Infrastructure, Water, Ecology: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as Ecological Archive1 249 Infrastructure, Water, Ecology: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as Ecological Archive 1 Seth Peabody Carleton College Abstract: Fritz Lang’s comments about the inspiration for his film Metropolis emphasize the verticality and bright lights he encountered on his first view of Manhattan in 1924. Scholarship on the film’s cityscape has likewise focused on skyscrapers, the influence of and discourse about New York, and the debate about skyscrapers in Germany. Yet events high above ground constitute a minority of the film’s action. The present study argues that the upward focus in past scholarship has distracted from the equally dramatic ecological archive underground. After discussing ideas about archives that undergird the study, the article offers a new analysis of the film’s cityscape in relation to the rapidly expanding underground infrastructures of early twentieth-century Europe and ideas about ecology and pollution that circulated around the time of the film’s release. With these contexts in mind, Metropolis resonates as an ecological archive of Weimar Germany as much as a science fiction fantasy of the future. Keywords: Fritz Lang, Metropolis, German film, infrastructure, environment, ecocinema, ecocriticism When researching the filmic environment of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, frequently cited as the prototypical science fiction cityscape, a curious puzzle emerges. Lang’s comments about the inspiration for the film emphasize the verticality and bright lights he encountered on his first view of Manhattan in 1924. Scholarship on the film’s cityscape has likewise focused on skyscrapers, the influence of and discourse about New York, and the debate about skyscrapers in Germany. Yet events high above ground constitute a minority of the action: in the 2010 reconstruction, the film spends roughly equal amounts of time high above ground in the Eternal Gardens, offices, or apartments; at street level; and underground. The present study asks: What is missed by focusing on the above-ground cityscape? I argue that the upward focus in past scholarship has distracted from the equally dramatic ecological archive underground. This paper aims to reopen that archive� In what follows, I use the framework of cinema as an ecological archive to analyze Metropolis and argue that Lang’s film serves as an archive for the manifold environmental relations of its time. I begin by briefly reflecting on ideas about archives that inform the present study. I then examine four different areas of environmental discourse that are evident in Lang’s film. Two of these fields of discourse — the debate about skyscrapers in Weimar Germany and the interaction between environment and social tensions — have already received significant scholarly attention. The other two — rapidly expanding underground infrastructures of early twentieth-century Europe and notions about ecology and pollution that circulated around the time of the film’s release — have gone largely unnoticed, and will therefore receive the majority of the attention in this study� Archives have been described as “prosthetic memory” (Kieckhefer n. pag.): the physical materials of the archive enhance the limited capacity of the human brain for storing information. In defining the word “archive,” dictionaries tend to focus on collections of documents deliberately preserved by archivists� But an ecological archive — understood in this study as a collection of sources that yields insight into the physical environment, changing ecological processes, and environmental discourses — also draws on physical materials created and preserved independently of, or as an unintentional byproduct of, human agency� The ecological archive of cinema includes films’ explicit plotlines about environmental topics, landscapes captured in the background of a film scene about an unrelated topic, and even the scratched surface of a film print that bears witness to the past environments of the film’s storage, distribution, and exhibition. The storytelling power of film draws on all of these environmental components. Scholars of new materialisms argue that “things (or matter) draw their agentic power from their relation to discourses that in turn structure human relations to materiality”; in other words, “phenomena result from the intra-actions of material and discursive practices and agencies” (Iovino and Oppermann, “Introduction” 4; cf. Barad 3). Film, with its inherent tension between creative manipulation and indexical realism, is a particularly useful medium for this approach because it sits at a middle ground between documents created and preserved intentionally, and physical materials into which information is inscribed regardless of human intent (cf. Lethen 16). In Metropolis, a clear link between film archive and ecological archive arises through the film’s focus on massive engineering projects to control the physical 250 Seth Peabody Infrastructure, Water, Ecology: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as Ecological Archive 251 environment, especially through the tunnels, caverns, and waterworks of the underground city. The ecological archive of Metropolis became even more evident when a nearly complete copy of the film was discovered in a Buenos Aires film archive in 2008. In the twenty-five minutes of new scenes that were added to the film in the 2010 reconstruction, the heavily scratched surface of the image reminds the viewer of the materiality of film and the impacts of nonhuman factors alongside deliberate filmmaking practices. Further, several of the newly restored scenes deal with the film’s