Prime cut

The recent restoration of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is now available for home viewing in three plush editions, in Eureka’s Masters of Cinema DVD series.

The recent restoration of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is now available for home viewing in three plush editions, in Eureka’s Masters of Cinema DVD series. Metropolis is the foundation of all subsequent science-fiction films. It is a movie of incalculable influence that deserves to be seen by all — and the chief attractions of this version are 25 minutes of footage unseen for 80 years, and long believed lost, as well as a recording of the original score.
Premiered the year The Jazz Singer’s sound changed cinema, Metropolis was a peak of both silent film and German Expressionism. (It would be over 40 years until there was a sci-fi film in sound, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which equalled its accomplishment.) Lang’s imagery, which still overwhelms the eyes and the imagination, has rarely been surpassed. The great achievement of this restoration is that it removes from his story many of what the critic Pauline Kael called the ‘startling ineptitudes’ that were (we see now) inflicted by the deplorable re-editing of the film soon after its creation.
Barring a second miraculous discovery of previously unfindable footage (to replace the few intertitles that describe still-lost scenes), this is likely to remain the definitive cut. And, it confirms Lang as a giant on whose shoulders talents as awesome as Kubrick, Godard, Ridley Scott, James Whale and even Chaplin have stood.

Metropolis is available in three formats: DVD, Blu-Ray and a limited edition of the DVD and the Blu-Ray.