Abel, Alfred

Metropolis (Restored Authorized Edition)

Fritz Lang's Metropolis belongs to legend as much as to cinema. It's a milestone of sci-fi and German expressionism. Yet the story makes minimal sense, and the "theme" belongs in a fortune cookie; to experience the film's pagan power, you have to see the movie. But for decades we couldn't, not really--not with so many versions, all incomplete, often in public-domain prints like smudged photocopies. This Murnau Foundation restoration changes all that. Some shots, scenes, and subplots may be lost forever, but intertitles indicate how they fit into the original continuity and the characters' individual trajectories. Most crucially, the images are crisp, vibrant, and three-dimensional instead of murky and flattened. The composite sequences (the Tower of Babel, a sea of lusting eyes) have been restored to their hallucinatory ferocity. And there's one moment when you can see a bead of sweat roll down a man's cheek--in medium long-shot. --Richard T. Jameson

Metropolis (1927)

This Fritz Lang classic film nearly bankrupted the motion picture studio that produced the feature. Set in 2000, this futuristic tale shows society separated into two distinct segments. The upper class lived in the high towers of the city and reaped the benefits of modern technology. The lower class resided in the underground regions working to make the machinery operate. The main thrust of the film centers on a man from the upper class falling in love with a woman from the lower class and his revelation as to what the world is like outside of his towers.

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Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler

It's hard to imagine that the razor-sharp Kino DVD of Fritz Lang's first magnum opus fails to capture any of the visual electricity and heady atmosphere experienced by Berlin filmgoers in 1922. The film's historical importance to the crime-film genre and its thematic relevance to the director's later work have never been in dispute, but with only murky, choppy editions to go by, the movie has largely been paid lip service for its legacy rather than appreciated for itself. Now, thanks to this definitive restoration by the Murnau Institute, we can properly see it and experience it.

Dr. Mabuse the Gambler is actually two films in one--or, more precisely, one film in two feature-length parts totaling four-and-a-half hours and conceived to be watched on consecutive evenings. Its title character is a criminal mastermind with the power and the will to orchestrate complex capers, counterfeit national currencies, manipulate the stock market, and hypnotically bend anyone to play a role in his diabolical designs. The hand of Mabuse seems to reach everywhere--for the excellent reason that the Doctor himself, a master of disguise, turns out to be just about anywhere at just the moment his intervention will wreak havoc and wreck lives. (He's played by Rudolf Klein-Rogge, who would repeat the part ten years later in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse and also, in spirit if not in name, in Lang's dazzling 1928 film Spies; he was also the inventor Rotwang in Metropolis--as well as, offscreen, the former husband of Lang's screenwriter wife Thea von Harbou!)

The film's title in German is Doktor Mabuse der Spieler, and our supervillain is really less a gambler (all his games of chance are rigged) than a player: playing multiple roles, but even more importantly, playing with others' lives, playing with the very fabric of modern reality. The subtitles of the two parts are "A Picture of the Time" and "People of the Time"; the film is an artifact of the Weimar era when, as one character remarks, "We are bored and tired ... we need sensations of a very special kind to remain alive." Lang and his art directors, Otto Hunte and Karl Stahl-Urach, create a hallucinatory mise-en-scène in which the decor is at once stark and decadent, a playground for all manner of perverse spectacle and gamesmanship, a maze of corridors and doorways and streets where the modern and the gothic interlayer. This world ripe for Mabusian manipulation prefigured Hitler by a decade--and in one of his last declarations, the Doctor anticipates more contemporary visionaries of chaos: "I feel as a state within a state, with which I have always been at war." Fritz Lang continues to be a chillingly prophetic filmmaker. --Richard T. Jameson

Fritz Lang Epic Collection (Metropolis/Die Nibelungen/Woman in the Moon/Spies)

Phantom

Flicker Alley, in partnership with the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Foundation is proud to present, Phantom, which marked a major turning point in the influential career and the groundbreaking style of cinema poet F.W. Murnau. In this beautifully reconstructed and restored edition from an amazingly detailed, original 1922 negative, Alfred Abel (Metropolis, Dr. Mabuse) plays Lorenz Lubota, a man obsessed with his own desires to achieve fame and wealth, who must confront the barriers of class keeping him from a woman (Lya de Putti)with whom he has had a fateful encounter.

Featuring a magnificent new orchestral score by Robert Israel, this powerfully expressive and surprisingly insightful film is a triumph of German Weimar cinema and a wonderful collaboration of many of its most skilled artisans and recognizable performers. Through dazzling visuals and memorable characters, Phantom paints a portrait of the corrupting influence of money, the conformity of societal norms, and the redemptive power of family.

