Lecture 002

Metropolis

Germany, between WWI and WWII.

• openly progressive time

• great science fiction film

• lost a few generations (silent film not valuable)

• edited down for shorter length

• film re-discovered in picture

In 2-3 paragraphs, choose one of the thru-lines mentioned in the syllabus, and discuss how its future is manifested in the film:

• Land And Food Sovereignty

  • Heat Machine: govern entire worker city (flood: biblical reference)
  • French Revolution
  • Underground worker city provide electricity for upper city

• Climate Change

• Future of Work/Automation

  • workers are slaves, like jailed criminals
  • workers operate machines, and dies because of it
  • there are clear separation of the upperclass from the working class
  • working class: hand
  • leader: head
  • we need a heart to link them
  • workers are mindless, only know how to follow the crowd

• Future of Social Interaction

  • higher education is prestige

• Space Travel/Alien Contact

  • aliens are pictured with big head and enslaves human

• Body Autonomy (gender, post-human)

  • "holy mother energy radiating from this lady huh, first with the kids and now with church stuff"
  • woman worker at last
  • woman Frankenstein
  • woman led revolution
  • blame woman witch - typical

• Nature/PostNature (ecology, biotechnology, multi-species ethnography)

• Cultural Narratives (AKA Myths)

• City

  • tall buildings
  • transmitters on bridges accross buildings
  • airplanes everywhere
  • buildings are bold

The film presents an interesting dive into the future of work and automation imagined by the author of the film. In this dystopian world, automation is mostly mechanical instead of electrical. Extensive labor is put into operating machines by adjusting the gears in a physical way. This might be the result of failure to imagine things that are not familiar to the author in that time period. Similar to the idea of steampunk, people are good at taking existing concepts and making it to the extreme while not good at predicting something that operates in a drastically different way.

In Discord, we have discussed how this film objectifies women by adding all "duties" onto one character, which is reasonable since the author probably was unaware of this issue, but clearly not justifiable. To give us more food for thought, I want to directly point out another issue which is the main subject that this movie concerns.

The class structure in the film is not that different from that time period since it is the subject of the film in concern. It borrows many Marxism ideas to separate populations into the invisible, under-the-ground working-class proletarians (the "Hands") and ruling-class Bourgeoisie (the "Heads"). The movie mainly highlights the harm of protesting and advocating for a peaceful resolution between the proletarians and the Bourgeoisie. The movie also plants in the implicit assumption that the proletarians lack the ability to think before acting. The entire revolution in the movie is about following what other people (and the protagonist) are doing while the revolutionaries don't have a clear idea why they are acting. This can be seen quite literally when they start to call the protagonist a witch and totally ignore how their children are suffering from the flood they cause. The analogy of "Hands" and "Heads" build up an implicit dependency: the "Hands" cannot work without "Heads" and therefore should be ruled by "Heads". This movie, with its ideology, advocates and consolidates the regime of the German government.

jodhpurs/Josaphat = Joh Freder's son

Freder: touchy boy Joe Frederson: the boss

Gort: big bread guy?

G-Bank

Rotwang: the inventor, live in Metropolis, the wired house (mom Hel died, not really, robot mom)

• dad: created robot mom, lost hand, "no one could tell robot from man"

• the woman is mine, son is yours