Speaking of Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s film recently had a huge role in the last Berlinale edition. A never-seen-before, thought-to-be-lost full version of the film was discovered in Buenos Aires by film historian Fernando Martín Peña and Film Museum director Paula Félix-Didier. After being restored by the Murnau Foundation, it was presented in full splendor at a gala at the Friedrichstadt Palast opera house. However, as if the film was too powerful to be contained by red velvet curtains and an exclusive, tuxedowearing audience and needed to get out there to the people, a much more spectacular and relevant open air screening (a thousand spectators enduring the cold German winter) took place at the Pariser Platz. There, Metropolis came in contact with Berlin’s very own history and architecture: the futuristic picture of a city placed over the Dorian and deeply meaningful set of the Brandenburg Gate. Argentine journalist Javier Alcacer reported how the images seemed as if “they were coming out of an inter-dimensional gap that tore up the middle of the square”, and also noticed how locals were “proudly bragging about being able to showscreen that way such an important piece of film history”.

The link open air cinema establishes with large audiences and the location in which it is set, echoes the idea of public art. As its own very name describes, the idea of collective appreciation lies at the core of it. And although the formats one most often relates to this art form are more the likes of urban sculptures, happenings, and installations, cinema and its two dimensions can also (as it happened with the Brandenburg columns and Metropolis expressionist diagonal lines) articulate with public three-dimensional spaces.

As today the film watching experience finds itself more and more withdrawn into the privacy of one’s own home, pushed back as it is by online downloading+home-theater+LCD TV situation, the industry is witnessing a slow tendency some extend to the point of pronouncing the future death of cinema as we know it; that is, as an art form thought to be enjoyed collectively (the return of the 3D format can actually be seen as a resource closer to desperate measure than a true technical and aesthetic step forward). If traditional screenings (i.e. in a movie theater) tend to act as a last stand against this process by maintaining its ritual quality, while placing cinema in a playful two-way tension with the scenery where is projected (in Rotterdam, Maddin noticed the street noises seemed to add new meanings to his silent short); the open air screenings sit at the extreme of the this stubborn rebellion against individualization. Thus, they become not so much a way of clinging on to an ancient régime, but a political stand for collective communion through art.

by Agustín Mango