Metropolis (1927)

" There can be no understanding between the hands and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator."

Director: Fritz Lang

Metropolis was startling, poignant, and in every minute perfectly entertaining. The missing scenes were sorely missed, but the summary cards were fine and within minutes of sitting down to write this I came across this article --> http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/jul/03/news.culture3
So there you go.

If anything the film was really just a pooling together of all the conflicts, allusions, and general themes I've been really into recently. Science-fiction, dystopian society, strong juxtaposition, time, pursuit of love, religion, class struggles and the silly habits of the wealthy (straight from watching "The Discreet Charms of the Bourgeoisie" a few months back)...you get the idea. Between the Eternal Gardens, the tower of Babel, and Moloch (finally incentive to look it up, something I'd been meaning to do since I first read Howl) within the first twenty minutes or so, the strong religious undertones were obvious. Until the introduction of Maria, I was even working on the hunch that the protagonist, Freder, was going to follow a Siddhartha-style path toward realization (athough I was unsure about how much eastern religion was floating around the Weimar Republic c. 1927).
Sheltered from the real world by his noble father, the prince Siddhartha lived a golden, pristine life until a series of discoveries (the existence of disease, senility, and death) prompted him to escape from the palace. Having realized collective human suffering, Siddhartha sought a real escape from it rather than the intricate fallacies that his family had built for him. I thought the same idea would work for Freder, fleeing the Eternal Gardens and his father (after Maria shows him the workers' children) and submerging himself in the Worker's City until he found some sort of reinvented urban Enlightenment. I suppose it sort of worked that way.

Freder was charming and foppish in all the right ways, growing into the warm, kind-hearted hero he was always meant to be with the modesty and masculine grace every protagonist deserves. Brigitte Helm as Maria and the Maschinenmensch was by far my favorite though. She was brilliant. I'm always instantly charmed by the body-rooted acting of the silents, but she was really something else.