underground spaces and climactic flood (cf. “New Scenes” 4—6). Lang’s Metropolis is of course one of the most canonical films of German cinema, yet it is not generally considered as an environmental text� Canon formation and archival preservation tend to reflect power structures and dominant patterns of taste (cf. Kacandes 11—12). Yet both archives and canons, even as they try to establish stable traditions, also contain the potential for destabilization through diverse interpretive possibilities. According to Jacques Derrida, the multiplicity of discourses within any text comprises “an earthquake from which no classificational concept and no implementation of the archive can be sheltered. Order is no longer assured” (Derrida 11). Whatever the rationale for a document’s preservation or canonization, it might also yield insight into any number of conditions that influenced its creation — including relationships between humans and their environment. An ecological approach thus offers a chance to read the canon, but “read it slant,” to adapt Emily Dickinson’s (no less revolutionary than canonical) phrase, so that we might circle back through familiar works and reveal new layers of truth. After all, “success,” Dickinson assures us, “in circuit lies” (Dickinson 563). Metropolis is sufficiently well known that I will forego a thorough plot summary. For the purposes of this analysis, it suffices to note that the film displays a city divided vertically into three distinct environments: wealthy businessmen live and work high up in skyscrapers; laborers and machines are buried underground; and the traffic and business of city residents circulates at ground level. A conflict between the skyscraper elites and the underground workers erupts through a riot in the machine halls, a flood in the underground city, and a reconciliation at street level� Past discussions of the environmental discourses in Metropolis, or what I am describing as the ecological archive of the film, have focused on two primary areas: the relation of the film’s skyscrapers to the Weimar-era “Schrei nach dem Turmhaus” or skyscraper mania, and the way in which the environments in the film create spatial symbols for social tensions. Dietrich Neumann’s 1994 essay on the cityscape of Metropolis set the tone for scholarly discussions of the film’s 252 Seth Peabody relation to skyscraper discourse in Weimar Germany. Neumann writes that “the film’s architecture is one of the few features that has not been analyzed in any detail up to now” (Neumann 146) and describes H. G. Wells’s review of the film as “the only analysis that dealt with Metropolis’ urbanistic vision in any detail” (147). Wells’s New York Times Magazine review of 17 April 1927 criticized the film for showing an outdated vertical vision of the city, when urban planners had long since abandoned the notion of growth upward in favor of sprawl outward into suburbs (Neumann 148; cf. Wells 95). Neumann responds by arguing that the film reflects the “skyscraper mania”—consisting of plans and debates, not predictions or realized projects — in Germany during the 1920s. As evidence, Neumann discusses parallels between leading architects’ visions for German skyscrapers and Erich Kettelhut’s revisions of his set design for the film (149, 151—52, 155—62). The gap that Neumann identified regarding scholarship on the architecture of Metropolis has largely been filled. 2 In subsequent studies of the filmic environment, commentators have often focused on the relationships between Lang’s filmic cityscape and the film’s social structures. As Thomas Elsaesser points out, Lang does not endorse or reject verticality, but uses it as a “universally understood metaphor of social power” (Elsaesser, Metropolis 88). Several essays have dealt with the city’s underground realm, often treating it metaphorically as a space of myth or oppression within the film’s vertically oriented symbolic structure. These analyses tend to argue that Lang’s filmic city combines “the verticalized cityscape of Manhattan with the mythic underworld of Paris and the contemporary concerns of Berlin” (Pike, Subterranean Cities 283; cf. Elsaesser, Metropolis 88; Kaes 175—76; Pike, “Kaliko-Welt” 477). The underground layers are marked on the one hand by the mysticism of the catacombs, and on the other hand by the social issues represented by the bell in the underground city’s central square. The bell’s base was patterned after a monument in Weimar, designed by Walter Gropius, that memorializes the murder of workers who had gone on strike in 1920 to oppose the Kapp Putsch. The bell thus displays in condensed form the sociopolitical tensions embedded into Metropolis’s vertical structure (cf. Neumann 153). The role of underground water has likewise been explained metaphorically: the continual rising, boiling, and bubbling water stands as a recurrent symbol for the rising social unrest of the oppressed masses (Elsaesser, Metropolis 26; Kaes 185; Schönemann 66). Past analyses have helpfully elucidated the architectural debates and symbolic implications of the urban landscape in Metropolis� But as a product of environmental discourses in 1927, Lang’s film serves as an archive for much more than Infrastructure, Water, Ecology: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as Ecological Archive 253 just urban design discussions and social tensions. It also reflects and expands on realities on the ground, and underground, in Germany and around Europe. Underground tunnels, caverns, machines, and water systems create a massive infrastructure beneath the surface of the cinematic city in Metropolis. These elements of the filmic environment serve as an ecological archive of ideas inspired by the massive construction projects that