Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Special Effects and the Techno-Romantic Paradigm
- 1 Imagining Technological Art: Early German Film Theory
- 2 Modern Magicians: Guido Seeber and Eugen Schüfftan
- 3 The Uncanny Mirror: Der Student von Prag (1913)
- 4 Visualizing the Occult: Nosferatu (1922)
- 5 The Technological Sublime: Metropolis (1927)
- 6 “German Technique” and Hollywood
- Conclusion: Techno-Romantic Cinema from the Silent to the Digital Era
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - The Technological Sublime: Metropolis (1927)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Special Effects and the Techno-Romantic Paradigm
- 1 Imagining Technological Art: Early German Film Theory
- 2 Modern Magicians: Guido Seeber and Eugen Schüfftan
- 3 The Uncanny Mirror: Der Student von Prag (1913)
- 4 Visualizing the Occult: Nosferatu (1922)
- 5 The Technological Sublime: Metropolis (1927)
- 6 “German Technique” and Hollywood
- Conclusion: Techno-Romantic Cinema from the Silent to the Digital Era
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Abstract
Metropolis displays a deeply conflicting attitude toward industrial modernity. Conceived and marketed as a marvel of film technology, the film pursued the techno-romantic project of transcending material reality through technological means. What is more, the goal was to capture the unfathomability of technology itself. Metropolis simultaneously portrays technology as an agent of tyranny and dehumanization and flaunts it as spectacle. Special effects facilitate encounters with overpowering technological environments and omnipotent machines, which give rise to sentiments that are best described in terms of a “technological sublime.” The sublime characterizes experiences that go beyond the earthly and finite, to attain a spiritual dimension. In attributing transcendent qualities to mechanical objects, the technological sublime embodies the technoromantic paradigm.
Keywords: sublime, robot, science fiction, Schüfftan process, multiple exposure composites
Metropolis (Ufa, 1927, dir. Fritz Lang) exhibits an ambivalent, even paradoxical stance towards industrial modernity, which over the past century has profoundly resonated with audiences. The film's look has shaped science fiction films, music videos, video games, comics, and graphic novels. Its influence can be seen in the work of filmmakers and pop culture luminaries from Tim Burton and Ridley Scott to George Lucas and Denis Villeneuve, from Osamu Tezuka and Freddie Mercury to Beyoncé and Lady Gaga. Indeed, Metropolis has fashioned the way we imagine the future.
Set in a repressive urban dystopia that collapses following a humancaused disaster, Metropolis articulates fundamental fears about industrial modernity. The film paints a picture of the future in which nurturing natural environments have disappeared and technology permeates all aspects of life. As people have become enslaved by god-like machines, the fusion of human and apparatus seems inevitable. Despite these horrific premonitions, however, Metropolis is far from taking a purely technophobic stance as it flaunts technology's splendour, magnetism, and visionary power. By confronting the audience with monstrous machines and hostile high-tech environments of hypnotic grandeur, Metropolis simultaneously characterizes the future as astonishing and dreadful. This apparent contradiction can be best understood in terms of a “technological sublime.” The concept builds on theories by eighteenth-century philosophers like Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Schiller, who conceived of objects that exceed our sensory capacities and result in conflicting emotions of pleasure and pain as “sublime.”
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- Information
- Special Effects and German Silent FilmTechno-Romantic Cinema, pp. 185 - 226Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2021