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December 1931: Pathéscope
Just stumbled upon this by accident.
In December 1931, a British company called Pathéscope Ltd issued a five-reel condensation of Metropolis in 9.5mm.
As a matter of fact, there is a whole web page devoted to this.
Take a look: Grahame L. Newnham,
“Metropolis,”
Grahame N’s Web Pages, 18 March 2018.
He mentions that in January 2018 there was a showing in Pimlico of a tinted 9.5mm print!!!!!
As of 1936, Metropolis was no longer in the Pathéscope catalogue.
That means the film was available probably from December 1931 through December 1935, four years.
Those who failed to purchase it during that four-year stretch, well, they missed out.
There is a copy on YouTube,
and it was nicely scanned, so the focus and contrast and detail are remarkably good.
Unfortunately, someone ran the result through a consumer-grade stabilizer,
and those contraptions just don’t work.
So the image zooms in and out and in and out and it rocks and wobbles and it’s so bloody darned annoying.
Nonetheless, the video is definitely worth a watch.
We can see, by checking it against the
side-by-side comparison,
that the Pathéscope edition derives from the German source.
Steve the 95collector, 9.5mm Silent Film - SB745 Metropolis 1927 - 5 Reel Fritz Lang,
posted on Mar 11, 2023
If YouTube ever disappears this, download it.
Here are some
frame grabs directly off of the 9.5mm print,
revealing the sprocket holes which were on the framelines and which cut into the top and bottom of the image.
Here are some
collectors chatting about this edition of the movie.
Someone won a print at
auction for a mere UK£30, though it was not in the original boxes.
Here’s a January 1941
review by H.A.V. Bulleid
The Pathéscope 9.5mm edition runs one hour and twenty-three seconds at 15fps.
The equivalent length in 35mm would be about 3,397',
which would be a few seconds shy of 38 minutes at the standard projection speed of 24fps.
When the story is so radically condensed, it loses all its flavor and atmosphere.
To my surprise, though, the skeleton of the story is mostly still there.
At first, I was startled by a few of the images, because I didn’t recall them.
I am most familiar with the Eckart Jahnke restoration from 1972
and with the 2010 restoration.
That is why I was a bit stunned by some of the images in the 1931 Pathéscope edition.
They were a bit different from the 1972 and 2010 editions.
One of the most interesting differences is easy to illustrate with a mere two frame grabs.
On the left is a frame grab from the Pathéscope 9.5mm edition,
and on the right is the closest equivalent from the 2010 restoration.
The moment on the left was accidentally omitted from the 2010 restoration:
 Pathéscope 9.5mm from 1931 |
 F.W. Murnau Stiftung restoration from 2010 |
Both the above frame grabs come from the German edition, yet you will never find that first one in the German edition.
The frame on the left was deleted from the German edition sometime after November 1931 and before August 1936.
That was not all.
Compare the Pathéscope edition with the current restoration,
and you will see a few brief moments in Pathéscope that never made their way into the latest restoration.
This shot was not included in the Eckart Jahnke restoration from 1972, as Jahnke had no access to it.
(We’ll get to that below.)
When we watch the Eckart Jahnke restoration, we can see the splices where the above moments belonged.
We can see lots and lots of splices, really,
each indicating that something important had been removed in decades past.
The above two images were deleted from the Paramount edition in August 1927.
Actually, the whole scene was deleted.
It was also deleted from the Australian edition.
I assume that once Paramount got into some censorship trouble over this scene,
the staffers probably cabled the foreign distributors to recommend that they remove the scene as well.
When the restorationists worked so diligently on the 2001 and 2010 restorations,
they examined the MoMA edition, the Paramount edition, the Australian edition, the New Zealand edition,
the Associated British edition, and the Moroder edition, and they checked their work against the Eckart Jahnke edition,
but they all forgot to look at the Pathéscope 9.5mm edition!
Well, there will be a next time,
because there will be more discoveries, I am certain.
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ASIDE: It seems that Fritz had a nice side, too.
According to Talbot Lake,
“German Refugee Battles Nazis with Films,”
Tulare Daily Advance-Register, Saturday, 28 June 1941, p. 7:
“Today he is a great friend of the Navajos. They
even let him take color movies of
their sacred sand paintings....
Lang is unmarried and about 50 years old. He has a pleasing and
ingratiating personality and many varied interests....”
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