From Automaton to Autonomy

Abstract

This essay considers Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) in relation to Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936) and the writings of two other Frankfurt School critics—Theodor Adorno and Siegfried Kracauer. Anticipating the larger argument of Benjamin’s essay, the film situates its central conflict around the “auratic” (as represented by Maria’s Christianity) and the “mechanical” (as embodied by Joh Fredersen’s technology). This conflict is crystallized by the robotic Maria, who is an exact duplicate of the real Maria. The essay highlights Adorno’s correspondence with Benjamin, examining how Metropolis itself engages with the positions these critics take on mechanical reproduction in film. Especially relevant in this regard is Kracauer’s classic study of German cinema, From Caligari to Hitler (1947), a book that levels against Lang the charge that Marxism often levels against modernism: its formalism mystifies its politics. The essay concludes with an analysis of the flood scene from Metropolis, demonstrating that the film’s formalism is not merely “ornamental”—as Kracauer claimed—and that for Lang political autonomy is inextricably linked with aesthetic autonomy.