Horror Classics Triple Feature, Vol. 1 (Metropolis (1927) / Nosferatu (1922) / The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

Dr. Mabuse - The Gambler

It's hard to imagine that the razor-sharp Kino DVD of Fritz Lang's first magnum opus fails to capture any of the visual electricity and heady atmosphere experienced by Berlin filmgoers in 1922. The film's historical importance to the crime-film genre and its thematic relevance to the director's later work have never been in dispute, but with only murky, choppy editions to go by, the movie has largely been paid lip service for its legacy rather than appreciated for itself. Now, thanks to this definitive restoration by the Murnau Institute, we can properly see it and experience it.

Dr. Mabuse the Gambler is actually two films in one--or, more precisely, one film in two feature-length parts totaling four-and-a-half hours and conceived to be watched on consecutive evenings. Its title character is a criminal mastermind with the power and the will to orchestrate complex capers, counterfeit national currencies, manipulate the stock market, and hypnotically bend anyone to play a role in his diabolical designs. The hand of Mabuse seems to reach everywhere--for the excellent reason that the Doctor himself, a master of disguise, turns out to be just about anywhere at just the moment his intervention will wreak havoc and wreck lives. (He's played by Rudolf Klein-Rogge, who would repeat the part ten years later in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse and also, in spirit if not in name, in Lang's dazzling 1928 film Spies; he was also the inventor Rotwang in Metropolis--as well as, offscreen, the former husband of Lang's screenwriter wife Thea von Harbou!)

The film's title in German is Doktor Mabuse der Spieler, and our supervillain is really less a gambler (all his games of chance are rigged) than a player: playing multiple roles, but even more importantly, playing with others' lives, playing with the very fabric of modern reality. The subtitles of the two parts are "A Picture of the Time" and "People of the Time"; the film is an artifact of the Weimar era when, as one character remarks, "We are bored and tired ... we need sensations of a very special kind to remain alive." Lang and his art directors, Otto Hunte and Karl Stahl-Urach, create a hallucinatory mise-en-scène in which the decor is at once stark and decadent, a playground for all manner of perverse spectacle and gamesmanship, a maze of corridors and doorways and streets where the modern and the gothic interlayer. This world ripe for Mabusian manipulation prefigured Hitler by a decade--and in one of his last declarations, the Doctor anticipates more contemporary visionaries of chaos: "I feel as a state within a state, with which I have always been at war." Fritz Lang continues to be a chillingly prophetic filmmaker. --Richard T. Jameson

Dr. Mabuse--criminal genius, psychologist, hypnotist, counterfeiter, card shark, master of disguise, thief of state secrets and ruler of a sinister empire founded on selfishness, chicanery and murder--gained his first screen incarnation in this monumental film by Fritz Lang, one of cinema's greatest directors. Made in 1922 and subtitled "A Picture of Our Time," "Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler" is indeed a snapshot of a historical moment when Germany was likened to Sodom and Gomorrah. Now, both parts of Fritz Lang's memorable silent film--"Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler" and "Dr. Mabuse, King of Crime"--are now available on one package.

Metropolis

The book sensation of Europe in 1927!a classic meditation on futuristic technology and mass mentality, this fantastic feature concerns a mechanized society. The original set design and special effects made this a very influential film in its day and it is considered one of the first films of the science-fiction genre. (watch for the first videophone, still being developed) Silent, in black and white, with musical score. English titles. Produced in germany in 1927and written by Thea von Harbou.

Metropolis

Fritz Lang's Metropolis belongs to legend as much as to cinema. It's a milestone of sci-fi and German expressionism. Yet the story makes minimal sense, and the "theme" belongs in a fortune cookie; to experience the film's pagan power, you have to see the movie. But for decades we couldn't, not really--not with so many versions, all incomplete, often in public-domain prints like smudged photocopies. This Murnau Foundation restoration changes all that. Some shots, scenes, and subplots may be lost forever, but intertitles indicate how they fit into the original continuity and the characters' individual trajectories. Most crucially, the images are crisp, vibrant, and three-dimensional instead of murky and flattened. The composite sequences (the Tower of Babel, a sea of lusting eyes) have been restored to their hallucinatory ferocity. And there's one moment when you can see a bead of sweat roll down a man's cheek--in medium long-shot. --Richard T. Jameson

Metropolis [Region 2]

Fritz Lang's Metropolis belongs to legend as much as to cinema. It's a milestone of sci-fi and German expressionism. Yet the story makes minimal sense, and the "theme" belongs in a fortune cookie; to experience the film's pagan power, you have to see the movie. But for decades we couldn't, not really--not with so many versions, all incomplete, often in public-domain prints like smudged photocopies. This Murnau Foundation restoration changes all that. Some shots, scenes, and subplots may be lost forever, but intertitles indicate how they fit into the original continuity and the characters' individual trajectories. Most crucially, the images are crisp, vibrant, and three-dimensional instead of murky and flattened. The composite sequences (the Tower of Babel, a sea of lusting eyes) have been restored to their hallucinatory ferocity. And there's one moment when you can see a bead of sweat roll down a man's cheek--in medium long-shot. --Richard T. Jameson