5B: Gesamtkunstwerk: Film
- John S. Titford, “Object-Subject Relationships in German Expressionist Cinema,” Cinema Journal, 13.1 (Autumn 1973): 17 – 24.
- Anton Kaes, “Metropolis: City, Cinema, Modernity” in Expressionist Utopias: Paradise, Metropolis, Architectural Fantasy, ed. T. O. Benson (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1993), 146 – 165.
- Andreas Huyssen, “The Vamp and the Machine: Technology and Sexuality in Fritz Lang's Metropolis,” New German Critique, 24/25 (Autumn, 1981 - Winter, 1982) 221-237.
- Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903).
- What are some of the dichotomies (ideas or themes that seem to be directly opposed to one another in this movie), which you notice, and how do they help to support and develop the film’s most important themes and ideas?
- Note any allegories to recent German history you observe.
- This film reveals an ambivalent relationship to technology and modernization. On the one hand, the film’s vision is anxious: technology oppresses and alienates the citizen. On the other hand, it concedes to the necessity of—even reveals a love for—technology “with a heart.” Take notes on both aspects and consider how this film reflects some of the tensions between “Germanness” and modernization that we have discussed in the course.
- How are anxieties and desires over technology projected onto Maria, as both herself and as the robot? In other words, how are technology and modernization gendered in Metropolis?
