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FRITZ LANG'S HAUNTING PRESCIENCE

"There can be no understanding between the hand and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator," declares Maria to her underground followers in "Metropolis". When Fritz Lang's apocalyptic silent film premiered in Berlin in 1927, it was the most expensive German film ever made. It was also a commercial and critical flop. Paramount Pictures swiftly acquired the film, trimming its length and simplifying its plot to appeal to an American market. It didn't work: the film bombed in America, too, and the original cut was presumed to be lost forever.

In the meantime, Lang's stylish vision of a grim future has become a cult relic, fascinating cineastes and inspiring directors such as Ridley Scott and Stanley Kubrick. Now, over 80 years later, the film recently enjoyed another world premiere, again in Berlin—this time as the director's cut.

Set in the year of 2026, "Metropolis" features lowly, expendable labourers toiling in polluted darkness to support the wealthy few. Lang's imagery is bizarre and haunting, full of grinding machinery, a mad scientist and a fembot villain. It also boasts a plot full of weird gaps and confusing transitions. In 2008 a previously unknown copy of "Metropolis" was found in a museum archive in Buenos Aires, complete with missing scenes. This "sensational discovery", according to Rainer Rother, the head of the Berlin film museum Deutsche Kinematik, has filled in some of the more mystifying parts of the story. Smaller characters are fleshed out; bigger characters are better motivated.

After a comprehensive digital restoration by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau Foundation, the film opened the 60th Berlinale in February, accompanied by the Berlin Rundfunk Symphony Orchestra performing Gottfried Huppertz's original score. This new 147-minute cut, 20-minutes longer than the previous version (though six minutes shy of the original), was received with standing ovations by both gala ticket-buyers and the thousands who attended an open-air screening at the Brandenburg Gate (despite freezing temperatures).

"For the first time I feel the tempo and the rhythm of the music are absolutely synchronous with the events on the screen," said Frank Strobel, the orchestra conductor, at a press conference.

The stunning pictures, excellent camera work and dramatic orchestral music gave me the heebie-jeebies. Even more eerie, however, was Lang's vision of a heartless, remote, capitalistic monopoly, which feels as prescient now as it was then.

Fritz Lang's restored "Metropolis" will screen as part of the TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood, California in April

~ CORNELIA RUDAT