This year, the landmark silent film Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang, will enter the public domain. To celebrate this occasion, experimental music duo Magazinist (Matthew Tomkinson & Andy Zuliani) will offer a live rescoring of the film.
A cautionary sci-fi epic, Metropolis holds up an unsettling mirror to our present-day anxieties around artificial intelligence, class division, the automation of labour, and the blurred boundaries of the human. It imagines a dystopian future brought about by the narrow utopianism of the technocratic elite. Magazinist’s score mines the uneasy zones of overlap between the organic and the machine-made, with compositions that echo the angular distortion of the film’s Expressionist style, the gestural oscillations of the workers, and the electrical charge of Rotwang’s iconic laboratory equipment.
With a focus on unique hand-built instruments alongside vocal processing, synthesizers, and other electronics, their original soundtrack supports the film’s mesmerizing visuals with a fittingly expansive score, including post-industrial rhythms, soaring utopian motifs, and dystopian drones. Embodying the subterranean labour of the workers on screen, the performers enact a restless quest of their own, to keep the Moloch Machine of music running throughout the film’s prodigious runtime without being swallowed by its hellmouth.
Early Bird: $18
From Sept 22: $25
Country of Origin: Germany | Year: 1927 | Language: Silent film with subtitles | 19+ | 135 min
Date: Sunday, October 22, 2023
Time: 6:30 pm
Venue: VIFF Centre | 1181 Seymour Street | Vancouver, BC | V6B 3M7
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