Lang lost reels bring seminal sci-fi to life

The discovery of three cans of film from Metropolis is a reminder that it set the shape of films to come, says Jim Gilchrist

CLASS war, Art Deco robot, towering cityscapes whirring with clunky airborne traffic ... it can only be Metropolis, Fritz Lang's pioneering science-fiction epic which, almost 80 years ago, gave cinema audiences a spectacular taste of films to come, from Flash Gordon to Blade Runner.

Released in 1927, the film's vision of an industrial dystopia, in which a dehumanised underclass toils to maintain a city and its intelligentsia, set the template for a multitude of sci-fi films, from the gleaming alloy curves of its female android and her mad-scientist creator to its urban canyons swarming with flying vehicles.

The silent classic made headlines this week when it was announced that three reels of long-lost 16mm footage had been unearthed in a film museum in Argentina – a find which film historians have described as sensational.

One of the most expensive films of its day, Metropolis flopped at the box office and was heavily cut in an attempt to make it more commercial. Last week Helmut Possman, director of the Friedrich-Wilhelm Murnau foundation, which specialises in film preservation and holds the rights to the film, described himself as "overjoyed" at the news.

"This find is incredibly important," agrees Nick Wrigley, DVD production director for Eureka Entertainment's Masters of Cinema DVD series, which plans to release the lengthened version of Metropolis once restoration is complete. "It explains a great deal of background story, fleshing out a number of the characters, and allows us to see for the first time Fritz Lang's original vision, his editing rhythms, his mise-en-scène ... which have only previously been hinted at in tantalising production stills."

The film's spectacular cityscapes were inspired by the German director's visit to Manhattan, where he saw what he later described as "buildings like a vertical curtain, opalescent, and very light". Today some of his miniature skytrains and biplanes whirring through these urban canyons may look jerky, but their influence can be seen as early as some of the scenes in Alexander Korda's Things to Come, released just nine years later, while tackier versions wobble their way through the 1950s Flash Gordon TV series.

More recently, look at the brazen-skied towerscapes of Blade Runner, or the Babel-like monoliths of Batman's Gotham City as recreated by Tim Burton; or even the 23rd-century New York through which Bruce Willis and Milla Jovovich career in Luc Besson's crazy but stylish The Fifth Element – same urban canyons, same assumption that, not content with smashing each other to smithereens on the roads, in the future we'll be doing so in the air as well.

But it wasn't just the backdrops of Metropolis that set the shape of films to come. Its android analogue of the film's union-leader heroine, Maria (Brigitte Helm played both roles), was the first of generations of movie robots, from Gort, who emerges from his flying saucer in 1951's The Day the Earth Stood Still, to Star Wars' plummy C-3PO and the relentlessly marching androids that assail Will Smith in I Robot. And Lang's wild-haired Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) helped cast the die for cackling legions of mad scientists.

Wrigley agrees on the film's legacy: "Metropolis wasn't the first science-fiction film, but it was the first made on such a massive scale. It's the incredible production design, special effects by Eugen Schüfftan, and the sheer scale and ambition of Lang's Metropolis project which, I believe, has been its major influence on future films.

"One could claim that Blade Runner production design was influenced by it, and perhaps C-3PO from Star Wars, too, but films like The Fifth Element were probably more influenced by Blade Runner – it's all osmosis and mostly speculation. However, Lang's ambition and vision probably did influence Stanley Kubrick when he made 2001: A Space Odyssey."

While the original score, composed by Gottfried Huppertz for theatre orchestras accompanying the silent film, has been re-recorded since, Metropolis has suffered numerous musical impositions in its various video and DVD re-releases, including pop contributions from the likes of Jon Anderson and Freddie Mercury – much to the disgust of film purists. Also, the electro-pop group Kraftwerk and heavy rockers Motorhead have both recorded tracks called Metropolis, inspired by a film which may have been a box office flop in 1927 but has since attained such classic status that it was the first film to be entered in Unesco's Memory of the World Register of globally significant cultural achievements.