Complete print of Metropolis found

[Kelly Goden]

in Argentina of all places.

http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/stor...288990,00.html

[Claude Mangold]

Fantastic news, thanks, Kelly.
Metropolis is an important reference for my own work so this is totally important to me.

[Kelly Goden]

Really curious to see how they restore it.

Film archaeology is interesting. They once found a print of a long lost Joan of Arc movie in the janitor closet of a Norwegian psychiatric institution.

Who knows what else is out there and where.

[Martin Catt]

Metropolis exists in varying cuts and edits, depending on the market for where the movie was to be shown. My understanding is the original US release print lost almost a third of the footage from the German release. Argentina had a large German immigrant population, so they got the German print.

The Argentina print -- if nothing else -- will serve as a guide as to where to put the odd pieces of film that have been discovered over the years. Some of the stills I've seen from the Argentina print looked pretty degraded. For sections that exist only in the Argentina print, hopefully funding can be found to do a substantial restoration, frame by frame. With every successive restored version I've seen, I get more and more impressed with Lang's work. The last restoration with the original orchestral sound track easily holds its own against any modern work.

Martin

[Lori Starfelt]

Originally Posted by Kelly Goden

Film archaeology is interesting. They once found a print of a long lost Joan of Arc movie in the janitor closet of a Norwegian psychiatric institution.

Who knows what else is out there and where.

I was cleaning out the closets at my church in Studio City a few years ago, and found about 20 16mm episodes of Mr. Ed. It may not be Metropolis, still.....

[Stefan Immler]

Originally Posted by Martin Catt

My understanding is the original US release print lost almost a third of the footage from the German release. Argentina had a large German immigrant population, so they got the German print.

What I read in German and Argentinian articles is different. The print found in Buenos Aires had nothing to do with German immigrants and predates the official release of the movie by more than a year. It's a copy of Fritz Lang's original cut that was shown on Buenos Aires during a test screening. The US and German prints that were released later were identical, but dramatically different from the original cut Fritz Lang made.