Page 127 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 127/146
Fritz Lang: Metropolis 1927
In contrast to Lot in Sodom, Lang’s Metropolis is a full-length feature film with a record large budget - but Lang, with his talented co-writer - his wife Thea von Harbou (Metropolis was ba- sed on her novel of the same name), and his art-directors, produce an equally avant garde film masterpiece, with breakthroughs in genre (science fiction) and in set design, ingenious optical effects, and references to Futurism, Bauhaus, machine-age aesthetics, and Expres- sionism - especially in this montage of close-up faces of characters in the film story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(1927_film)
Of course - with such a film - probably the first blockbuster - I guess you would expect break- throughs in cinematography. But it was (also the innovation in set-design and in the special in-camera optical effects - created by Eugen Schüfftan - that gave us a seemingly gigantic modern city: Metropolis - Lang had been mightily impressed by his visit to New York). Schüfftan pushed the limits of marrying scale model-making to live action cinematography, building scenarios for the second most famous early science-fiction (after Voyage dans la Lune) for this workers-revolutionary-cum-age of the robots/Wellesian epic. Metropolis was as revolutionary in its cinematic experience as the Wachowski’s virtual cinematography and bul- let-time in The Matrix was in 1999.