Film Futurist

Frame grab from Metropolis, 1927

I recently saw Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis – a masterwork of the German Expressionist period summarized here by Kino Video after its recent full-length re-release: ”Metropolis takes place in 2026, when the populace is divided between workers who must live in the dark underground and the rich who enjoy a futuristic city of splendor. The tense balance of these two societies is realized through images that are among the most famous of the 20th century, many of which presage such sci-fi landmarks as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner. Lavish and spectacular, with elaborate sets and modern science fiction style, Metropolis stands today as the crowning achievement of the German silent cinema.

Metropolis was a work of enviable imagination when it was created, something likely lost on contemporary viewers when watching the lengthy, silent flickering black and white spectacle.  But at its heart are haunting questions of power and modernity, labor and class, slavery and morality and of course, in the grand tradition of cinema – love.

It takes some patience to view in an age where we are bombarded with sights and sounds in 5.1 surround with grand pyrotechnic theatrics and the like. But I found myself mesmerized by not only the artful renderings of a future urban dystopic world, but by some of the most powerful images in the history of cinema. This image of the man grasping the hands of the gigantic clock that looms above the gulag type factory where workers toil below has to be one of the most brilliantly symbolic images of any science fiction film ever made.

Iconic clock image from Metropolis, 1927

This had been on my mind for weeks when suddenly through a twitter post by Maria Popova (@brainpicker) I discovered a very interesting parallel in the modern world. A few months ago, a series of photographs entitled Dubai, Transmutations had come into the media-sphere and somehow made its way through the cultural curations of the twitterati. The work of French photographer Martin Becka, these photographs brought my mind’s eye right back to Metropolis.

Using a 150 year old camera, Becka photographs Dubai in its current state: the once-bourgeoning city of the future as it were, languishing slowly in a concrete desert. Once fueled by the spoils of oil-rich empires and now suddenly empty of the hope and promise of a perfect metropolis. In the background of these images, construction cranes hover; not so much as objects of change and transformation but instead as gigantic relics of an unfinished world.

It’s unclear to me whether the photographer intended to make the connection between the film and his images or not – but either way, I thought it an interesting musing for the end of one decade and the beginning of another.

Cityscapes of Dubai, 2009

Here’s an excerpt from the exhibit:

The images of the thousands of building sites of Dubai’s metamorphosis have been captured with a wooden photographic tool of a very large format on negative waxed papers, using a process invented approximately 160 years ago by Gustave Le Gray. These photographs were then printed on albumin paper and toned with gold. Since its invention, when photography was still an expensive, elaborate and experimental pursuit for the happy few to the present day with its democratic ubiquity of camera phones, photography has remained the main technology through which we both understand and record the world.

You can see additional images from the exhibition on the The Empty Quarter gallery website, as well as more information on the technique.