Metropolis (1927)
Famous silent film from the, hitherto unsurpassed, golden era of german cinema in the 1920's. Metropolis might not be the first science -fiction movie ever made, but it does provide the first depiction of what we now recognize as a dystopian future. Directed by Fritz Lang it's... well, it's a big deal, in a number of ways.
Metropolis is set in a futuristic art deco... metropolis, defined by stark class divide. The working class lives in squalid underground apartments, working themselves to death on large, coal powered machines, while the wealthy live in lavish skyscrapers in blissful ambivalence to their suffering. Metropolis follows Freders, the son of the city's leading industrialist, venturing into the workers quarters to meet a mysterious woman who turns out to be a preacher instigating a workers uprising.
Metropolis is a movie about class struggle, if one that ends up taking a decidedly liberal stance on it. Stating, very clearly, that the way forward to a better future is not in the working class disposing of, but learning to cooperate with the industrial class on an equal level. It's moral summed up with the proverb "The mediator between the brain and the hand shall be the heart." that is repeated quite a few time throughout the movie.
This way it's surprisingly idealistic for a dystopian parable, presenting, as solution to class conflict, the moderating influence of modest, empathetic men acting according to decent, very explicitly christian, virtues. It, is, by now, common knowledge that Metropolis was one of Adolf Hitler's favourite movies. Accordingly, it's tempting to look for traces of fascist ideology in it, even more so considering that screenwriter, and director Lang's wife at the time Thea von Harbou, eventually ended up a member of the National Socialist party.
While it's tempting to read fascist sympathies into that moral of class collaboratism, what is notably absent from Lang's dystopian epic, though, is any reference to the nation state or the the "Volkskörper" as the unifying element between proletariat and bourgeouisie. Opting instead to pay tribute to the virtue of universal solidarity and mutual understanding as the foundation for a better future. While Metropolis certainly can't be read as a marxist movie, it's certainly not conforming to the ideology of Mussolini and Hitler either.
There is a lot to be said about Metropolis' politics, but from a modern perspective, it's much more famous as the grandfather of a lot of what we now consider hallmarks of the science fiction movie. Metropolis' depiction of a futurist society, even from a modern perspective, is undeniably impressive. Looking at the movies production values, even now, it's tempting to assume that it might have been single handedly responsible for the german economic crisis. The production design is nothing if not lavish, its elaborate sets, masses of extras and effects work feeling ahead of its time by multiple decades. Straight up, Metropolis' iconography not only paved the way, but is still present in just about any subsequent depiction of a futuristic society. Star Wars, Blade Runner, Brazil, they all owe a lot to Metropolis' visual language.
Also, for something that's damn near a hundred years old, it's still a lot more watchable than you might assume. Not only for its still impressive visual design, but simply for how fluidly it all moves along. It's not a dense plot by modern standards, simply for the limitations of the silent film as a medium. Something that would be plot heavy by modern standards would have had to consist to about 70 % of text cards to be conveyed silently, but the visuals and the acting manage to convey a lot of nuance.
From a modern perspective, Metropolis' morals might come off as a bit naive, and its christian subtext as very heavy handed, but where it might lack some of the insight into the mechanics of the post industrial totalitarianism that would only really manifest in reality a bit later, a lot of what we now expect from this kind of premise is already there, and better fleshed out than one might expect. It's not hard to see how Metropolis is a movie that can only be described as historical.
