According to the BBC, most of the remaining scenes from Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis have been discovered in the Museum of Cinema in Buenos Aires:
Around 20 to 25 minutes of footage that fleshes out secondary characters and sheds light on the plot would be added to the film pending restoration…but around 5 minutes of the original was probably still missing.
This is obviously great news for cinephiles, and will bring us much closer to experiencing the story as Lang intended. But a film fan has apparently been begging the Argentinian Museum of Cinema to check their archives for Metropolis footage since the 1980s, so while this is a coup, it’s also makes you wonder what people in the various film museums around the world really do all day? Fund raise, of course. Play a few games of Freecell while they absorb that first cup of coffee, that’s a given. But why can’t each of them just hire some temps, hand out flashlights and Playtex gloves, and say, “Go down into the vault and dig through those stacks of film cans; after you find London After Midnight, or the Theda Bara Cleopatra you can take lunch.”
Granted, it would be slow, dirty, even dangerous work, and perhaps the average guy or girl working for Apple Temps would rather just answer the phones at some Century City law firm, then sneak out at 3:30 to make an audition. But once we pull out of Iraq, there’s going to be a lot of Blackwater mercenaries who suddenly find themselves without contracts, or carte blanche to shoot random citizens as they ram through traffic in an up-armored SUV. So rather than just dump them back on the streets of Anytown, USA, I suggest a gentle transitioning program, the first part of which will involve keeping them underground in a cool, dark place with a large amount of highly volatile silver nitrate film stock.
Here’s a thought–how about cataloging your shit? I mean, you’re an archive. The whole point of being an archive is to have a list of your shit, right?
Then again, if people weren’t so incompetent at this shit, we’d never have unexpected discoveries at these places, which would take some of the fun out of life I guess.
Left by Me on July 5th, 2008