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As modern as Bauhaus yet as ancient as Zhuangzi, who warned of machine worries and machine hearts. Opposite worlds above and below linked by a mirror, the monumental vertical structure demanded by Fritz Lang's Mecha-Babylon. Proletarian hordes trudge in the depths while the aristocracy romps in elevated pleasure gardens, the prophetess (Brigitte Helm) foresees a Mediator and catches the eye of the princeling (Gustav Fröhlich). (Sneaking out of his dome, he's promptly faced with a steam-powered Moloch gulping down workers.) In the the middle of this vast refinery is a hut out of the Brothers Grimm, in it toils the inventor (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) with metallic arm and vengeful obsession. "Isn't it worth the loss of a hand to have created the man of the future?" His ultimate invention updates Leonardo's robot, adorned with the blonde evangelist's visage as part of a plan by the reigning technocrat (Alfred Abel). Out of the laboratory (with consequences for Frankenstein) and into the nightclub for the herky-jerky odalisque, from Marinetti's Poupées Électriques all the way to Fellini's Casanova. "For her, all seven deadly sins!" A colossal pulp fantasia in three accelerating movements, Lang's allegory of allegories posits humanity's progress as a collision not just of labor and management but of technology and sorcery. Meticulous constructions carry the frenzy, all of the visual arts summoned and piled high for a fractured Tower of Babel, a panorama of pistons and gears with the camera as the most ferocious mechanism of all. Modern Times and Blade Runner, Things to Come and RoboCop, the countless inheritors of the superproduktion that broke Ufa's bank and incidentally drew up the blueprint for the Third Reich. Wells ("the silliest of films") and Buñuel ("the most marvelous book of images ever composed") have their verdicts, meanwhile the skeleton cackles from the bonfire and the Reaper's scythe slashes the screen itself. Cinematography by Karl Freund and Günther Rittau. With Fritz Rasp, Theodor Loos, Erwin Biswanger, and Heinrich George. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |