Metropolis as a Reflection of the Uncanny

Both Crary and Burch discuss the varying degrees and progression of different cinematic techniques and their effects on entertainment and the viewer. The progression of monocular and one-dimensional film into a more uncanny and three-dimensional experience creates disorientation between the subject and the viewer as experienced in Lang’s 1927 version of the acclaimed film Metropolis.

Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics, 2021

The construction of purpose-built cinemas in the early part of the twentieth-century was aimed at providing a safe and secure base for the new medium of film, and to gentrify this unruly and 'magic' medium, particularly with the development of the feature film which required a more established 'home' for it to be successfully exhibited. The motivation behind these new movie 'palaces' was therefore both economic and class-based in an attempt to remove film from its lower-class origins. Yet the intended domestication of the medium exhibited within the confines of the new buildings was never secure; in fact, it will be argued that such attempts were ill-fated from the outset, and that the ontological strangeness of the filmic medium was instead amplified within the new surroundings.

New Review of Film and Television Studies

In Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, Laura Mulvey explores the temporality of motion imaging in terms of notions of the uncanny, as set forth by Wilhelm Jentsch and Sigmund Freud. Her title refers as well to the rate at which moving images are captured and projected – 24 frames per second – and her argument suggests that cinematic movement (not just the photographic image alone) is itself an uncanny special effect. Mulvey writes that ‘the inanimate images of the film strip not only come alive in projection, but are the ghostly images of the now-dead resurrected into the appearance of life’ (2006, 36). Drawing on Roland Barthes,1 Mulvey argues that the temporal oscillation within the photographic between its status as a signifier of pastness (of ‘having been there’) and its status as a signifier of presence (that pastness is now here) evokes the threshold of uncertainty between life and death that Freud associated with the uncanny. For both Freud and Jentsch, the uncanny is a sensation or perception of uncertainty. Jentsch describes it as ‘doubt as to whether an apparently living being really is animate and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate ...’ (1906, 8). Jentsch explains that ‘the unpleasant impression is well known that readily arises in many people when they visit collections of wax figures, panopticons and panoramas. In semi-darkness it is often especially difficult to distinguish a life-size wax or similar figure from a human person’ (9). The problem of distinguishing between wax figures and living beings represents one end of the spectrum of the uncanny; at the other end lies the uncertainty involved with the perception of death itself as in the open-casket corpses of friends and relatives whom a skilled undertaker has made up to look as they did when they were alive.2 The cinematic image, of course, differs from that of the photographic image. But, as Mulvey insists, it is also an uncanny image in its blurring of boundaries between the animate and the inanimate, the organic and the inorganic, the moving and the still, and the alive and the dead (2006, 53). The photograph and the cinema are, for Mulvey, nineteenth century novelties that constitute a

2023

This is a brief introduction to the film Metropolis (Lang, 1927), presented at a screening of the film for the CSUN Cinema and Television Arts Cinematheque series "Are You A Replicant? VFX, Sci-fi, and the Meaning of Life" in spring 2023. The 'vulgar idealism' of its expressionist forebearers is well represented in the catastrophe of Metropolis. As famed German cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer would write, in its self-confused and reductionist depiction of class warfare, ultimately infantilizing the proletariat and espousing the dismantling of the worker’s rebellious instincts, Metropolis naively contributes to a growing desire for "authoritative socialism" in German culture, a salvation from Weimar democratic parliamentarianism (Kreimeier, 173). As historical object, Metropolis proves that cinema itself is a form of science fiction; its technology is uniquely equipped to divine in its eternal present the future soon to come. The film harnesses the vanguard visual effects that would forever become synonymous with its genre to foretell a future less and less determined by human input, by critical interpretation that may resist the rationalized computerization of our shared social project.

Pearson Journal of Social Sciences, 2024

Fritz Lang's 1926 film "Metropolis", one of the most important examples of Science Fiction Cinema, shares some common elements with the city of Metropolis in Anatolia, from which it takes its name from. Director Fritz Lang took the audience on a journey to a future city with elements borrowed from antiquity, as if emulating the phrase "There is a Future in the Past ". First of all, "Metropolis" conveyed the planned city-which was the lifestyle of antiquity-into the future. In film, structures similar to Ancient Greek Temples, with horizontal or vertical elements were used, instead of hi-tech future cities in the form of transparent capsules. Designs of steam-powered factories, constructivist buildings in the city, the Catacomb, the Moloch Machine, the cathedral or the neighborhoods reflect the grid-planned rationalist urbanization politics of the antiquity. In addition, the looks of the female robot in the leading role of the movie is similar to the descriptions of Hygeia from the ancient city of Metropolis. As a matter fact, robots in the following period of cinema history have had humanoid features besides having artificial intelligence, at least in terms of carrying organic parts. In our work, we examine the connection between the city of Metropolis in the Torbalı district of Izmir-Turkey and the city of Metropolis in the movie, both visually and in terms of content.

ABSTRACT The present research study will try to evolve in close symbotic relation between the metropolis and cultural, social conditions and predicament in the selected movies such as Delhi Belly directed by AbhinayDeo, Delhi Six by Rakesh Omprakash Mehraand Mani Ratnam’s Yuva,. The research work will attempt to register insider’s outsideness in metroplises’s landscape to see how the surrounding world is represented in the movies such as Sudhir Mishra’s Calcutta Mail; Rock On by Abhishek Kapoor begins with struggle in Mumbai and later has the backdrop of the city Delhi in which a band of young rebel musicians shown to capitalizing on their skills for survival. The movies such as Mahanagar by Satyajit Ray, Life in a Metro directed by Anurag Basu that set in Mumbai, and Page-3 directed by Madhur Bhandarkar explore power – play between the culture and the media through the eyes of a female. The study will involve the city environment from the perception of the characters of the movies and from the filmmakers’ point of view i.e. interplay would be searched between the pace of metropolises’ landscapes and the pace of human activities i.e. how the internal crises, limitations finds space for freedom, openness, hybridization and recognition. Key Words: Hindi Cinema, Society, Metropolises, Cinematic Representations

2017

This thesis seeks to demonstrate that the uncanny and stop motion animation enjoy a special relationship, one characterised by a sense of darkness becoming visible. A range of scholars, including Barbara Creed, Tom Gunning, and Laura Mulvey, have recognised that film is capable of embodying the dark fears and concerns related to the collapsing of boundaries and merging of oppositions that are characteristic of the uncanny. Stop motion, this research argues, is a form that is written through with uncanniness. Stop motion animation is especially capable of conveying an experience of the uncanny because of the technical processes through which an impression of movement and life is created from stillness, inertia and death. The thesis explores its claims through in-depth investigation of Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay on the uncanny, and a range of critical and literary texts and intertexts - including the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Stanislaw Lem, John Milton and Georges Bataille - which enga...

Camera Obscura, 2001

(Cover Page) In his famous work "The Uncanny", psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud writes: "[the uncanny in fictions] is a much more fertile province than the uncanny in real life, for it contains the whole of the latter and something more besides, something that cannot be found in real life (…) The somewhat paradoxical result is that in the first place a great deal that is not uncanny in fiction would be so if it happened in real life; and in the second place that there are many more means of creating uncanny effects in fiction than there are in real life." Seizing upon this conundrum, Lewis Kerfane deploys the tenets of Freudian and Lacanian theory as he seeks to apply them to literature, the visual arts and cinema. This book takes the reader from dream interpretation to the symbolic order at large, to the fundamental fantasy, the gaze and the object of desire, to the uncanny proper, and finally the operation of suture at work in the movies. More Real Than Reality Itself thus gradually delineates the contours of the real as it tries to make sense of art in all its forms.

The parallel re-reading of the topography of the two urban landscapes portrayed in the Science Fiction movies of Metropolis, Fritz Lang (1927), and The Matrix, Wachowski siblings (1999), highlights the role architecture plays in building part of the symbolic meanings both the movies address about the importance Urban Planning has in relation with the society's development. Specifically, this essay's goal is to target the role of architecture as a system of meanings, whose understandings is helpful in order to meditate on some of the most forward-looking themes that such movies anticipated. The first one chronologically speaking, Fritz Lang's film Metropolis, substantially differs from other science fiction futures displayed at that time, which more deeply reflects an image of people living inside machines or, generically overwhelmed by the new rising technology, pretty much like what happen in Modern Times (1937) where a majestic Charlie Chaplin is slide and transported along and within the new technological superstructures. Soon after, the city as the main object of representation, takes the spotlight of the action and its characteristics are begin to be shown by the director's eye: the point of view being located within the city and its structures and infrastructures, the urban landscape is portrayed focusing on the city's vastness. The ultimate goal of such cinematographic vision is to make the spectators feel as if they are observing the entire system of the place, in this case an urban ecosystem, as it operates. This kind of shot-camera acts in the exactly opposite way than an Earth-from Space images, or a zenithal urban shot from a plane, which both enhances the outside point of view of representation. One famous example of what I am speaking about it is the 9 minutes film directed by the architects Charles and Ray Eames The Power of Ten (1977), in which the outside point of view is specially remarked by the aerial perspective and the further widen of the camera lens, two effects that