Pay please! Metropolis: 43 years between public domain and copyright

96 years ago today, the silent film Metropolis celebrated its premiere in Berlin. It is considered the most influential science fiction film of all time. Films like Blade Runner and robots like C-3PO in Star Wars refer to him directly, and he is quoted in excerpts in Queen and Madonna music videos. The Berlin audience, however, was not very enthusiastic about the performance. The original version was canceled in May 1927 and replaced by a version shortened by 30 minutes.

The film produced by the German-American company Parufamet fared even worse in the USA. There, in 1926, playwright Channing Pollock began mutilating the film. Ironically, there is now good news from the USA: Metropolis has been in the public domain there since January 1, 2023 and is therefore ready to inspire many artists again. He was able to do that once before – for 43 years – between 1953 and 1996.

Metropolis was formed by the merger perfume registered in the USA in 1925 when the dimensions of the mega project became clear. American copyright law at the time provided for a protection period of 28 years. When this period ended in 1953, director Fritz Lang, who had emigrated to the USA in 1933, refused to extend the protection because the mutilation was no longer his film. Thus, Metropolis was in the public domain until January 1, 1996, when the US joined the international Uruguay Round Agreements Act that required retrospective copyright protection.

Strict copyright conditions in this country

The USA had previously joined the Berne Copyright Convention of 1989, but this did not require retrospective grandfathering. For 43 years, artists were able to use the Metropolis fund and set important impulses. This is now possible again, of course except for Germany: according to our copyright law, Metropolis is protected until the year 2047. But that’s not all: Within Metropolis there is a special art protection for the figure of the robot woman Eva, created by the costume designer and sculptor Walter Schulze-Middendorf was created. Another detail of the tricky copyright story is provided by the accompanying music, which, like the subtitles of a silent film, is subject to its own copyright claims.

At the beginning of the 1980s, the composer Giorgio Moroder and the musician David Bowie fought a hard bidding war for the music performance rights to Metropolis at the Munich Murnau Foundation, in which Moroder prevailed. In return, the high sum included the costs for a restored Metropolis version, which represented the status of the snipped film as the “Munich Version from 1987” up to 2001. Moroder’s version, with its musical accompaniment, was shown as a monumental video clip at the Cannes Film Festival in 1984 and, with songs by contemporary superstars such as Adam Ant, Freddy Mercury, Bonnie Taylor and Pat Benetar, ensured that Metropolis became a pop culture cult film. With the technically again improved version of 2001, Metropolis even became part of the World Document Heritage of UNESCO.

Visionary megacity in the conflict between rich and poor

Metropolis is set in the year 2026. An upper class lives in a megacity in the lap of luxury in “Eternal Gardens” and in an entertainment district. The lower-class workers are pale, gaunt beings who work beneath the surface to maintain the machinery that supplies the entire city. The city belongs to a Joh. Fredersen and he lives in a Tower of Babel from which everything can be monitored. Technologically, the film shows the real-time electronic transmission of data from the machinery into the tower, access control through sensor-controlled doors and video conferences that Fredersen has with the powerful foremen. But there are no computers. In 1927, the Austrian-American artist Frank Rudolph Paul illustrated what a thinking machine might look like:

There is no contact between the upper class and the workers. That changes the moment Fredersen’s son, Freder, meets Maria, who accidentally drops by the gardens with a bunch of kids. While Freder searches for the magical apparition, Rotwang, a mad scientist (who helped develop Metropolis’ machinery), sets out to create a robot named Maria. She should equal his dream wife Hel, who changed sides, gave birth to Joh. Fredersen’s son Freder and then died. Said Freder now briefly experiences the working-class existence, sometimes confusing the Marias, because the robot (!) calls for rebellion against the machines until everything comes to a good end. Those at the top and the bottom are finally reconciled, true to the motto that is displayed: “The heart must be the mediator between the brain and the hands.” The left film critic Siegfried Kracauer etched that this could also have been a saying by Goebbels.

In fact, Lang’s then-wife Thea von Harbou stayed in Germany as the screenwriter of Metropolis, while the Jew Fritz Lang emigrated to the United States. She joined the NSDAP and wrote a series of propaganda screenplays for Veit Harlan.

Technically a masterpiece

Technically, the film was a pioneering act, starting with the huge hall that was purpose-built for it, today Marlene Dietrich Halle called. All scenes were recorded simultaneously by three cameras for the three film companies involved. Around 580 kilometers of film came together in this way, but to this day it has never been possible to put it together to what the producers and especially the meticulously working director Fritz Lang had in mind. The last long version is based on a copy that was only found in Argentina in 2008.

A stop-motion film sequence of around ten seconds of the car traffic of the future in 2026 required a production time of one week. The mirror trick process used in the film was immediately used by Alfred Hitchcock in his film “Blackmail”, an extraordinary mixture of silent film and talkie. With the end of copyright, contemporary artists are expected to take a fresh look at the subject.

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