All language subtitles for Voyage to Metropolis.ENG

36,000 extras, 1,100 shaved heads,
200,000 costumes,

500 to 600
70-storey skyscrapers.

Metropolis, Ufa's
most expensive silent film.

Total cost: 5 million Reichsmark.

The film only took just over 75,000
Reichsmark at the box office in 1927.

A disaster for the distributor.

Metropolis was dropped,
shortened and mutilated.

No-one has seen
the complete version of it since.

On the film set where director Fritz Lang
is still all smiles.

The city of the future as it looks
in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner,

a modern sci-fi classic from the '80s.

And it was clearly modelled
on another film.

An architect's sketch,
but not for Blade Runner.

This tower is at the centre
of Metropolis.

It's the scene of the action
as well as a symbol.

Metropolis - the city of cities,
a city of towers.

The new Tower of Babel.

These images still fire the imagination
of directors and architects.

The box office flop from back then

is now one of the most important works
in cinematic history.

We are now in Buenos Aires
on the trail of Metropolis.

It leads us to
the small Museo del Cine

which is on the site of a factory
in an industrial area.

Not really a museum - more an archive
for film industry insiders.

Here, on these shelves,
Metropolis re-surfaced.

This is where the Manuel Pefia
Rodriguez film collection is stored.

And in May 2008,
Fernando Pefia and I...

Fernando had suspected for 18 years

that there might be the complete version
of Metropolis in these film cans.

So we went to these shelves
and found

that it is indeed a complete copy
of Metropolis.

Surrounded by these rusty film cans,

a global sensation had been stored
for decades without being discovered.

In 1986, I met Salvador Sammaritano
at the film academy

and started working for him
at the Cine Club Nucleo.

The Fondo Nacional de las Artes

wanted to donate Pefia Rodriguez's
film collection to the club.

As we discovered Metropolis,
Sammaritano said to me:

"I will never forget
how we showed this film in 1959.

"For two and a half hours

"I had to hold down the film gate
of the projector with my finger."

That seemed strange to me

because Giorgio Moroder's version of
Metropolis had just hit the cinemas,

and that wasn't two and a half hours
long, not even two hours,

but just 90 minutes.

HAMBURG-AMERICA LINE

October 1924.

Architect Erich Mendelsohn

travels to America on behalf
of the Berliner Tageblatt.

"A fact-finding mission for the eyes
and mind", he calls his journey.

Film director Fritz Lang
is also on board,

as well as producer Erich Pommer
with his wife Gertrud.

They are going to the opening of
Die Nibelungen in New York.

Mendelsohn on his
travelling companion Fritz Lang:

"Monocle and other
Viennese quirks aside,

"he is a thoughtful and
daring human being.

"Port entrance.
The ship swerves.

"In the haze,
a first glimpse of the skyline.

"Then rising to the sky,
the Woolworth Building.

"Quick entrance,
turns, curves.

"Space cataract, space battle,
infinite flush of victory."

Fritz Lang is overwhelmed as well:

"The buildings seemed
like a vertical curtain,

"shimmering and very light,

"an exuberant backdrop
hanging from a dark sky

"that dazzles, distracts
and hypnotises."

Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten,
published in Berlin, 1926.

Erich Mendelsohn's report with photos
of avant-garde audacity.

Broadway bei Nacht, an image that
Mendelsohn attributes to Fritz Lang.

Lang was later to claim
that Metropolis

had been inspired
by his first impression of New York.

One of his many tales,
as we know today.

Architecture and physics,
poetry and film...

Erich Mendelsohn's Einstein Tower
in Potsdam.

Designed in the trenches
of World War I,

and built at the beginning
of the 1920s,

a prototype of the architecture
of Metropolis.

Even today this edifice
looks like a message from the future.

"This script
is dedicated to Erich Pommer" -

the original dedication on the title page
of the screenplay for Metropolis.

Fritz Lang and his wife
Thea von Harbou

completed it in June 1924,

before their trip to America.

The flat that they shared
on the Hohenzollerndamm in Berlin -

photos for the magazine Die Dame.

A strangely old-fashioned interior

in which this futuristic subject matter
was conceived.

The story of a vertically layered city.

"All the buildings used
as a backdrop on the film set

"had been described
in such detail in the screenplay

"that there could be no doubt about
their character and their dimensions",

art director Erich Kettelhut remembers.

