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This is astonishing news. I've seen any number of versions of Metropolis over the decades, including one at the National Gallery of Art a few years ago which had several minutes of newly unearthed footage--culled from an Australian print, if I remember correctly.

Discovering the complete Metropolis is not quite the Holy Grail of the silent film fan--that would be the complete Greed--but this is a major, major find. It's almost unbelievable, how things from that period just keep popping up even now--over a hundred years after the beginning of the silent film era, eighty years after its end.

Those folks who only know Metropolis from the ghastly Moroder cut--which was nowhere near complete, even for what was available at the time--are going to be amazed. As, I'm sure, will all the rest of us--even those of us who have read enough about Metropolis over the years to virtually feel that we've seen the complete film already, though of course we haven't.

Thanks for posting this, Matt!

Ah--"as its own work." Yes, Matt, on that I'll go along with you.

Karen, I agree with you about London After Midnight, though numerous people who saw it back when it was released went on record later saying that it was actually a terrible movie and that we didn't lose much by its disappearance!

This excitement about Metropolis is making me think it's about time for me to go on a silent-film binge, which I haven't in a while. The Penalty with Lon Chaney, perhaps (one of the downright weirdest movies ever made--Chaney as a legless gangster who gets around on little stubby crutches!), Wings and It with Clara Bow (the original "It" Girl, a phrase still in use today), The Big Parade with the great John Gilbert, Flesh and the Devil with Gilbert and Garbo, Murnau's Sunrise, The Cat and the Canary...And I haven't even mentioned Chaplin or Keaton yet. Or Harold Lloyd.

By the way, though it's hardly the masterwork that even the incomplete Metropolis is, Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Moon from 1929 is well worth a look too, as another example of early filmed science fiction. I saw a gorgeous print of this at the National Gallery a few years ago.

Scarlet Street is one of my favorites among his American films. As dark as they come.

For any interested Metropolisphiles, here is a link to some detailed information about this new footage:

http://www.zeit.de/online/2008/27/metropolis-vorab-englisch?page=1

...And here's a follow-up article which features individual frame blow-ups of some of the new material, unseen for 80 years:

http://www.zeit.de/online/2008/27/bg-metropolis

(Looks pretty scratched up, but they can do wonders with digital technology these days!)

Information on imdb.com indicates that Kino will be releasing this newly restored version of Metropolis on Blu-Ray and regular DVD in 2009.