Paramount sold Metropolis with nine adjectives in three stacks: fantastic, futuristic, fatalistic, then erotic, exotic, erratic, then imaginary, impressive, impossible.
This is the English-language Paramount Pictures release poster for Fritz Lang's 1927 UFA production. Under its Parufamet distribution arrangement with UFA, Paramount commissioned the playwright Channing Pollock to make a simpler American version from the existing footage. Pollock shortened Lang's original from 153 minutes and reworked the intertitles, and the poster's diagonal red credit banner names both Lang and Pollock. Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut and Karl Vollbrecht designed the sets.
The film opened in Berlin on 10 January 1927, and Pollock's version premiered in the United States in March 1927.
On the poster
A woman's face fills the left third of the sheet, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, short dark hair lit against a deep purple ground. It is Brigitte Helm, who played both Maria and the Machine-Person in the film. To her right rises Lang's imagined city: a densely illustrated Art Deco skyline of coloured towers, archways and aerial walkways. A lone worker in orange drives a machine wheel at its foot while crowds surge in the foreground.
Across the top, in hand-drawn green capitals: "METROPOLIS". Down the centre, the three stacks of white italic type read "FANTASTIC / FUTURISTIC / FATALISTIC", "EROTIC / EXOTIC / ERRATIC" and "IMAGINARY / IMPRESSIVE / IMPOSSIBLE".
About this print
A digitally restored reproduction, printed on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art paper with pigment inks.
