The lost masterpiece. There’s a romance to it. Literature has heaps of them: From Shakespeare’s fabled adaptation of Don Quixote, to Aristotle’s treatise on comedy, to Lord Byron’s memoirs. Wordsmiths don’t hold the patent on vanished treasures, though. Despite cinema’s much shorter history, it has racked up a few holy grails of its own, and sometimes even a victorious Galahad.
A somewhat recent example that springs to mind is the 1981 discovery of a complete 
version of Carl Theodore Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. Like its heroine, the film was thought to have been destroyed in a fire. By a weird twist of fate, it was in a remote closet of a sanitarium that a single print of the original film survived - such an institution as might have been able to preserve the original Joan, had it been around at the time.
Since the find, film historians have been in a mad flurry of opening closet doors. In 2008 it paid off once again. In the Buenos Aires Museo del Cine, an ancient print of Fritz Lang's 1926 classic Metropolis was discovered. This movie is like a mill of iconic science fiction imagery: the beauty of the cinematography and art direction have been influential beyond reckoning.
The past year has been spent in expensive and painstaking restoration of the new old material (and quite a bit of restoring there was to be done – check out the grainy, scratchy originals here.) The new, 150 minute cut opened the Berlin International Film Festival in January of this year.
The film began touring the U.S. last weekend. It’s off to a strong start with an opening weekend average-per-theater superior to most films in this week’s top ten. There are very few prints of it, but luckily for those of us outside of Los Angeles they’re touring. Hop on over to the distributor’s website here to see if it’s coming to a theater near you.
Unlike Atlantis, the lost Metropolis of film has surfaced. Viewers now have a rare chance to see it transform from its ruins to the living, breathing city that materialized all too briefly on the German screen in 1926.
