Metropolis (1927)

Directed by by Fritz Lang.

If the plot of Metropolis evokes hope, its images stir fear in the audience through all three aspects of reality – people, time and space. In terms of space, the majestic architectural blocks stretching vertically of the Metropolis have occupied both the cityscape and the human mind, causing people to be swallowed by them and framed within them. If the height of the buildings emphasizes the power gap between the bourgeoisie living in the skyscrapers and the workers living underground, their exaggerated size deprives every individual of their weight, both bourgeois and workers. The film presents a series of scenes – where people crawl around machines and buildings like termites crawling around a termite nest. In that glorious yet chilling scene, each person is no more than a tool that the system can easily replace or eliminate, a meaningless existence, a soulless unit in statistics. This little person is also suffocated in time by the rushed rhythm of many movie scenes - when machines do not bring comfort to people, but force people to work faster to catch up with the machines. Regarding the human aspect of reality, the humanity of the characters is often swallowed up in scenes depicting crowds of workers lining up to go to work like robots, or furiously chasing and killing "witches" like zombies. With these designs, the film successfully illustrates two concerns of the industrial era, which were conveyed through le Bon's concept of "mass psychology" and Marx's concept of "deathlessness".