On Set Of 'Metropolis' (1927): Brigitte Helm As The Machinemensch

June 2, 2021

Turning Man Into Machine

In this photo from the set of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, colorized by Steve Foster, Brigitte Helm, who plays the role of Maria in the film, is being made up as the Machinemensch. To create the character, the sculptor Walter Schulze-Mittendorff created a whole body cast and constructed the costume around it. The costume was made of “plastic wood” which was pliable enough to look metallic but allow for some free movement. It wasn’t a comfortable costume though, and Helm did sustain some cuts and bruises; although it did allow some movement, it was still rigid. As Helm recalled in an interview: “Once I even fainted: during the transformation scene, Maria, as the android, is clamped in a kind of wooden armament, and because the shot took so long, I didn't get enough air." 

Source: (Colorized by Steve Foster).

This was just one of the early special effects in the film, one of the first feature length science fiction movies. It was made in Germany in 1927. Eugen Schüfftan created miniatures of the city, used a camera on a swing, and utilized a method named after him, the Schüfftan process, which used mirrors to make it seem that actors are in miniature sets; it was used in Alfred Hitchcock’s film Blackmail (1929), two years later. Filming Metropolis took 17 months to complete and cost more than five million Reichsmarks.

The Problems With Industrialism

Source: (Pinterest).

The film, which was based on a novel by Thea von Harbou, Lang’s then wife, was also inspired in part by Lang’s first vision of New York, as well as the culture of the Weimar Republic, industrialism and mass production. Metropolis is set in the future in an urban dystopia, a million-acre city called Metropolis. The society is divided between the industrialists, businessmen, and top employees who are in the 50-1,000 story skyscrapers, and the workers, who are underground, operating the machines which power the city. The city’s master, Joh Fredersen, has a son, Freder, who spends his time at sports and in a pleasure garden. His leisurely life is disrupted by Maria. Maria has taken worker’s children on a field trip to see the lives of the other, wealthy half. Freder, taken by her, decides to find her in the lower levels; while there, he witnesses a machine explosion that injures and kills many workers. This triggers a hallucination, in which the machine is a temple of Moloch, feeding on the workers. Freder reports the explosion to his father, who is angry because his assistant, Josaphat, did not tell him of the explosion. Eventually, Fredersen fires Josaphat.