Thea and Fritz at the Ufa zoo.

As the screenwriter,
she had always been held responsible

for all the kitsch and mundane
subject matter in Lang's films.

It was no different with Metropolis.

Modernity in town planning.

At the same time Le Corbusier
draws up the Plan Voisin for Paris -

the old city centre must give way

and is subjected to
"surgical intervention".

There are 18 cross-shaped skyscrapers
made of steel and glass.

Every skyscraper is a vertical
city district for 50,000 people.

A contrast to New York.

"My proposition is brutal
because town planning is brutal,

"because life is brutal;

"life shows no mercy;

"life must defend itself;

"in the face of death
one must act

"to thwart death's schemes",

Le Corbusier writes in his book
Urbanisme.

The film Metropolis
juxtaposes this concept

with a dual vision of New York.

A model of high-rise buildings
and urban canyons.

A cinematic achievement.

"When we shot the scene
of the main street

"in which we used approximately
300 small toy cars,

"we had to move every single car
a few millimetres forward

"after every single frame
that we had shot

"to create the impression of movement
in the film",

wrote cameraman Gunther Rittau.

Eight days of work
for ten seconds of film.

Design of a high-rise building.

It could be for Metropolis,

but it was actually made
by Hugo Haring in 1922

for the design competition Hochhaus
am Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, Berlin.

The same goes
for Hans Poelzig's entry.

An architect's sketch for Metropolis
by Erich Kettelhut

reinterprets such ideas.

The Mossehaus in Berlin's
former newspaper district.

A real intrusion of modernity.

In 1923, Mendelsohn gave
an old district a new facade.

It "flows" around the corner,
as it were.

A house in motion.

Almost everyone knows this image -

the Robot Maria from Metropolis
by Walter Schulze-Mittendorff.

An icon of silent film.

The laboratory of Rotwang,
the inventor of The Machine-Man.

The set design inspired dozens of films.

The multiple exposure sequence
of the incarnation of a robot.

But what does a robot look like?

Contemporary abstract sculptures
were used as models.

Rudolf Belling's Skulptur 23,
a futuristic hollow head, made of brass.

Oskar Schlemmer's Abstrakte Figur,
created between 1921 and 1923.

Fritz Lang's film gathers and condenses
the impulses of its time

and makes its own mark on
the development of art and architecture.

I actually think that films -

and that is something that I personally
have always done -

should deal with today's problems.

I have always been a fighter.

I have always fought very hard
for my ideas, to implement them.

Also in America.
Or especially in America.

If you have convictions,
you have to fight for them.

Lang on the set.

Filming took place from May 1925
to August 1926.

Metropolis, initially budgeted
at 800,000 Reichsmark,

is now estimated to have cost
approximately 3.5 million Reichsmark.

Ufa's press office
proudly reported

about 620,000 metres of negative film
and 1,300,000 metres of positive film

that Lang had exposed.

It's hard to understand
that until the discovery in Buenos Aires

no complete version of Metropolis
had survived.

Fritz Lang's film technique
was a montage of several negatives.

He achieved this effect
by working with several cameras,

or, in scenes in which that was
not possible,

by doing so many takes

that there were at least
three good ones of each shot.

You can confirm that by looking
at the surviving material.

There is only one
surviving original negative.

That's the original negative
that was used for the American edit,

which is not the same as the one
that was cut by Lang,

but it's the surviving edit
that was made by Paramount.

Of the other negatives
only copies have survived.

There was a negative
for the German market,

and there was a negative
for Ufa's export department.

And this negative was used
to make the copies

that are now in London, Australia,
New Zealand and Argentina.

The Ufa studio in Neubabelsberg.

The outdoor set for Metropolis.

These images were shot
in the summer of 1927,

long after the film had been completed.

We are showing them here
for the first time.

"To work with Fritz Lang as director
was no picnic for anyone�,

remembers Gustav Frohlich,

who plays Freder,
the son of the ruler of Metropolis.

"His patience and his tenacity
appeared to be infinite,

"as did his powers of persuasion,
if necessary, his downright manipulation.

"He also had a hypnotic effect
on all his colleagues

"and pushed everyone
to their limits.

"But nevertheless, work progressed
calmly and efficiently,

"without yelling,
but with unyielding persistence."

Freder and Maria -
the heroes of the film,

a forbidden love,

for Maria is a girl
from the underworld...

