While the children of the rich have fun in the “Kids’ Club”, the working class toils underground on huge machines. That’s how it is in “Metropolis”, Fritz Lang’s masterpiece fascinates audiences to this day. There are several versions of this silent film from 1927, it was mutilated after its premiere, reworked and only largely reconstructed in recent decades. Lang’s film has also changed musically, the original score is by Gottfried Huppertz; but there is also a pop version by Giorgio Moroder and several new settings for piano, choir or string quartet.
At the start of the Regensburg Silent Film Week on August 15, the 146-minute, reconstructed original version of “Metropolis” will be performed, with musical accompaniment from the Regensburg multi-instrumentalists Rainer Hofmann and Bertl Wenzl. The festival shows films for six evenings: When the weather is nice, the screenings take place in the arcaded courtyard of the Thon-Dittmer-Palais, when the weather is bad, they go to the “Leerer Beutel” film gallery.
Each of the six films is set to music live by musicians such as Maud Nelissen and Daphne Balvers or the Aljoscha Zimmermann Ensemble from Munich. They all make the performances a unique event. Or as Aljoscha Zimmermann once said: “We get involved live in what’s happening in the film.” That has always been the case, often music was composed for silent films. However, much of the original music has been lost over the years. The musicologist Oliver Huck from the University of Hamburg would like to investigate the origin and forms of music for silent films up to 1918. His project was recently funded by the German Research Foundation.
Whether his findings will have an impact on future performances remains to be seen. In Regensburg, silent films like Dziga Vertov’s “The Man with the Camera” or the 1923 film adaptation of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” with Lon Chaney are on the schedule. “The Love of Jeanne Ney” by GW Pabst or the US comedy “It – That Certain Something” with Clara Bow will also be shown. Each of them will have their own sound.
41st Regensburg Silent Film Week, Tuesday, August 15th to Sunday, August 20th, www.stummfilmwoche.de