"There can be no understanding between the hand and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator. "

When silent films are discussed today, if they are even discussed at all, only a few directors are mentioned. There was D.W. Griffith, F.W. Murnau, Sergei Eisenstein, Alfred Hitchcock gets lumped in with the silents, all those great comedic directors (Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd) and then Fritz Lang. The great German director, probably had the best transition to sound of any real silent director, Hitchcock doesn’t really count as a silent director since he made only a handful of silent pictures.

The masterpiece of Lang’s silent work is a 1927 science-fiction movie that has influenced other movies as far as style goes and has allowed film theorists to debate its allegorical message. The movie is Metropolis, the first film to deal with the utopian society.

Before getting into the allegorical aspects of the story involving a world literally divided into two halves, the upper and lower, with the workers in the lower half and the elites on the upper and how a mediator is the only one who can bring the two together – lets look at the stylistic achievements of the movie.

Metropolis is a German Expressionism film so it has all those great shadows we associate with the style. Although it is not as good as say Nosferatu (1921) for shadows. What separates this movie from others like it is the art deco architecture. The towering cities and the Tower of Babel of the upper class are brought to full life. All futuristic cities in fiction owe a little something to this movie for their design. The movie Blade Runner (1983) is a good example of a movie that has copied some of the skyscraper features from Metropolis.

Now for a modern audience it is a little hard to watch and see Model T’s roaming the streets in the year 2027. Also the single engine planes look out of date, but the large highways that roam around the tops of the skyscrapers still haven’t happened and are closer to being a reality than any sort of flying car.

A lot more attention could be paid to the different shots Lang got in the movie, but that would turn into a technical discussion of lighting and camera work and I am not qualified to discuss in great detail how Lang got some of this breathtaking shots. All I know is Lang was a perfectionist who demanded the most from his cast and crew. The cast especially.

At the end of the movie a robot named Hel is being burned at the stake. The evil villain in this story is a scientist named Rotwang, who all mad scientists seem to be based off of. He has created a robot who looks a lot like the angelic girl who is going to keep the workers from starting a revolution until a mediator is found. This girl’s name is obviously Maria, a variation of Mary. The mediator’s name is Freder. Freder happens to be the son of the man who owns all of Metropolis and lives above the workers. Obviously there is one allegorical reading of the movie.

Getting back to the fire scene though. The actress who plays Maria, Brigitte Helm, was strapped to the stake and Lang had extras move in and actually set the wood around her feet on fire. Lang was disappointed because there was not enough smoke the first time he shot the scene. So the fire was put out and Helm was subject to more smoke inhalation and the possibility of being burned before Lang was satisfied with the final product.

For his part, Lang wanted a machine like quality from a lot of the actors in the film. To get this effect he made them do the same scene over and over until they were too tired to care what they were doing. This technique is either brilliant or cruel and unusual punishment. Whatever you call it, it worked and looks great on-screen.

Any time a German movie from the 1920s is discussed, it has to be looked at in the contest of what would happen to the country in the next decade. Unfortunately for Lang the movie was Hitler’s favorite. In fact Hitler’s minister of propaganda gave Lang the opportunity to make movies for the Nazi government. Upon receiving the offer, Lang took the next train he could out of the country and left for America. He left behind him his wife, Thea von Harbou, who wrote the movie and was deeply involved with the Nazi party.

Lang himself did not care much for the allegories the film would receive after it was learned that Hitler enjoyed it so much. Some thought it was the perfect Nazi propaganda movie. As the city is basically controlled by one man. Hitler believed if the man had actually been him, there would have been no revolution by the workers, as there is in the movie.

What Lang did care about and what hurt him for many years is the way the movie’s ending was received. It ends with Freder taking the hand of the foreman of the workers and joining it with his father’s. The message of the movie is that the head (Frederson) and hands (workers) can only be joined by the heart (Freder). It is rather anticlimactic and critics said so. Lang would go back and forth throughout his life as to whether the idea for the ending was his or not. Depending on which interview you read you’ll see him defending it or condemning it.

Metropolis is a silent movie. It is also a long one that has pieces of the original missing. This may make it hard for some to watch, but the cinematography is so good that is overshadows the time spent watching and the terrible acting.

"The truth is: I do not know... I seek... I have not yet found. Only with this in mind can I feel alive and look at you without shame. "

Federico Fellini does not seem like a director I would like. Most of his stuff is about film as art and focused more with images than story. But 8½ (1963) is a definitive movie that others can be modeled on. Like The Godfather (1972) is the definitive gangster movie or Star Wars (1976) is the definitive space movie. It is the movie we first think of when we think of the genre. 8½ is the definitive movie made about a director.

Unlike writers, who seem to be obsessed with writing stories that feature writers as their main characters, directors seem to be less concerned with directors as characters in movies. That is except for Fellini here. Maybe this is why no other directors have taken on the movie about making a movie, at least in a dramatic sense. There have been many made in a comedic way.

The movie is about a famous Italian director who is supposed to make another great movie. He faces what appears to be "director block." It is writer's block just transferred to a director.

Obviously this famous Italian director is supposed to stand for Fellini himself. He could have suffered from director block himself and just threw this movie together to be something, much like the director in the movie does. But with Fellini this is all very complex and open to great meaning that could take forever to discuss. So let us keep to the basics.