...the workers' underworld -
deep below the Earth's surface.

At the M-Machine -
people like robots.

19th December, 1925.

The so-called "Parufamet Agreement�
is signed.

For a $4 million credit

Ufa agreed to reserve
75% of its cinema capacity

for productions from the American
companies Paramount and Metro.

The Americans agreed to show
ten Ufa films per season.

A fateful day for Metropolis.

Even before its premi�re in Germany
in January 1927,

the film came to America and was
radically edited and shortened there

by Channing Pollock
at the request of Paramount.

In the summer of 1927, the German edit
was also re-cut to match this model

and shortened by 30 minutes.

The material that had been cut out
was destroyed.

The Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv
in Berlin-Hoppegarten.

A modern bunker for approximately
90,000 reels of nitrate film.

Amongst them, eight reels
of the original negative of Metropolis

in the Paramount version.

In 2001, this "American"
camera negative

was used to restore the film

under the aegis of the
Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung.

But the lost 30 minutes
were still missing.

Nowadays, the American negative
is the best in terms of quality, of course,

because it is the only
surviving camera negative,

i.e. first-generation film,

except for one reel, which unfortunately
is a duplicate from the '60s.

It's also the best in terms of
the quality of its contents,

i.e. of what the actors are doing,

and how well
continuity has been maintained.

But not everything can be used

because, as I said before, one reel
is a duplicate which isn't very good,

and the changes that Channing Pollock
made in 1927

sometimes led to
changes in continuity.

Some of the material had been
shortened to such an extent

that it was no longer possible
to piece it together

as it had been originally,

and it had to be replaced
with different material.

Sometimes we used fade-outs

where there were
new transitions between scenes.

When Pollock had finished a scene,
he wanted to have a fade-out.

He treated the negative chemically,
so there was a fade-out,

and in these sequences
the image suddenly goes black.

Stadt der S6hne [City of the Sons],
a sketch for Metropolis.

The stadium sequence
was also cut out in 1927.

"Figure height: 14 metres.

"Plinth: 8 metres."

"In reality the figures were only
about 20 centimetres high",

Erich Kettelhut remembers.

Mauer nebst Figuren, ein Modell
[Wall with Figures, a Model]

was projected onto a 3-metre-high
angled wall, using the Schifftan process.

Fritz Lang's screenplay
is thought to have been lost.

Only the 13th page, complete
with handwritten notes, has survived -

as a facsimile,

reproduced in the Ufa magazine,
in the special edition Metropolis.

The Eternal Gardens in the upper city
of Metropolis.

Many journalists and guests
visited the set and wrote about it.

Even Hitchcock - not yet a director
himself - is said to have been there.

A photo shoot on the set
of the Eternal Gardens:

Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein
on the far right of the picture.

Lang has not yet seen Bronenosets
Potyomkin [Battleship Potemkin].

He says to Eisenstein: "Watch
and learn, and you will shoot like me."

"We will shoot differently",
Eisenstein thinks.

Russians and Metropolis.

There will be consequences...

In the Soviet Union,
all film magazines and newspapers

constantly wrote about Metropolis.

Expectations were high,

due to Fritz Lang's huge success
with Die Nibelungen.

Images from the film,
reports about the shooting...

The film was eagerly anticipated.

It was quite a long wait.

It was only in 1929
that they tried to distribute the film.

Sovkino provided the censorship
authorities with a detailed report.

Ideologically, the film
was not acceptable.

But they promised to change it -
to shorten and re-write it

and to put explanatory slates
at the beginning and the end.

They hoped the film in this form
would make it to the cinema.

Far from it.

In April 1929, it was banned
from being shown in the Soviet Union.

The censorship decision
signed by Fyodor Raskolnikov.

Towards the end of the 1920s,

the housing development Schorlemer
Allee is built in Berlin-Dahlem,

Berlin's first steel-framed
housing development,

designed in the studio
of brothers Luckhardt and Alfons Anker.

A futuristic house.

In 1929, the director of Metropolis
moves in.

In 1933, Fritz Lang goes into exile
from here.

He stays in America
even after the war.

There is a story about a man

who arrived at the Mauthausen
concentration camp in 1943.

As he climbed up the ramp

and saw countless men and women
with shaved heads in work clothes,

he is alleged to have said
to one of his fellow inmates:

"Do you know Metropolis?"

There is always more significance
to a major work of art

than its author is aware of.