underlay all of the European metropolises in which Fritz Lang had lived, studied, and worked. In the most famous review of the film, H. G. Wells derides Metropolis for its failure as a work of creativity: rather than imagining the future, Wells argues, the film shows technologies such as cars and airplanes that already exist. It then implants them into a vertical notion of urban growth that may be visually impressive, but that had been abandoned by architects and urban planners decades before the film was made (Wells 94). Wells might have been more impressed if, rather than expecting a futuristic account of urban technologies, he had considered how Lang’s film reveals crucial technologies that are often hidden such as underground tunnels, structural supports, and sewers. In his search for flashy gadgets, Wells ignores the film’s infrastructures. Paul Edwards, a leading scholar of infrastructure studies, writes that “the most salient characteristic of technology in the modern […] world is the degree to which most technology is not salient for most people, most of the time” (Edwards 185). When we talk about technology, he continues, we usually mean high tech, while the vast majority of technologies — from foundational building blocks of culture such as ceramics, screws, and paper to “mature technological systems” such as roads and sewers — reside in a “naturalized background, as ordinary and unremarkable to us as trees, daylight, and dirt” (185). These technological systems have become infrastructures; they are remarkable precisely because they are invisible. In Metropolis, H. G. Wells may not have seen anything new or futuristic, but he certainly saw technologies of the present that he was not accustomed to seeing. Raymond Bellour writes that “the focus of Lang’s mise en scène is so often vision itself,” a trait frequently exemplified in the figure of the detective seeking clues (Bellour 25). Metropolis is not about searching for answers to a mystery; instead, it emphasizes vision by showing what is known but rarely seen or even acknowledged. It creates a visual archive of the often invisible infrastructural layers of the city� Numerous developments in infrastructure history form the backdrop for the cinematic environment in Lang’s film. When Metropolis was released in Berlin in 1927, the city was undergoing a rapid transformation of its transportation, water, and power infrastructures� Subway tunnels were being rapidly expanded: “Der Bau mehrerer neuer U-Bahn-Linien ab 1927 entpuppte sich als eine Herausforderung auch für die Wasseringenieure” (Schug et al. 136). The water 254 Seth Peabody infrastructure at the center of the filmic city in Metropolis comprises an imagined archive of projects taking place in Berlin and across Europe� Building on major water engineering projects underway since the eighteenth century (cf. Blackbourn 5), the construction of elaborate and costly water infrastructure played a major role in efforts to modernize cities across Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Environmental historian Frank Uekötter notes that “cities from Paris to Budapest were competing for the latest and best urban technology”; even today, “the quality of life and the attractiveness of the European metropolises rest not least on accomplishments from the turn of the century” (Uekötter 41). Fritz Lang had lived his formative years in some of the primary cities in which these infrastructure projects had been underway� He grew up in Vienna, and Patrick McGilligan writes that “the architecture of the city towered in Lang’s psychology. […] The characteristic shots from high places, the extreme upward-slanting low angles, the lingering emphasis on the size and structure of massive buildings, the people dwarfed by walls or doors — these were a legacy that was distinctly Viennese” (McGilligan 6). When Lang left Vienna, he next settled in Paris, which Matthew Gandy describes as a classic example of the “plumbed city” in which “private and public realms have been regularized and separated” (Gandy 6). Paris’s impressive sewers had entered the public consciousness through a prominent photography exhibit in the 1860s and public tours starting in 1867; they were a familiar sight long before Lang’s arrival in 1913 (Gandy 33). In 1918 Lang moved to Berlin� In 1920, the Groß-Berlin Gesetz was passed; it vastly increased the land area and population of the city, and also called for unification of 21 distinct waterworks covering 46 municipalities. The system now included 1,400 kilometers of water pipes and had an annual capacity of 40 million cubic meters of water� During the decade that followed, the capacity would increase to 256 million cubic meters, and by 1932 it would reach one million cubic meters per day (Schug et al. 124, 136). The furious expansion of the city’s water infrastructure did not occur without glitches. The city’s waterworks had just made it through a shortage of workers during the Great War. Then in 1919, a general strike called by communists and left-wing Independent Social Democrats (USPD) was met a with a brutal response ordered by Gustav Noske, an official of the centrist Majority Social Democrats (MSPD), and carried out by right-wing Freikorps troops, causing some disruption to gas, water, and power supplies. Further, the general strike that followed the Kapp Putsch in 1920 — alluded to in Metropolis via the Gropius-inspired bell at the center of the worker’s city — led to interruptions of the water supply for some Berlin residents (Schug et al. 105—06). Later in the decade, the rapid expansion of waterworks coincided with the development of subways as well as Infrastructure, Water, Ecology: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as Ecological Archive 