MANCHESTER, NH — A silent film hailed as the grandfather of all science fiction fantasy movies will be screened with live music in Manchester next month.
“Metropolis” (1927), an epic adventure set in a futuristic world, will be shown on Wednesday, April 5 at 7 p.m. at the Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester.
The screening will feature live accompaniment by Jeff Rapsis, a New Hampshire-based composer who specializes in creating music for silent films.
Tickets are $10 per person, general admission.
Regarded as German director Fritz Lang’s masterpiece, “Metropolis” is set in a society where a privileged elite pursue lives of leisure while the masses toil on vast machines and live in poverty.
The film, with its visions of futuristic factories and underground cities, set new standards for visual design and inspired generations of dystopian fantasies from Ridley Scott’s ‘Blade Runner’ to Terry Gilliam’s ‘Brazil.’
In reviving “Metropolis” and other great films of cinema’s early years, the Rex Theatre aims to show silent movies as they were meant to be seen—in high-quality prints, on the big screen, with live music, and with an audience.
“All those elements are important parts of the silent film experience,” said Rapsis, who will improvise an original live score for “Metropolis” during the screening. “Recreate those conditions, and the classics of early cinema leap back to life.”
In “Metropolis,” the story centers on an upper-class young man who falls in love with a woman who works with the poor. The tale encompasses mad scientists, human-like robots, underground spiritual movements, and industrial espionage, all set in a society divided between haves and have-nots.
The version of “Metropolis” to be screened at the Rex Theatre is a newly restored edition that includes nearly a half-hour of missing footage cut following the film’s premiere in 1927.
The lost footage, discovered in 2008 in an archive in Argentina, has since been added to the existing “Metropolis,” allowing plot threads and characters to be developed more fully.
When first screened in Berlin, Germany on Jan. 10, 1927, the sci-fi epic ran an estimated 153 minutes. After its premiere, the film’s distributors (including Paramount in the U.S.) drastically shortened “Metropolis” to maximize the film’s commercial potential. By the time it debuted in the U.S. later that year, the film was only about 90 minutes long.
Even in its shortened form, “Metropolis” became a cornerstone of science fiction cinema. Due to its enduring popularity, the film has undergone numerous restorations in the intervening decades in attempts to recover Lang’s original vision.
The restoration work has continued in recent years. In 2008, the curator of the Buenos Aires Museo del Cine discovered a 16mm dupe negative of ‘Metropolis’ that was considerably longer than any existing print.
It included not merely a few additional snippets, but 25 minutes of “lost” footage, about a fifth of the film, that had not been seen since its Berlin debut.
The discovery led to a 2½-hour version that debuted in 2010 to widespread acclaim. It’s this fully restored edition that will be screened at the Greenfield Garden Cinema.
“‘Metropolis’ stands as a stunning example of the power of silent film to tell a compelling story without words, and reach across the generations to touch movie-goers from the real future, which means us,” said accompanist Jeff Rapsis, who provides live music for silent film screenings throughout New England and beyond.
To accompany a silent film, Rapsis uses a digital synthesizer to recreate the texture of the full orchestra. The score is created live in real time as the movie is screened.
Rapsis creates new music for silent films that draws from movie scoring techniques that today’s audiences expect from the cinema.
The restored “Metropolis” will be shown on Wednesday, April 5 at 7 p.m. at the Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester, N.H.
General admission is $10 per person. Tickets may be purchased online at www.palacetheatre.org, by phone at (603) 668-5588 or at the door.
For more about the music, visit www.jeffrapsis.com.
