New music by Jeff Mills composed for Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” transforms the film

Metropolis by Fritz Lang has known many vicissitudes since its release in 1927. Commercial failure, several versions exist of the film which remains still incomplete of eight minutes today. The score of Gottfried Huppertz’s original music was not discovered until 2008, while eighteen other versions were recorded to carry the film, including the best known, and the worst, by Giorgio Moroder in 1984. Jeff Mills creates a short story in 1999, then rewrites it in 2010, to end up with this third version, in total osmosis with the film, which he gives in cine-concerts around the world and in a magnificent triple album.

The union “of head and arms through the heart”

In the continuity of the electro-acoustic research of the 70s, with the Germans Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze or Ash Ra Temple, Jeff Mills tints his compositions of dramaturgy for the images of Metropolis. The first film to be classified in UNESCO’s international Memory of the World register, Fritz Lang’s work, based on a script by his wife Thea von Harbou, was at the time the biggest budget in cinema and a bitter commercial failure. Yet the film invented an aesthetic that was to have a strong influence on world cinema, with its new descriptive images of a future city, staged with marvelous and revolutionary special effects.

The image is sumptuous on a dystopian scenario with social resonance, where the rich live in immense towers launched towards the sky, while the rest of the population, the workers therefore, work in their factories and live underground. The film that ends with the meeting “head and arms through the heart“, in the handshake between the master of Metropolis and the worker, reflects the nascent Nazi ideology in Germany in the 1920s. It also prefigures the accession of the novelist and screenwriter Thea von Harbou to the National Socialist Party in 1940 , while Fritz Lang had divorced her in 1933 and left the country the same year for France, then the United States.

Sequential compositions

A virtuoso of electronic music, Jeff Mills composes a score of great sound, melodic and rhythmic richness which gives a new dimension to Metropolis. If one could feel a wavering halfway through the film so far, it disappears under the impetus of the Detroit school singer-songwriter. The music participates in the editing, it gives it more enthusiasm, more liveliness over the 2h48 of the film (2h53 originally). Its spectacular futuristic universe and the multiple adventures of the story offer a most inspiring and relevant musical ground, conducive to an electronic score. An ambition which was not reached by the music of Moroder, also electronic.

The surprise emanates first of all from Jeff Mills’ adaptation to the musical canons of silent cinema. A glorious march opens the score that accompanies the credits of the film, then the first shots of the future city, idealized as the ultimate incarnation of the progress underway in the 1920s. The music therefore gives way to more atmospheric, more nuanced tracks, that underlie feelings and action.

Percussive rhythms are grafted on ranges of atmospheric and soaring chords. Jeff Mills is in line with the sequential compositions of the German bands of the 70s, repetitive and constantly evolving, here according to the durations inherent in the action. The musician has found the exact sound equivalent to the images of Fritz Lang, photographed by Karl Freund, one of the pillars of German Expressionism.

Modernity

The magic of the film still operates, with an extraordinary visual beauty to which many recent works refer, such as blade runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) whose tour of the Los Angeles police station in 2019 refers to that of Joh Fredersen, the master of Metropolis. Jeff Mills has internalized the aesthetics of Fritz Lang’s work by transposing it into his evocative compositions of an anterior future, the film dating from 1927. Its modernity and relevance will remain in the annals of film music. A rare, demanding, bewitching and evocative work which, listened to alone without the images, also transports you to the fascinating and frozen universe of Metropolis.

Metropolis Metropolis
Jeff Mills
57 minutes
Axis Records