255 the growth of infrastructure for gas and electricity, leading to enormous costs and a “Gedränge unter der Straßenoberfläche” (Schug et al. 136). Lang and his viewers had experienced the rapid growth of infrastructure and had witnessed its susceptibility to social and political upheaval� While interruptions to the water supply were limited in scope and brief in duration (Schug et al. 105), they made it clear that political upheaval on the streets had consequences within the homes and apartments where people lived — especially for those workers who lived on the upper floors of apartment buildings, where reduced water pressure had its first impacts in the form of reduced or nonexistent water supply. Thus, the portrayal of social strife within a context of water infrastructure in Metropolis — and the fact that this conflict directly impacts the workers’ homes — would have been uncomfortably familiar to the first viewers of Metropolis� With all of these elements of the film and of Lang’s own experience in mind, it appears that the filmic environment in Metropolis draws much inspiration from European cities and underground infrastructures, not just from the glittering skyscrapers of New York� Why, then, did Lang ignore these underground environments in his written comments? As it turns out, he didn’t, even in his texts about the United States� Instead, his writings have been sampled selectively by critics (and by Lang himself). Commentators frequently discuss the travelogue that Lang published in Film-Kurier shortly after his return from America in December 1924� 3 The text describes the glittering lights and shining skyscrapers of Manhattan; it plays into Lang’s “carefully cultivated myth” regarding the flash of inspiration that led him to create Metropolis (Bachmann 5). But this summary ignores half of the story. The full title of Lang’s article is “Was ich in Amerika sah: Neuyork — Los Angeles.” About half of the text deals not with New York towering upward, but rather with Los Angeles sprawling outward and digging downward. In another travelogue published shortly after the Film-Kurier article, Lang focuses entirely on this second form of urban expansion that he had witnessed in the United States. The article “Zwischen Bohrtürmen und Palmen: Ein kalifornischer Reisebericht” was published in the magazine Filmland on 3 January 1925. The report begins with a focus on oil derricks: “Im Anfang war der Bohrturm. Dann kam die asphaltierte Straße, die sich Meilen um Meilen durch trostloses Oedland erstreckt, immer flankiert von den wild wachsenden Bohrtürmen. Dann, zur Verschönerung der Gegend, werden die Palmen angesiedelt” (Lang, “Zwischen Bohrtürmen und Palmen” 16). Lang describes the roads as leading through a wasteland, and the palm trees are added as an ornamental afterthought: the primary element is the growing forest of oil rigs digging underground� When Lang arrived in Los Angeles, the city was three years into an oil boom that had begun with the discovery of three 256 Seth Peabody major oil fields in 1920 and 1921 (Tygiel 13—15). Due to the “rule of capture” by which, according to United States law, oil belonged to whoever brought it to the surface — unlike in Germany, where oil belonged to the state regardless of where it was located — and because land in Los Angeles was already divided into small plots owned by numerous individuals, a race of “town lot” drilling ensued. Wells were drilled side by side, with each landowner trying to profit individually from the underground resource (Tygiel 29). The landscape above the oil fields came to resemble a crowded forest of densely packed oil derricks stretching across entire neighborhoods (Tygiel 30; Elkind 84). While the underground resource was oil, not water, the city nonetheless provided an image of frenzied development to gain wealth by controlling underground fluids, resulting simultaneously in a strange growth of vertical structures above ground. Past scholars have noted that the California portion of Lang’s trip was as important as New York for the development of Metropolis because of what Lang and Erich Pommer learned by visiting American film studios (Elsaesser, Metropolis 19; Bachmann 8). Lang’s writings about the trip suggest that the landscapes and underground resources of Los Angeles, not merely the city’s film industry, played a significant role. Two years after Lang’s trip to America, publicity materials leading up to the release of Metropolis offer further evidence that the film’s underground elements merit close attention. One promotional article, written by UFA foreign publicity director Alfred Sander and published in the New York-based Motion Picture News, shows six images, five of which display underground spaces. Figure 1. From “Metropolis Likely to Be Sensation,” Motion Picture News, August 28, 1926 Infrastructure, Water, Ecology: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as Ecological Archive 257 The only above-ground photo shows Rotwang’s house — the most cave-like of above-ground spaces in the film. It is also the only image showing the sets still under construction, suggesting that the appeal of the city above ground lies in the impressive construction efforts rather than the completed filmic environment. Further, a striking continuity exists between the bottom left image, showing the mass of children struggling to climb the underground stairs to escape the flood, and the image showing Rotwang’s house. Identical vertical metal columns rise to the full height of the frame in both images� In the staircase image, two vertical columns occupy the foreground in the center and left of the image, pushing the main action of the scene — the children trying to escape death by drowning — into the