That also holds true
for this film by Fritz Lang.

Moments of premonition.

The former bunker complex of
the Reichsfilmarchiv in Babelsberg.

Just after the end of the war it is seized
and secured by the Red Army.

A Soviet special commission
removes countless films

and sends them to Moscow.

Film as "war loot" -
including Metropolis.

35 years later,
at the beginning of the '80s,

Enno Patalas,
head of the Filmmuseum Miinchen,

contacts the Soviet film archive
Gosfilmofond

and brings some of the films
that had been looted back to Germany.

That had consequences,
including for Metropolis.

We had heard and seen

that the films at Gosfilmofond
were of a much better quality

than they were anywhere else,
especially in Germany.

And once we had received
the famous Soviet films

by Eisenstein, Pudovkin and so forth,

we asked for German films from
the Soviet archive by way of exchange.

We exchanged metre for metre,

1 metre colour
for 3 metres black and white.

And old German films
for new German films,

i.e. Fassbinder, Herzog, Kluge
for Murnau, Fritz Lang and so forth.

And Metropolis was only one of
approximately 12 films we had asked for.

And it had no particular priority.

It was just one of the films

which we thought
that we should have,

and we had seen or presumed,
quite often we only presumed,

that the quality at Gosfilmofond
was better than anywhere else.

It was not the case that
we specifically chose Metropolis

in order to maybe work on it.

That had not even occurred to us.

It was the other way round.
The film chose us to give us work.

Storage rooms of the Russian
film archive Gosfilmofond.

Films that were looted from the
Reichsfilmarchiv are piling up here.

Long before Enno Patalas
did business with the Soviets,

the employees of Gosfilmofond tried
to reconstruct Metropolis themselves.

They finally wanted to see the film.

After the war, a lot of film reels
were brought here from Germany,

and it wasn't known
exactly what they were.

We tried long and hard
to identify them.

Finally, Metropolis was unearthed
from this pile.

There were five reels
with English intertitles.

The film was given an archive number

and it was archived at Gosfilmofond
in the Soviet Union.

Unfortunately, no-one could do
anything with the film

because there were only fragments.

But fortunately, the Czechoslovak
Filmovy Archiv in Prague

had the other fragments.

We decided to piece the film together
from these fragments.

That's how Gosfilmofond and
the Narodni Filmovy Archiv in Prague

created an improved American edit
in 1961.

The first attempt at reconstructing
Metropolis.

In 1971, the fragments were returned
to the Staatliches Filmarchiv der DDR

which was also trying
to reconstruct the film.

"Dear Mr Lang,

"may we approach you again with
questions when we are finishing the film,

"especially with regards to
the exact sequencing of the scenes

"and maintaining continuity
between cuts?"

"Dear Mr Klaue,

"please find enclosed
a copy of a brochure with quotes

"that Paramount issued to
the American press at the premi�re,

"so you can see for yourself

"how thoughtless and dictatorial
distributors in America were

"in the way they treated European films
in the 1920s.

"Yours sincerely, Fritz Lang."

The comparison of the copies

that we had acquired
from other archives

was done by a young employee
at the film archive

who had just come from
the film academy, Eckart Jahnke.

He was a few doors down from me

and one day he was all excited
and said:

"Mr Klaue, Mr Klaue,

"there's a cat walking across the screen
in a scene from one of the copies,

"but there's no cat in the other copy."

That was a revelation.

The same scene was shot
with multiple cameras,

and maybe there were
different negatives.

We had not even considered
that possibility.

We were convinced
that there was just one source,

one negative that had been edited.

We did not find the cat.

Instead we'll show a comparison
of a different scene.

Josaphat's dismissal by Joh Fredersen,
the ruler of Metropolis.

The American edit on the left,
the German edit on the right.

Some scenes suggest

that they were indeed
shot with two cameras.

In other instances, there are
multiple takes of the same scene.

These subtle differences prove

how precise Fritz Lang was
in translating his vision of a scene.

As far as it was possible,
we completed the copy

and showed a first
reconstructed edit

at the congress of the F�d�ration
Internationale des Archives du Film

in 1972 in Bucharest.

It was acknowledged
with interest,

but I have to say that the interest
was not spectacular.

Maybe it was a bit too soon.

We were the first
to attempt such a reconstruction

with international co-operation.

People weren't exactly
filled with enthusiasm.

