The Unrestored Metropolis

SPECIAL FREE SCREENING! ► Pacific Cinémathèque puts a lot of curatorial stock in the presentation of pristine new 35mm prints and beautiful restorations of cinema’s great works. Few restoration projects have been as celebrated — or as complex, or occasionally contentious (yes, we’re thinking of Giorgio Moroder’s 1984 reissue) or, indeed, numerous — as the reconstruction(s) of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Perhaps no other offers a better opportunity to showcase what a world of difference a superlative, comprehensive reconstruction can make (at least, until those missing 40+ minutes excised from Orson Welles’s 1942 masterpiece work The Magnificent Ambersons are rediscovered and restored). To this before-and-after/compare-and-contrast end, we present a special free matinee of Metropolis in its unrestored form. Screening from a 16mm print held in Pacific Cinémathèque’s collection, this is Lang’s film in the truncated, 90-minute version that was, for many decades, the only Metropolis available — and which, even so, even so grievously abridged, was still heralded as an ingenious masterwork of fantastical, visionary cinema. B&W, 16mm, silent with English intertitles. 90 mins.

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PLEASE NOTE: Seating for this special free screening is available on a first-come, first-served basis only. Sorry, no advanced tickets.

Patrons who wish to remain for the 3:45 pm screening of the new Metropolis restoration may purchase tickets for that screening at the door prior to 2:00 pm free screening or in advance at www.cinematheque.bc.ca