Metropolis (2023)
 
This year, the landmark silent film Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang, will enter the public domain. To celebrate this occasion, Magazinist 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