I'm sure that a few years later it would
have fallen on more fertile ground.

I was a bit disappointed.

I had hoped that the experts
would pat us on the back

and tell us what a good job
we had done

and that we had taught them
something new.

That was not the case yet.

The only other thing
I was able to do for the film

happened by sheer coincidence.

I was on a visit to Stockholm.

The Svenska Filminstitutet
showed me its facilities,

amongst other things its library

with books and information
and advertising materials.

Amongst other things
they showed me a big box

with unsorted censor-cards

from the German censorship agency
and said:

"We have these as well."

And as I was rummaging through
this box, as if it were a bargain bin,

what did I find?
The censor-cards for Metropolis

which we didn't have
when we reconstructed the film.

They didn't exist in Germany.

They are not available
in any other archive.

I took them
and gave them to Enno Patalas.

Metropolis as a mediator
between East and West.

The censor-cards for
the first version of the film,

issued in November 1926,

with the complete text
of the original German intertitles.

Until 1980, they had to translate
the English back into German.

These censor-cards
are important documents

that show the original sequencing
of the scenes.

Enno Patalas and his team used
four copies for the restoration:

the shortened German version

that Ufa sent to the Museum
of Modern Art in New York in 1936,

Moscow's "war loot" version
from the Reichsfilmarchiv,

the version from London, as well as
one from Melbourne, Australia.

Patalas was determined

to create the best and most complete
version of Metropolis.

The premi�re of the reconstructed
edit from Munich

took place in the autumn of 1987
in Moscow.

It was not a systematic piece of work,
and when somebody asks me,

"How much time did you spend
working on it?"

I cannot say
14 days or 8 years

because it was spread out
over a number of years.

Quite often nothing happened
for a few years,

until suddenly a missing piece
was discovered somewhere

or there was an interesting opportunity
for us to do something.

Cin�mathe�que Francaise in Paris.

There are 831 photos from
the filming of Metropolis stored here

that Thea's brother Horst von Harbou
had taken on the set.

Fritz Lang gave three albums
of these photos

to the head of the Cin�math�que,
Henri Langlois,

who kept them under wraps.

In 1983, they reappeared.

Images from lost scenes.

The Thin Man as Freder's minder.

This character, played by Fritz Rasp,

was almost completely removed
from the film.

Rotwang at Hel's monument...

A key scene that explains
his enmity with Fredersen.

But what's the best course of action?

Should the stills be used
instead of the lost scenes

or should the lost scenes
simply be described?

That was a question that was raised
at the time in Munich.

The only photo that we used
several times in the reconstruction

was the one of the monument.

There was the text on the monument
from which the entire story originated,

and the head of Hel
and this entire complex.

That was one of the most
interesting discoveries.

The character of Hel was removed,

allegedly because the name Hel was
too similar to the English word "hell"

and would have seemed strange
to the American audience.

In 1984, Giorgio Moroder,
composer of Hollywood soundtracks,

released his version of Metropolis.

It was the British version - but in colour.

The soundtrack was recorded
by pop stars of the '80s,

such as Freddie Mercury, Bonnie Tyler,
Adam Ant and Pat Benatar.

Thus Metropolis had arrived
in pop modernity.

A cult classic - especially in America.

After I had completed Metropolis,
I didn't like it at all.

I thought that a lot of things
had been done too simplistically.

And I thought that, for example,
the tenor of Metropolis,

that was written by Mrs von Harbou,
my wife at the time,

that the mediator
between hands and head,

i.e. between capital and worker,
should be the heart...

I thought that cannot be the answer
to problems in society.

THE MEDIATOR BETWEEN HEAD AND HANDS

MUST BE THE HEART!

But here's something strange:
I dearly love today's youth.

I am 100% behind today's youth.

When I say "today's youth",

I mean America, of course,
where I live.

And when you talk to today's youth

and ask them what they think about an
establishment governed by computers,

or what they think is missing,

as they are opposed
to this establishment,

then all of them say "the heart",

which makes me wonder:
Maybe Harbou was 100% right after all.

Fritz Lang as a pop hero, celebrated
by Madonna - with dangling monocle!

But unlike this music clip,

its model, Metropolis,
is still disturbingly fresh.

At the beginning of the new millennium,

the story of Metropolis
appeared to have come to a close.

In 2008, it took an unexpected new turn.

Of course I did not expect
any more material to surface.

