In a vast future city, the privileged ruling class lives above ground while workers labor at machines underground. Then the son of the city's master falls in love with a worker-prophet and discovers what lies beneath. Fritz Lang's silent masterpiece invented the look of science fiction cinema. The political point he built into it has never stopped being relevant.
Metropolis is a 1927 science fiction and drama film directed by Fritz Lang. This breakdown covers 5 techniques (4 cinematography and 1 narrative), each with the scene where you can see it. If you like how it is made, The Apartment uses several of the same techniques.
Contrasting the buildings and rooms different social classes live in. The powerful get large, warm spaces and the powerless get cramped or exposed ones, so you see a gap nobody says aloud.
How this film uses it
Lang divides the city top to bottom. The ruling class lives above in towers of glass and light, and the workers run the machines below in underground darkness. The buildings are the film's political statement made in steel and shadow. The social order becomes a physical structure, and your class decides where in the city you live.
Where to see it
The establishing shots of the upper city and the underground machine halls. They introduce the split between above and below, and the whole film is built on it.
Having an actor perform in the big, physical style of silent movies, where gesture and facial expression do the work of dialogue. In a sound film, it marks a character as out of their time.
How this film uses it
Brigitte Helm plays 2 roles, Maria the prophet and the false Maria the robot. Her double performance relies on the exaggerated, expressionist body language of the silent era. The robot moves mechanically and the prophet holds a saintly stillness, and you tell them apart entirely by how she uses her body. The performance does what sound could only roughly imitate.
Where to see it
The false Maria's cabaret performance. The robot's body gives off sexuality and menace. Silent film acting gets that across through gesture, with no voice.
Building highly detailed scale models of places too big or impossible to build full size, sometimes called bigatures. They are filmed with real cameras and blended with full-size footage.
How this film uses it
The towers of Metropolis were built as scale miniatures. They were combined with full-size human action through the Schüfftan process, a mirror trick that reflected the miniatures into the live camera frame. The result was a city that looked convincingly huge and could not have existed any other way.
Where to see it
The Metropolis skyline. The towers and elevated walkways of the upper city are miniatures, and they look big enough to dwarf the human figures among them.
Writing a villain whose danger comes from a belief system that makes sense on its own terms. The story has to take on their ideas, and beating them physically isn't enough.
How this film uses it
Joh Fredersen rules Metropolis by suppressing information, watching everyone and engineering the workers to stay passive. He works like a manager. He shows no sadism or cruelty toward the workers. He simply doesn't see them as people whose experience matters. That is, his ideology is efficiency without ethics.
Where to see it
Fredersen's response to the discovery of the worker meetings. He makes a cold strategic calculation and decides to infiltrate the meetings. He never deals with what the workers are saying. You see his ideology in a management decision.
Designing the sets to reflect what is going on inside a character. The place they live in tells you things about them that the dialogue doesn't.
How this film uses it
Every space in Metropolis tells you the mental state of the people in it. The workers' underground is a machine world that has turned workers into parts. The Eternal Gardens above are a pleasure space that has turned the ruling class into children. Rotwang's house is a medieval alchemist's den dropped into a modern city, and it puts his madness on the outside where you can see it.
Where to see it
Rotwang's laboratory. It is a medieval laboratory in the modern city. The set shows how cut off the scientist is from both the world he serves and the world he destroys.
Questions
Metropolis: quick answers
What filmmaking techniques does Metropolis use?
CineCode breaks down 5 techniques in Metropolis (1927): Architectural Class Opposition, Silent Film Performance Register, Practical Miniature Construction, Ideological Villain and Production Design as Psychological Space.
Who directed Metropolis?
Fritz Lang directed Metropolis, released in 1927. CineCode also covers M (1931), The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), The Woman in the Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945), The Big Heat (1953).
What films are similar to Metropolis?
Films that share techniques with Metropolis include The Apartment (1960), The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026), The Dark Knight (2008).
