Reading Comics and Watching Metropolis

My friend Doug Wolk just won an Eisner for best comics-related book for Reading Comics. And, I might add, we’ve been hosting a little book event in his honor over at the Valve the last couple weeks. Kip Manley just write a very nice little essay, for example.

In other news, somehow I missed the news a few weeks ago that long-lost footage from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis had turned up in Buenos Aires. That’s almost as good as when they found a nice print of Dreier’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) in a Norwegian insane asylum, eh?

Although the new material is in a terrible condition, according to the first appraisals by the German film historians, including Rainer Rother, the director of the Deutsche Kinemathek Museum in Berlin, the newly discovered scenes give a surprising insight into the characters’ motivation. They finally give “Metropolis” a coherent story-telling rhythm, whose absence was often criticized. For example, characters who were practically extras in the shorter version, such as the spy Schmale or Josaphat, Freder’s friend, actually had significant supporting roles and the original dramaturgical concept, which before could only be reconstructed using textual sources and photographs, is now apparent on film for the first time since 1927.

I don’t think we even knew the spy Schmale’s name. He’s always just been ‘the thin man’, right? And he’s onscreen for all of 3 seconds, looking very tall and sinister. I’m looking forward to seeing a bit more. Here’s a YouTube video that includes tidbits of the new stuff, starting with Schmale, I presume, peeking over a Metropolis newspaper:

And, in other German typeface-related news, we are finally going to get to see the lost Yoshiwara district scene.