Just read this back and it is a bit of a long post, mainly waffling, which coincidently I also ate for Breakfast.

Today we had another film lecture, where we watched the 1927 German film 'Metropolis'.Like yesterday's film, it had no dialogue but relied on the acting, captions and music to tell the story. The first thing I noticed about the film was how advanced the set design was, especially in the few city-scape scenes. The ciy was shown from above to be a living, breathing world allowing the audiences to see individual cars, planes and persons moving around it. For a film created so early on in Cinema, I thought this was very impressive. The acting (although quite dramatic) I thought was also well done, the main actor which stuck out in the film for me was the character 'Grot' the 'guardian of the heart machine', who I've found was played by Heinrich George.





I thought the story was great as from the very beginning I could tell it was building up to a disastarious climax and the end did not disappoint. I can see why Phil wanted to show us this film as it brought with it the start of so many conventions that have been used since. They were easy to spot, such as the bringing alive of the Doctor's robot, with the dramatic electricity flowing through the body and the large city with the tallest building as an emblem of power (Reminded me a lot of Blade Runner)

The audio I felt suited the scenes very well also, unlike yesterday's film, 'The Cabinet of Dr Caligari' the music was very well thought through. Although I don't listen to a lot of classical music, I noticed in some of the last scenes, there seemed to be a likeness (or exactness) to Tchaichovsky's 1812 Overture, even though the tune didn't quite erupt into the proper version, this might have just been coincidence, or perhaps the film was unable to use the original music. This was during the scenes of struggle and mayhem, I think that song was written commerating a battle where the the French troops were forced out of Russia at a large battle (Guessing from my memory here) so it suited the film's battle of the workers versus the upper class.

Overall, I enjoyed the film, even though it was not fully finished (and never will be) I am looking forward to seeing some more recent sci-fi to see the connections.

I'm also on my last few pages of the book 'Journey to the Centre of the Earth' for my project. I think this book was fantastic and I'm a bit annoyed I haven't made the effort to read it before now. I'm going to try and find 'Around the world in 80 days' in the next couple of weeks.