Entries associated with the tag "Fritz Lang":

Earlier this week the Museum of Cinema in Buenos Aires held a press screening of long-lost scenes from Fritz Lang's silent sci-fi epic Metropolis that were located in the museum's archives in April. Twenty to twenty-five minutes of footage, cut from the film by the German studio Ufa after the film's unsuccessful release in 1927, have been recovered from a print, now heavily scratched, that was brought to Argentina by a private collector in 1928.

As Lang fans know, Metropolis has been available in a dizzying array of cuts over the past 80 years. Patrick McGilligan writes in his biography Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast, "The film was dictatorially and carelessly slashed everywhere after its Berlin premiere. Foreign negatives were often different from domestic negatives—to save money, different 'takes' rejected for domestic release were often inserted into foreign negatives, so that subtly and dramatically different prints made their way around the world. Local and government censorship in other countries added to the confusing variety of versions."

Helmut Possman, head of the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation in Wiesbaden, Germany, has said that the new material will bring the film within five minutes of its original length.

To celebrate its 75th anniversary, the University of Chicago's Documentary Film Group (that's Doc Films to you) will be displaying some of its coolest possessions from July 16 to August 31 at the Joseph Regenstein Library, 1110 E. 57th. Along with old programs, posters, and programming calendars, you'll find correspondence from Samuel Fuller and Jean Renoir, rare personal-appearance photos of John Ford and Howard Hawks—even Fritz Lang's martini recipe.

Curator Kyle Westphal just completed a bachelor's degree in Cinema and Media Studies at UC, and his thesis documents the history of America's "longest continuously running student film society." About half the items were culled from alumni association materials donated to the library's special collections; Westphal, Doc's current programming chair, dug the rest of the stuff out of the group's archives. Among the artifacts on display:

•  A cartoon by Fritz Lang, drawn in 1970 for a Doc staffer living in Los Angeles. Lang had recently visited the Hyde Park campus for a screening of Hangmen Also Die (1943); mostly blind by then, he had to be led around on both arms, but according to Westphal he insisted on attending the screening and shouted from the back of the theater that the print was out of focus.

•  Silk-screened posters for Psycho and To Catch a Thief, autographed by Alfred Hitchcock during his 1967 visit, as well as excerpts from an unpublished interview.

•  Letters from Jean Renoir in 1969 and Sam Fuller in 1970 regarding their campus appearances.

•  Correspondence from Pauline Kael, Josef von Sternberg, and Stanley Kubrick, collected during the 1962-64 run of the Midwest Film Festival (a precursor to the Chicago International Film Festival).

•  Photos of John Ford (sample above), taken during a 1968 visit to screen The Long Voyage Home, and of Howard Hawks in 1971.

•  Publicity materials for Maya Deren's 1951 lecture at the university.

In addition to these items, says Westphal, the group's calendars also allowed him to track programming trends and critical ideas that influenced Doc's offerings to students over the years. "Doc Films at 75" is free and open to the public weekdays from 8:30 AM to 4:45 PM and Saturday from 9 AM to 12:45 PM. Westphal will give a guided tour of the exhibit during the opening reception on Monday, July 16, 3 to 4:30 PM. For more information contact the university's Special Collections Research Center at 773-702-8705 or specialcollections@lib.uchicago.edu.