METROPOLIS With Live Soundtrack by Ben Model!

Incorporating more than 25 minutes of newly discovered footage, this 2010 restoration of METROPOLIS is the definitive edition of Fritz Lang’s science fiction masterpiece, the film’s dazzling visual design and special effects are more striking than ever. The integration of scenes and subplots long considered lost endows METROPOLIS with even greater tension and emotional resonance, as it dramatizes the conflict between wealthy über-capitalists and rebellious subterranean laborers—orchestrated by a diabolical scientist capable of destroying them both.

BEN MODEL is one of the nation’s leading silent film accompanists, and performs on both piano and theatre organ. 

Over the past 35+ years Ben has created and performed live scores for several hundred silent films, films lasting anywhere from one minute to five hours. Ben is a resident film accompanist at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC) and at the Library of Congress’ Packard Campus Theatre, and performs at theatres, museums, schools and other venues around the US and internationally. As a film programmer, Ben has co-curated film series for The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and co-programs a monthly silent film series at the Cinema Arts Center. 

"A MASTERPIECE OF VISIONARY SILENT CINEMA... one of the strangest, most fascinating films ever made, a futuristic nightmare that is both sublime in its grandeur and remarkably intimate in its emotions. Just about every science-fiction movie you can think of pays tribute to its influence, but to date none has matched its strangeness or its prophetic power."- A.O. Scott, The New York Times

“Fritz Lang's 1927 film is a crazed futurist epic, a mythic sprawl with something of Jung and Wagner, and dystopian nightmare about a city-state built on slave labour, whose prosperity depends on suppressing a mutinous underground race whose insurrectionist rage is beginning to bubble. Metropolis predicts the ideologies of class and race of the 20th century, the robot is a brilliant eroticisation and fetishisation of modern technology and the current crisis in Dubai, whose economic boom was founded on a colossal import of globalised labour, makes Metropolis seem very contemporary.”- Peter Bradshaw