Premium
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and the United States
Author(s) -
Minden Michael
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
german life and letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 12
eISSN - 1468-0483
pISSN - 0016-8777
DOI - 10.1111/1468-0483.00170
Subject(s) - modernity , ambivalence , context (archaeology) , weimar republic , german , theme (computing) , relation (database) , socialism , art history , sociology , political science , aesthetics , art , law , philosophy , history , psychoanalysis , psychology , communism , archaeology , politics , computer science , operating system , linguistics , database
Fritz lang’s Metropolis (1927) has often been analysed in context of the Weimar Republic and in relation to National Socialism. This essay, while acknowledging the importance of those contexts, seeks to take a fresh look at the film in the context of the effects upon it of the United States. The film’s production, distribution and theme are all bound up in one way or another with the influence of the United States and these circumstances, the essay argues, have a significant bearing upon the kind of images created in the film. In productively exploiting the historically actual cultural and economic tussle between the German and the U.S. film industries, this essay argues that with Metropolis Lang produced a unique mise‐en‐scène of the ambivalence of technology in the culture of modernity, which helps to explain the enduring fascination exerted by some of the film’s images, especially that of the robot.