Metropolis
Film by Fritz Lang
Music composed for this version: Martin Matalon
Musicians from the Gulbenkian Orchestra and guests
18 Jun 2010 - 21:00
Open-Air Amphitheatre
Admission 20 €
It is a rare privilege to have the chance to either see or re-see the film Metropolis, by Fritz Lang, produced in 1927 and a universal reference not only in German cinema, but also worldwide. This is a film in which both the costs and the complexity of its production have become legendary, a work of reference for all essays on utopias, a work about the industrial Megalopolis, housing in its underground world thousands of workers, whose identification was a number, a work about what at that time were considered to be the evils of technical progress, in short a film about the perversions of totalitarianism.
Metropolis met with all kinds of difficulties during its production, also being subjected to cuts and amputations in the course of its post-production and distribution: negatives were lost, various different copies of the film were spread across the world, and finally the version that will be shown here is the one that was found in Argentina, for which the Argentinean composer Martin Matalon expressly composed a score that was premièred at the Théâtre do Châtelet on 30 May 1995. The film and this score are the ones that will be shown and heard in the Open-Air Amphitheatre, in a co-production of the Gulbenkian Orchestra and the Next Future Programme, marking the beginning of this year’s musical programme for this event.