September 23, 2003

• I’ve got so many things going on I barely have time to breathe. It seems that every night I have at least 2 meetings, usually at the same time. So far, I have Fencing, the Denisonian (which doesn’t really have meetings, but writing an article takes up time), Alpha Epsilon Delta (the pre-med honorary), East Asian Club, DISA, Women’s Emphasis (Please stop calling it WE, Kristina), SAC (Student Activities Council), Tutoring students, and AIDS Task Force (Which is the first community service organization I’ve joined, and which may not last long because there is no chair). I’m also supposed to be on Adytum (the yearbook), but they haven’t sent any emails so far). I’m sure I’ve left something out, and these are just my evenings. I didn’t even include the out-of-class History of Cinema movies, which are almost every Sunday, Monday, and Wednesday evenings. Which brings me to the two I have to report on. Sunday’s movie was Battleship Potemkin, a Russian movie made in 1925 and directed by Sergei Eisenstein.

  
  

   

  
  

  

  
  

   

  
  

  The movie is a dramatization of a mutiny that occurred on a battleship of the same name in 1905, and a subsequent police massacre of workers in the town of Odessa. Obviously, a few facts were stretched, and the movie is dripping with Communist propaganda. Apparently, this was rated as the greatest film ever for decades (that honor is now most often held by Citizen Kane). My professor says this was because most film scholars are very left-wing and often socialists, but even with that, I wouldn’t give it top honors (just for the record, I consider myself left-wing, but not socialist). I think it was successful in its goal (that is, to ooze Communist propaganda), but it was incredibly boring (the lighting also sucked). I would sooner watch Intolerance 10 times in a row than see this movie again, which is pathetic, considering that Intolerance is over two hours long and Battleship Potemkin is barely an hour.

  
  

   

  
  

  Monday night’s movie was Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, made in 1927.

  
  

   

  
  

  

  
  

  

  
  

   

  
  

  There are several different versions of this movie. Fritz Lang’s original cut was almost three hours long, but edited down for release in Germany and in other countries. Obviously, a great deal of footage was lost, and there have been several attempts to reconstruct the movie to Lang’s original vision, using still photographs, the original script and storyboards (which still exist), and every shred of film they can find. This includes the “Old Kino Version” from the fifties (“Kino is German for “cinema”) and the British “Director’s Cut” from the early nineties (by the way, the “Director’s Cut” is a misnomer). The most successful attempt was the “New Kino Version,” which was finished in 2001 (the Denison Film Society showed this version last Wednesday). More footage has been located in the last twenty years, which brought the “New Kino Version” as close to the original running time as it will probably ever get. It also has a new orchestral score, and the entire film has been digitally remastered, bringing the detail to the sharpest point it can get to. All this praise of the “New Kino Version” was given to us by our professor. He then went on to say it was “an outstanding scholarly achievement…and it is boring as hell.” He explained that while the “New Kino Version” was an important and wonderful feat, most viewers would be too bored to appreciate it. The version we were shown was compiled in 1984 by Giorgio Moroder, and it was the most complete version until the “New Kino Version.” It was ninety minutes long, mostly because the intertitles were removed and replaced by regular subtitles (Presumably, the original three hour version contained 127 intertitles). Most critics hated this version (and so did my professor until he saw the other versions and decided that the 1984 version has the highest entertainment value). I’ve never seen the “New Kino Version,” so I don’t know what scenes have been discovered since the 1984 version, but at that point, there were still some important scenes missing. Therefore, there were some intertitles giving plot exposition. For instance, the heroine Maria gets captured and held hostage by a scientist. Apparently, she gets into a struggle with him, knocks him unconscious, and is able to escape, but that footage either is lost or had not been located in 1984, so all we were offered was an intertitle explaining that there was a fight and Maria was able to escape. I had to resist the urge to think of it as a plot hole. The film was partially colorized, but not much (and not in weird tints, like Intolerance, which had some frames that were entirely hot pink). For a movie made in 1927, Metropolis’s special effects aren’t that bad. The most entertaining part of the 1984 version has to be the music. It has a VERY ‘80s score. Giorgio Moroder was responsible for the music in The Neverending Story, and the anthem for Top Gun, so you probably have a feel for his style (lots of computerized music and electric guitar riffs). There were also songs featuring ‘80s artists like Pat Benatar, Adam Ant, Bonnie Tyler, and Freddie Mercury. That was fun except for the fact that the songs seemed to have a little too much relevancy to the scene, which made those scenes funny (and they weren’t necessarily supposed to be). I can see why the critics hated it. The ‘80s music made it seem a lot like a 90-minute long music video (remember, this is a silent movie, so the music’s the only thing you hear), which disconnected you a little bit from the plot. But I actually enjoyed it.

  
  

   

  
  

  Well, now I have to get ready to go to fencing practice, and then AED. The busy life continues…

  • 6:06 pm
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