Metropolis with Live Music

Introduction and live piano accompaniment: Vít Janeček

Metropolis / Germany 1927 / 153 min. / live musical accompaniment — The inhabitants of the city of Metropolis live in a strictly two-class society: the wealthy and privileged above ground, exploited workers in the underground. Ruler Joh Fredersen controls the entire system, while his son Freder, alone among the privileged, questions the prevailing inequality and ventures into the workers' underground to help Maria. Fredersen seeks to suppress any uprising and orders inventor Rotwang to create a robotic double of Maria that would destroy the workers.

The film is often read as a critique of capitalism, yet it also rejects radical change and replaces it with moral reconciliation — the famous vision of "the heart as mediator" may thus seem more like a tool for stabilizing the system than overcoming it.

Fritz Lang's monumental silent classic is considered the prototype of dystopian sci-fi films, influencing many other works through its content and visual style.