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darren nemeth wrote:

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Clips from yesterday's screening are already being posted on youtube.com

http://youtube.com/watch?v=vq2Uc61YRMY

To be specific, that's actually footage of an earlier in-house screening of the footage at the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin, rather than coming from yesterday's Buenos Aires press conference. The commentary notes that the Argentinian archive where this 16mm copy was located is so poorly funded that it couldn't even afford to turn on the heating last winter; so it's hardly a wonder that the place doesn't have enough staff to work through all its hidden treasures.

The 16mm copy appears still to be missing around 5 minutes from the 153-minute version, seemingly due to nitrate decomposition of the 35mm print prior to its duplication to 16mm in the 1970s; in that sense, it really was a case of this version having been put on 16mm 'just in time', even if no-one seems to have realised its full significance at the time.

South America (and in particular Uruguay and Argentina) has been a rich source of finds from the German silent and early talkie eras, not because of any mythical stockpiles of films being secreted there by on-the-run Nazis after the Second World War, but rather because it was a region that had a *huge* film culture in the 1920s and 1930s, yet only a modest amount of domestic production. Hence, foreign films were imported in disproportionately high numbers, and since various nations had strong (trade and cultural) ties with Germany, this included a large number of German pictures. That's about as sinister as it gets.

CavemanBeater wrote:

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but the collector was from the nazi party.

What is your basis for this claim?

The importer of the movie, Adolfo Z. Wilson, was a Rumanian-born film distributor (and later producer of middle-of-the-road melodramas and similar fare) in Buenos Aires, and only had possession of the print in 1928.

The collector into whose hands it then fell for around forty years was Manuel Peña Rodríguez, who wrote the cinema column in the conservative daily La Nación Argentina from 1925 to 1942. His column had a strong focus on Hollywood productions, and he regularly traveled to California to undertake interviews with stars including Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, and even a certain Boris Karloff. After leaving La Nación Argentina, he appears to have been something of a philanthropist, and an occasional film producer of literary adaptations and melodramas. He sold his collection on in the late 1960s after being diagnosed with cancer, which would ultimately claim his life in 1970. Or are there some alleged skeletons in his closet of which I'm unaware?

BlondieJohnson wrote:

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He was kidding, doctor kiss.

Well, I'd hoped that was the case, but I still wanted to nip such a rumor in the bud, in case it was taken seriously. Because METROPOLIS is a film which already carries quite enough baggage in terms of supposed Nazi associations. While one can certainly lend credence to the idea of some of its bombastic monumental imagery and architecture being 'pre-fascistic' in nature (both Goebbels and Hitler were known admirers of the film, and might conceivably have taken some aesthetic inspiration from it), this notion has on various occasions been taken to quite implausible lengths by people intent on uncovering ever more 'pre-fascistic imagery' within the film.

Most famously, this includes assertions by writers such as Jean-Marc Bouineau and Alain Charlot - and this within the past 20 years - that all of Rotwang's walls are daubed with "yellow Stars of David", interpreted as an anti-Semitic association of Rotwang's villainy and desire for retribution as supposedly intrinsically Jewish qualities. Of course, the fact that the stars are generally seen tinted red within the film, and are indeed described in the script and Thea von Harbou's 1927 novelization alike as 'copper-red Seals of Solomon' needn't get in the way of what these writers think they've seen (and quite how one sees a 'yellow' Star in either a black-&-white print, or in a red- or blue-tinted scene.. is certainly open to question). The Seal of Solomon was chosen by Harbou, and readily identified by contemporary critics, as a shorthand for Rotwang's status as an alchemist... indeed, its status as a symbol of alchemic transmutation was singularly appropriate in the context of Maria's transformation from machine to woman.