Doesn’t that headline sound like a meta version of an Indiana Jones movie? Maybe Spielberg and company woulda had more luck if they made Dr. Jones head to Kasikstan to look for the missing reels in Orson Welles’ “The Magnificent Ambersons.”
Oh well. Anyhow, to our above point. One of cinema’s holy grails has been found. The missing reels from Fritz Lang’s legendary, silent science fiction masterpiece, “Metropolis” – the most expensive movie ever made at the time in 1927 – have been discovered in Argentina according to German weekly newspaper Die Zeit (the Argentines were Nazi sympathizers, there’s the connection! Speilberg you TOTALLY missed the boat here).
“The film’s original rhythm will be re-established,” Martin Koerber, the man responsible for the current restoration of the proto-sci-fi film that also leaned heavily on German Expressionism, modernism and art deco, told the German paper.
Zeit writes, via GreenCine, “The most important silent film in German history can, from this day forward, be considered rediscovered.” However, this longer discovery, found in the Museo Del Cine in Buenos Aires, is accoring to Zeit and GreenCine, “not have the absolute, complete version; [Rainer Rother, director of the Deutsche Kinemathek ] estimates that what’s been rediscovered represents around 85 percent of what had been considered lost for good.”
Of course, now we have to play Queen’s “Radio Ga Ga,” the video of which was famously cut to some footage of “Metropolis.” Who knew Freddie Mercury was such a cinephile? [some links found via Spout]
Scene: “Metropolis”
