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2001: The Munich Reconstruction
As mentioned above, it was in 1979 that Enno Patalas of the Münchener Filmmuseum began a reconstruction.
Through a series of marvelous coincidences, the Bundesarchiv had acquired the Paramount negative from Staatliches Filmarchiv.
This was the short version, about 7,667',
and one of the reels was a dupe negative, for whatever reason.
That was nice, but there was something better: The collection included the trims!
What trims?
Most certainly the trims from the 8,039' edition of early March 1927.
See Minden/Bachmann, pp. 119–120 .
Welllllllllll... yes, but there was more.
According to Enno Patalas in Metropolis in/aus Trümmern (Berlin: Dieter Bertz Verlag, 2001), p. 11,
the trims consisted of deletions from Channing Pollock’s (unreleased) 12-reel edition!!!!!!!
That means that the Pollock edition still does exist after all — or at least most of it does!
The Pollock version is an offense, but few if any people suspected that it still existed.
Patalas needed the trims to fill in the missing pieces of the puzzle,
and the result saw the light of day on 25 October 1988.
To my surprise, this 1988 “Munich Edition” was issued to cinemas in 1994 and on
DVD
in 1999 by Galeshka Moravioff’s company, Films sans Frontières in France,
with a piano score by
Moravioff himself.
That makes me wonder:
Why did Paramount hold onto the trims from Channing’s 12-reel edition?
Was there a nagging doubt that maybe it might need to be shown someday?
A nagging thought that Publix might someday soon change its mind?
If Paramount held onto the trims from 12-reel edition,
then why did it not hold onto the trims from the 16-reel edition?
Was that just bureaucratic goofiness, contradictory supervisors barking out contradictory mindless orders
just because they liked to bark out orders, without even understanding what those orders meant?
It was known that Gottfried Huppertz had written the original orchestral score, and then the revised piano score.
That was not a secret, and it was not forgotten.
Heinrich Riethmüller used Huppertz’s piano score as a basis for his own in 1963.
Then we find this curious comment by
@dcdad556 underneath a video by
Terry Talks Movies entitled
METROPOLIS (1927) Science Fiction As Revolution.
Witness:
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Terry, you can vet or debunk this. Returned to my native Wash., DC from L.A.
after careers at two top major film studios and in film/TV production in the early 2000s.
At that time, The Kennedy Center had a week of movies (musicals and science fiction)
where maestro John Williams conducted the National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) to accompany the movies,
like an organist, silent film style, in real time.
HE claimed, HE had researched who might have been the contemporary composer
to come up with the original score for Metropolis.
WILLIAMS said, contemporary newspapers made mention of Gottfried Huppertz.
Williams plugged in some pieces and discovered Huppertz compositions
timed out nicely into many scenes of Lang’s Metropolis.
Eureka! Williams conducted that night with the help of a
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The Murnau-Stiftung hired
Martin Koerber to do further work, this time digitally.
How much this differed from the “Munich Version,” I do not know.
The image quality was certainly superior in this new edition.
The première was in
2001.
As with the “Munich Version,” this new “Murnau-Stiftung Version,”
was essentially a restoration of Channing Pollock’s US edition,
but with Channing’s rewritten titles again expunged and replaced with replicas of the original German titles.
There was a problem, though: Huppertz’s music could not be used due to rights tie-ups .
Bernd Schultheis composed a new orchestral score.
It is clear that the rights issues were settled soon enough,
and now it seems impossible to hear Schultheis’s score.
Koerber assembled what he thought was the
definitive restoration, about 117 minutes (not 124; the DVD’s back cover is wrong).
It seemed to be the final word in reconstituting the mutilated film.
Deletions from Fritz’s original were explained with brief synopses flashed on screen.
As for Fritz’s original, worldwide searches had failed to yield even another frame
(because everybody neglected to check the 9.5mm edition),
and so it was thought that this was as far as the work could go.
Kino released this “Murnau-Stiftung Version”
on DVD in February 2003, on Friday the 21st, I think,
and it garnered some nice reviews.
This DVD included a delicious video that Patalas had made:
Click to play.
Metropolis - 1927 - The Metropolis Case Documentary
Movie Set, https://youtu.be/fkPEyzjyejI
If YouTube deletes this, download it.
Aitam Bar-Sagi offers us a little tidbit:
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BTW. The Bernd Schultheis score (2001 restoration at 20fps) was shown
after the Berlinale premiere on ARTE TV (2002), but never since, it seems.
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Aitam continues:
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2001 was the FWMS and the Deutsche Kinemathek version, supervised by Martin Koerber,
based off the earlier work by the Munich Film-Museum, but not really involving them.
There were two DVD releases of it by “Films sans Frontières”,
one with a silver 3d / emboss cover and one with a different
“regular” cover (a copy I own).
These releases are 24fps (inside the PALs 25fps, there is a field-repeat-shift every 12 frames).
The musical score is by Gottfried Huppertz in part (Orchestral!),
while the rest is Piano music by Moravioff himself, all with horrible reverb echo,
probably to avoid paying copyright to Berndt Heller who owned the music copyright of Huppertz at the time.
I think it was first shown on TV in France (FR3) in 1997.
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The Universität der Künste Berlin made a
study version on DVD available only to educational institutions:
Metropolis Studienfassung.
Wish I could get a copy. Oh well.
Aitam Bar-Sagi fills us in even more:
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As for the Study-edition: it is basically the 2001 version with blank (or stills, depending on your selection)
sequences to describe what is missing. One difference:
The note Georgy holds with Josephat’s address is excluded,
the reason being probably the fact it is in English and not German.
It has Huppertz’s music on two Pianos, or silent track,
and selection of sub/intertitles describing things (i.e. Huppertz’
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The Progressive Silent Film List
explains that the 2001 restoration is based on four sources:
MoMA,
the material received in 1971 from Gosfilmofond (presumably the Paramount negative and the several reels’ worth of trims),
the 8,537' Wardour nitrate held at the BFI National Film and Television Archive,
and the Harry Davidson print.