers about the trend of modern
invention, and develop these artistically. Any technical school would
have been delighted to supply sketches and suggestions for the aviation
and transport of A.D. 2027. There are now masses of literature upon the
organization of labour for efficiency that could have been boiled down
at a very small cost. The question of the development of industrial
control, the relation of industrial to political direction, the way
all that is going, is of the liveliest current interest. Apparently
the Ufa people did not know of these things and did not want to know
about them. They were too dense to see how these things could be
brought into touch with the life of to-day and made interesting to the
man in the street. After the worst traditions of the cinema world,
monstrously self-satisfied and self-sufficient, convinced of the power
of loud advertisement to put things over with the public, and with
no fear of searching criticism in their minds, no consciousness of
thought and knowledge beyond their ken, they set to work in their huge
studio to produce furlong after furlong of this ignorant, old-fashioned
balderdash, and ruin the market for any better film along these lines.
Six million marks! The waste of it!
The theatre when I visited it was crowded. All but the highest-priced
seats were full, and the gaps in these filled up reluctantly but
completely before the great film began. I suppose every one had come
to see what the city of a hundred years hence would be like. I suppose
there are multitudes of people to be “drawn” by promising to show them
what the city of a hundred years hence will be like. It was, I thought,
an unresponsive audience, and I heard no comments. I could not tell
from their bearing whether they believed that “Metropolis” was really
a possible forecast or no. I do not know whether they thought that the
film was hopelessly silly or the future of mankind hopelessly silly.
But it must have been one thing or the other.
_17 April, 1927._