Like all of Fellini, the movie is filled with beautiful images. Fellini is considered by some to be the greatest director ever, particularly because of the beautiful images that fill his movies. But Fellini was not an outstanding technical director like Fritz Lang or Alfred Hitchcock. He was brilliant at setting up shots and shooting them like a painting, but there are not a lot of pans, crane shots or dolly shots. The beauty of Fellini is static.

Because Fellini is more interested in images than story, his movies tend toward the weird side. This is the case here as there are random images and flashbacks that are included. They work here because the director's mind is so cluttered and indecisive that the whole thing works. Since it works this is called genius, if it didn't it would be called trash.

Images in the movie have been imitated. The beginning of Falling Down (1995) was modeled after 8½'s. The ending has often been imitated as well. The large circle of people involved with the production of the movie's movie and of the movie itself. Fellini as a boy ran away to join the circus. This is why the circus plays a large role in his movies and why we are graced with the presence of the clowns and circus music at the end.

8½ is an autobiographical movie. It is also a movie that defines what it is like to come up with a movie when you are famous. The stresses it puts on the director and his relationship if he happens to be married. It is a movie that needs to be watched more than once so it can take on deeper meaning each time. Constructing a movie like this might not take so long if it was unintended to turn out like this. Fellini wants the audience to think this is a natural progression of the director's thoughts, not that it has been preplanned by him.

Fellini was famous for remarking that he was a liar and to never believe a word he said. So the jury is still out as to how much Fellini meant to show in the movie and how much has been interpreted as greatness simply because it was made by Fellini. Whatever it is, it is a worthwhile movie to watch.

"It can only be attributable to human error."

Movies can be made to entertain people. They can also be made to entertain the director. Those movies that are given a mass release, but were made as a director’s pet project are either huge hits or major disappointments with audiences. One such movie that falls into the huge hit department is 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

Granted, not everyone who has seen the movie like it. Most don’t even understand it. It is doubtful that Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick even knew what it was about. Perhaps Kubrick, but his collaborator Clarke, probably was in the dark about a lot of stuff.

Kubrick and Clarke teamed up to make the ultimate space opera. Clarke was a great science fiction writer. Kubrick was interested in space at the time and respected Clarke’s work. Kubrick and Clarke came up with the basic idea for the story, if you believe the movie has a narrative. Anyway, the two worked on a screenplay in which the movie was made.

While Kubrick was shooting the movie, Clarke was working on the novel of the movie. The two were supposed to come out soon after the other. It is one of those rare movies where the novel comes out after the movie. The bad thing for Clarke, but the good thing for audiences, is that Kubrick was making changes to the script while he was shooting. None of these changes were discussed with Clarke and because of this the two are different in ways.

This is a good thing for those who have seen the movie because a lot of what happens is explained in greater depth by Clarke. As Clarke said after the movie was released: “watch the movie, read the book and repeat as often as necessary in order to understand.”

Our movie opens up with a group of human beings in their ape form. Kubrick shows us how humans learned to kill. It appears that a big monolith from some alien civilization gives the apes/humans the spark to discover brutal force. This monolith has been commented on by just about every theorist and critic who has looked at the film. One of the more popular beliefs, and endorsed by Kubrick, is that the monolith acts as a guide for human beings in their evolution. The monolith comes from an alternate civilization that we don’t even know about. Something that can not be seen by human beings. This obviously makes it tough to show on film, but according to Kubrick this is what the movie is about.

After the largest flash forward in film history we arrive at the year 2001 when human kind is colonizing the moon. Obviously this was not an accurate prediction, but Kubrick and Clarke choose a date sometime in the next century when they were writing the movie and it ended up being 2001.

There really are no definable human characters in the movie, which makes this movie rather unique since it is all live-action, not animated. Anyway, some important scientist from the US has been sent to study something on the moon that has recently been discovered. This is another monolith. The alternate beings have told humanity that they have reached another step in evolution – that step is interplanetary travel.

The next segment takes place on a ship and features the most memorable character in the movie, the computer HAL. HAL has been studied ever since the movie was released. He has also been extremely influential in popular culture. There is a Jared jewelers ad running on TV right now that features a GPS system that goes crazy when Dave does not give her the jewelry he just bought. Dave of course is a crewmember of the ship Discovery that has been sent to investigate a monolith transmission on Jupiter.

HAL is a supercomputer that is incapable of error. This is why he is the only one who has been entrusted of the ships true mission – going out into the unknown to meet something that could be potentially dangerous. The humans on Earth believe this mission is too stressful on human nerves, so they don’t tell the crew about it. They misjudged the effect this mission would have on the computer. The computer expresses doubt to both his active crewmembers, other members of the crew have lived in hibernation and will be woken up once the crew gets to Jupiter.

The crew, Dave and Frank, become concerned at the computer’s weird behavior and discuss the possibility of taking him off line. This doesn’t sit well with the paranoid computer. He becomes homicidal and kills everyone onboard except Dave, who happens to kill the computer in a slow, painful death.

From here it is anyone’s guess what happens. Dave leaves Discovery for Jupiter and then there are lots of lights before he ends up in a room where he happens to age rapidly before becoming a Star Child. Kubrick wanted audiences to draw their own conclusions of this section of the movie. He did say that the Star Child was the next step in human evolution in the movie.

2001 is not the typical space movie. It isn't even the typical movie. It lacks dialogue. It lacks definable human characters It lacks a cohesive narrative. It is interesting enough to watch and make you think though.