After 2001, we occasionally
received calls or letters from people

who thought they had discovered
something.

But invariably that turned out
not to be true.

Or they had discovered something
that was already known.

When I received the call
from an editor at Die Zeit newspaper

who had heard about the story
in Buenos Aires

and wanted to write about it,

and said there was new material
in Buenos Aires - 16mm,

I immediately said no,
and I said I wasn't interested at all.

I thought it was a copy that the Goethe-
Institut had left there at some point

in the '50s or '60s.

Thanks, but 16mm...?
We really don't need that.

We've got the camera negative
and so forth.

You could say I was arrogant.

"Haughty", as Fritz Lang would put it.

Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires.

While film historians were looking
for the lost material all over the world,

a complete edit lay here untouched.

An Argentinian distributor had acquired
a complete edit of the film in 1927

before it was altered and shortened.

A copy of this edit found its way into
the private collection of a film critic

and eventually became
Argentinian state property.

What we found at the museum
is a 16mm negative

that was reduced from a 35mm
positive copy to this format.

We cannot say with absolute certainty
when this negative was made,

but we think it must have been
1973 or 1974.

At this time,
the Fondo Nacional de las Artes,

which owned
the Pefia Rodriguez collection,

decided that it was too dangerous
to store 35mm nitrate copies.

There was no money
for a 35mm dupe negative,

so the film was copied to 16mm.

I think this material is the worst material
I have ever seen in my entire life.

I have never seen
such a badly damaged film before.

Still, it was enough of a reason for
the Murnau-Stiftung in Wiesbaden,

which owns the rights to the film,

to start a new attempt
at restoring the film.

Now Metropolis can be reconstructed
almost without any gaps.

The missing material -
almost a quarter of the film -

is going to be merged
with the edit from 2001.

The handwritten score of the
original music by Gottfried Huppertz

with countless notes

is useful
for putting the montage together.

The original music has survived,

with all the sync points
that are in the score,

which means that we know exactly

what the film must have
looked like originally.

And that was our starting point
because we noticed,

especially with the material
that we now have from Argentina,

that the sequencing of the scenes

is tied closely to the music,
and it works out very well.

And that was the starting point
for our thinking.

We said that we should try
to re-evaluate

everything that had been done
when the film was restored

in terms of what the music tells us and
what it says about the edit of the film.

But the music has to be edited
from scratch as well,

as many musical passages
could not be heard until now.

The music,
when you first hear it,

and perhaps if you approach it
quite critically,

harks back to the 19th century,

because it uses the musical language
of the 19th century.

However, if you take a closer look

and if you don't just consider
how the music sounds,

but how it interacts with the film,

then I think it can be said
that the music was trend-setting,

because the dramaturgy that it develops

transcends what was usually heard
in cinemas at the time,

i.e. purely illustrative music.

Metropolis in the digital age.

In the summer of 2009,

the dupe negative from Buenos Aires
comes to Germany

and is scanned frame by frame.

Finally, after more than 80 years,

the lost images of Metropolis
are returning to the screen.

When the film was copied,

all the damage and the stains
were copied as well

and are now part of the image.

Restoration in the sense of
physical treatment,

i.e. cleaning, immersing the film in liquid
before it is copied

in order to remove scratches
and so forth,

is no longer possible, because
everything has been photographed.

All the scratches, stains and oil stains
and so forth

are now part of the image
and cannot be separated from it.

Digital enhancement of the images
is the only possibility.

But as the images are
so badly damaged,

compared to what
they should look like,

there are limits to what can be achieved
by digitally enhancing the images.

We have seen various attempts
by different companies,

none of which were
particularly convincing.

We had to find a compromise

and leave some of the damage intact

which documents the story of what
happened to the film in every image.

With that in mind,
it is OK for it to be seen.

It won't be possible
to restore it perfectly,

but of course it is necessary
to "clean" the images,

in inverted commas,

to such a degree that you can
recognise what's in the image.

The image restoration
is done with dedicated software.

The complete version of Metropolis 2010
can be played from a hard drive.

Our story would end here,

but as is so often the case
with Metropolis, it continues.

In Switzerland we found these images
by Berlin photographer Alex Stocker.

The Ufa Pavilion
at the Nollendorfplatz in Berlin.

The first version of the film
was only shown in this cinema.

And it was here that
the Argentinian distributor saw it,

and from here, Metropolis
went all around the world.