"Someone must stay with the machine" » Mika Meskanen

Babylon Kino hosts a series of silent film screenings. I went to see the latest, restaured version of Metropolis accompanied by Carsten-Stephan Graf von Bothmer with a grand piano. The film was shot mid 20's at the famous Babelsberg studios, now a museum in Potsdam I've yet to visit. Somehow the film got cut up and dispersed into different versions around the world, none containing the structure and all the material meant by its director Fritz Lang. Only recently a restauration effort took place and with the newfound camera negatives and the original score could the F.W. Murnau Foundation construct as accurate a version as possible. However, one fourth of the film is still missing and considered lost forever. These parts are substituted with descriptive text plates. In this particual screening disruptive fire and smoke effects augmented the most intensive scenes. They weren't maybe quite in balance with the whole, but nevertheless accounted for an interesting experimentation with the stiff cinema code.