Metropolis Mashup
Well it took awhile but I think the mashup ended up looking pretty nice. (YouTube immediately blocked my audio so I switched to Vimeo and made a profile there)
In order to properly appreciate the point of the mashup one needs to have seen the 2001 Japanese Metropolis film, which is based in part on the original manga and also on the 1927 German Metropolis film. However, the mashup is intended to show the relationship between both films’ destruction scenes, the 2001 film’s destruction of the large tower being set to Ray Charles’ 1962 I Can’t Stop Loving You. HERE is a link.
Keeping that scene in mind, I took Charles’ scene and matched it up to the flooding scenes of the German film. Throughout both scenes are elements of the love story found in the two films, although with what I had to work with the German one ends on a happy note while the Japanese one ends with the protagonist losing the girl in the destruction. (Also, while both have female “robots”, the German film has a robotic copy made of the girl. The Japanese film has the girl unknowingly as the robot herself.)
I hope that through this mashup more people will become interested in the original Metropolis and notice many of the similarities between the two films.
Further Notes:
This was actually a really fun video to make, (despite crashing my computer and forcing me to put the file on an external HD [ended up around 30 gigs!]) and for fans of both the Japanese and German films will be a fun and engaging video to view (I hope).
I originally had many shots of the robot taking on Maria’s form, as that would further relate the two texts together, however they did not fit in with the video as a whole. Basically this plot point was removed and the focus on the love story was increased.
This might just be a personal boast but some of the basic editing in some of the shots is really an improvement over the original (Of course I have modern tech to do it with). As with quite a few silent films, there is a lot of lengthy shots of walking, running, etc. which when shortened a bit really adds to the tension and action of the film. I was able to shorten a lot of the shots of Maria and Joh’s saving of the kids without losing any of the continuity or the size of the crowds. I bet if someone really just took the time to cut down all the overlong scenes and streamline the action and plot the film would be much more accessible to today’s filmgoers.
One of the edits I’m most proud of is Maria’s horrified reaction to the elevators collapsing around 00:50, which was actually a reaction to some flooding. Around 00:56 is one of the worst, though, in that I couldn’t get rid of a second or two of the original flooding (that I showed at the start of the vid). The destruction starting at 00:58 was actually at the beginning of the film (the flooding and everything else towards the end), and starts off Joh’s compassion for the common workers. The shot of the bell being rung in a close up was actually untampered with, and is a powerful image in my opinion. 03:18 is an awesome camera movement in which they actually put the camera on a rope and swung it at the actors, creating the illusion of a massive quake in the underground city. There was no way I was going to cut that out.
Around 03:52 is a screwup on my part, as I cut the film there and couldn’t (metaphorically) glue it back together, so I briefly faded out. Hopefully it just looks like something that might actually happen to old celluloid and not a cut. The long kiss at the end was obviously not continuous to the rest of the video but I needed something to end on (and to sync up to the song’s powerful and emotionally moving coda) and chose the kiss which occurred about halfway thru the film.
Hopefully it accomplishes its point: that both films have many similarities and that by using a song from one the same emotional response can be achieved thru the other.
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