How does metropolis reflect the context of German Expressionism?

Analyse how the German Expressionist or the French New Wave film you have studied reflects the context of its film movement [35]

- Metropolis

Fritz Lang's 1927 film 'Metropolis', as a German expressionist film, encapsulates within the characters, ideology, and symbolic themes, the context of the German Weimar Republic, of which rapid modernisation, future fears, and shifting social values are externalised within the expressionistic aesthetic of the science-fiction dystopia. 

The collapse of monarchy, the aftermath of the first World War, and the making of the Weimar Republic marked a small yet hugely impactful period of change for German art. Most notably in influencing Metropolis' aesthetic, the rejection of traditional values as modernism rose to dominance in culture is reflected in the expressionistically futuristic mise-en-scene to present a mechanised and binary world; the literal segregation of the ruling and working class in the upper and lower levels of the city, their intertitles stylistically representing this by moving up/down the screen. Lang visited New York in 1924, stating how he saw it as a place of 'perpetual anxiety' and the towering skyscrapers became the vison for Metropolis, simultaneously abhorred and glorified: the impossibly distorted perspectives of hand painted skyscrapers typical of a German Expressionistic visual style in a montage of the city alongside brassy glorified music, the proto-brutalist architecture of the underground worker's city versus the Bauhaus architecture in The Club of The Sons, and the expressionistic parody of nature within the eternal gardens of the wealthy elite, with painted sets of grotesquely fraudulent nature paralleling its decadent inhabitants. Such urbanised advancement in Metropolis seems to contradict the low-budget and isolated origins of the German Expressionism movement, but by 1927 political and relative economic stability in the Weimar Republic was gained which led to a rise in decadence and moral decay against the simultaneous mass unemployment, this sentiment critiqued in Metropolis through the Levi-Strauss binary opposition representation of each class whereby Marxist overtones dominate the exposition. The chaotic agency of technology in the opening montage of whirling machinery, paralleling the non-diegetic string instrumentation, lay the foundations for Metropolis' thematic discourse surrounding future fears of technological advancement and its growing control over human labour as influenced from contextual insecurities in the face of rapid urbanisation. Significantly, Lang presents the proletariat, objectified as 'hands', as one mechanised identity; they trudge in a stylised and choregraphed movement to and from 10 hours of work connoting a perpetual misery of their exploited labour, the wide and distanced framing with compositionally divided arches above likened to that of a mouth foreshadowing the coming vision of 'Moloch', as well as emphasising a feeling of alienation, of being just an anonymous number in the greater system of Metropolis. In the machine halls, they move in alternating directions working on the 'heart machine' in a large-scale choregraphed sequence, the scale of the machine obtrusive within the frame, expressionistically hallucinated as the sacrificial god 'Moloch' by Freder (the son of Metropolis' head and a sympathiser to the worker's existence) as the workers must 'feed' the mouth of the machine with their own flesh. Such expressionistic oppositions of scale show how through its excess it becomes meaningless. Compared to the ruling class, who in Freder's introduction is captured in an ELS of a vast stadium, their freedom of movement, and the decadent and formulistic impracticality of clothing worn by encoded (a Stuart Hall theory) prostitutes in the eternal gardens, are clearly juxtaposed to the workers. Metropolis' vagueness in a conflicted ideology leans to the multiplicity of attitudes relating to its context; simultaneous cultural optimism from gradual prosperity, and future fears of mechanisation and modernisation: both glorified and made horrific in Metropolis.

During the early years of the Weimar Republic, there was great insecurity in the political, economic, and social landscape which led artists to reject traditional art forms, particularly the 19th century Prussian art that emphasised strength, authority, and militarism. Such a rejection of representational 'realism' cultivated the extreme opposite of the expressionistic, stylised, and heavily exaggerated aesthetic of German Expressionism which sought to bring the internal subjective reality to the surface, this externalised often in the mise-en-scene as established in 'The Cabinet of Dr Caligari', the jagged and extreme perspectives in painted shadows and forms encoding extreme mental states like fear and madness, in combination with theatrically stylised performances. It can be argued an extreme mental state occurs with every character in Metropolis, notably the Proppian villain Rotwang, the Vogler archetypal mad-scientist. For example, in his capturing of the Proppian Princess Maria, kinetic camera movement, as pioneered in the earlier German Expressionist horror 'Nosferatu', in tracking Maria up a flight of stairs provides a subjective perspective and parallel to her fear exhibited in her facial and gestural expressions, notably a repeatedly stylised clutching of her body and flaying arms, expressionistically shown in chiaroscuro shadows. The thematic conflict between the natural and technological is visualised in a close-up of Rotwang's mechanical hand extinguishing Maria's candle and as he pursues her with a torch, an encoded instance of Rotwang's extreme obsession, control, and the dangerous power of technological advancement: this is juxtaposed to the gothic tropes  such a helpless female victim, her holy purity represented in the candle, and the drawn out suspenseful atmosphere in the low-key lighting, Rotwang's spotlight an intrusive and claustrophobic cruelty. Freder similarly experiences an extreme mental state of madness, though this is externalised in hand-drawn special effects and rapid editing in a montage marking the 'ordeal' of his Vogler Hero's Journey. As he perceives Maria alongside his villainous father, a series of shots present his growing mania: close ups of his heightened confusion turn into whirling double-exposed shots of death, Rotwang, and the man-machine Maria, with flashes of light timed with the non-diegetic crescendo, Freder expressionistically falling against a black screen connoting a descent into the depths of his mind. The man machine is motifed far more than anything else in this montage perhaps symbolically representing the film's themes of technology/machinery overtaking society; the robot's cemented presence dominating Freder's mind. Such aesthetically expressionistic sequences provoke an active and theatrical engagement with extreme mental states.

Though German Expressionism was emerging before the Great War, its consequences led leaders of the Weimar Republic to encourage a spiritual and cultural regeneration to establish a foundation for Germany's 'return to greatness', and religious spiritualties became the fashionable concern in Europe, this influence on German cinema harnessing allegorical, religious, and paganist/occult beliefs to generate the expressionistic worlds. Metropolis encodes heavy religious symbolism and allegory in Barthes semantic, cultural, and symbolic codes to shape its narrative which becomes increasingly prominent in the second half of the film, most significantly the need for the Messianic hero Freder, revealed as he attends Maria's preaching in the catacombs, a symbolic light passing over his face and the eventual saviour of Metropolis; the Virgin Mary Maria, represented as a religious preacher in the catacombs foregrounded to an expressionistic set of Christian crosses and candles, this juxtaposed to the man-machine 'Whore of Babylon' who stands upon the sins of lust and envy as it dances provocatively in the 'Yoshiwara' show, framed mostly from low-angles to construct villainy, its existence as a satanic robot, constructed under the inverted pentagram by Rotwang, in opposition with natural creation; and Metropolis' head as the 'New Tower of Babel', situated at the centre of Metropolis, its architectural crown a metaphorical allusion to Christs' crown of thorns, suggesting the power wielded by Fredersen has been achieved through the suffering and sacrifice of the underground workers. Such symbolic codes emphasise religious, psychological, and spiritual ideas as a core underlying necessity for expressionistic cinema similarly echoed in Metropolis’ contemporaries, these ideas interspersed with socio-political and cultural commentary relating to the contexts of Weimar Germany and Europe at large.