background. In the image of Rotwang’s house, three vertical columns rise up in the center of the image; Rotwang’s house is essentially hidden behind them� In both cases, what appears to be the main focus of the scene is relegated to the background, thus foregrounding the role each physical space plays in supporting the towering structures that are suggested to exist above. The fact that these specific images were chosen to market the film suggests that underground infrastructure held a deep fascination and appeal for audiences; meanwhile, the skyscrapers that have dominated discussions about Metropolis are nowhere to be seen� All told, the underground imagery has been undervalued in the film, as has the film’s construction of a cityscape built around water infrastructure� Bearing this context in mind, a close analysis of underground scenes from Metropolis reveals a fictionalized archive of massive underground infrastructure projects. When Matthew Gandy writes about Berlin’s infrastructure in his book The Fabric of Space, he analyzes the 1930 semi-documentary Menschen am Sonntag due to the film’s focus on transport connections between the urban center and the forests and lakes at the periphery (Gandy 72—78). In contrast, Metropolis trains its gaze squarely on the center of the city — and as a result, the film offers an important supplement to the environmental discourses referenced in Menschen am Sonntag� Metropolis opens with an animated sequence that dissolves from the ornate art-deco title frame into a 10-second image of the city skyline, followed by the famous machine montage. In other words, after just 10 seconds of supposedly above-ground imagery, we are already underground with the machines and their operators. A minute into the film, the workers are shown at shift change in a windowless corridor or tunnel. 258 Seth Peabody Figure 2. Still from Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) The walls and ceiling consist of thick brick arches that seem to be supporting a heavy structure above. The tunnel serves several visual functions: first, it mirrors the portrayal of the humans contained within it. The low vaulted arches angle down toward the hunched shoulders of the workers leaving their shift, and the tunnel’s disappearance into the darkness of the elevator emphasizes the lack of a goal or meaning that results from complete alienation between the laborers and the fruits of their labor. The workers move in the exact same formation — blocks of workers six deep and six across, clad in matching dark uniforms and hats, marching in synchronized, slow, plodding steps — that they will use shortly later in the film, when Freder witnesses an explosion in the machine halls. Following the explosion, Freder sees a hallucinatory vision of slave-like workers marching into the mouth of the Moloch machine, sacrificing themselves to the demonic god of industry. The opening tunnel, like the vast machine hall of the later scene, comprises an environment in which oppressive underground architecture determines the direction of human lives� According to Thea von Harbou’s novel of Metropolis, created simultaneously with the screenplay, a single device known as the heart machine lies at the center of the film’s infrastructure. The heart machine is a generator that provides Infrastructure, Water, Ecology: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as Ecological Archive 259 power to all the machines of the city — there is “no machine in all Metropolis which did not receive its power from this heart” (von Harbou 123). 4 Among the machines that thus receive power, many work to pump away water that would otherwise inundate the workers’ homes: It was said that a river wound its way deep under the city. Joh Fredersen had walled up its course when he built the subterranean city, the wonder of the world, for the workmen of Metropolis. It was also said that the stream fed a mighty water-basin and that there were pump-works there, which were powerful enough, inside of less than ten hours either completely to empty or to fill the water basin — in which there was room for a medium-sized city. (Von Harbou 128; cf. Cowan 240) The description employs the language of folklore or urban legend (“It was said that. . .”), thus lending an aura of mythical awe to the machines’ infrastructural function. Moreover, the workers’ city is labeled as “the wonder of the world.” Given the focus on skyscrapers in discussions of the cityscape of the film Metropolis, it is remarkable that this laudatory language from the novel does not describe the skyscraper city above, but rather the tenement-filled cavern below ground, made possible through extensive water infrastructure� H.-G. Wells, as part of his scathing review of the film, suggests that the machines in Metropolis do not seem to do anything: “The machines make wealth. How is not stated. […] One is asked to believe that these machines are engaged quite furiously in the mass production of nothing that is ever used” (Wells 95). Wells criticizes the film’s portrayal of mechanical mass production, but he never considers that the machines might not be engaged in production at all� In fact, the machines reside, for most of the film, within what Edwards describes as the “naturalized background” of infrastructure (Edwards 185). Their function becomes visible when the machines break down and, as a result, the underground city floods. While the script of Lang’s film does not explicitly state the function of the city’s machines as water infrastructure, the film’s visuals emphasize water infrastructure at multiple levels. At the diegetic level, the machines’ function can be deduced from the fact that the city floods immediately after the workers destroy the heart machine. