Pop Smart - Metropolis: Found footage of a lost city!

The classic-film world, after the tragic loss of archived movies in Hollywood last month, should have cause for celebration when it was learned that the missing reels of the 1927 Fritz Lang silent-film classic, Metropolis, has been found! Woo-hoo! According to Reuters …

Two film fans in Argentina uncovered the fragile footage in a small museum, earlier this year — over eight decades after Fritz Lang’s dystopian classic first began to shed scenes.

With its cold, monumental vision of mechanized society, Metropolis forged a template for generations of science fiction cinema, and its enduring influence has been cited on films from Blade Runner to Fahrenheit 451 and Star Wars.

“We were overjoyed when we heard about the find,” Helmut Possmann, head of the foundation which owns the rights to the film, the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung, told Reuters.

“We no longer believed we’d see this. Time and again we had had calls about supposed footage but were disappointed.”

Unfortunately, the Reuters report says, there still might be about five minutes missing, but still, we’re talking as complete a version as we can hope for — eight decades after its release.

Here’s the opening, just to get us all excited. Paging Kino!

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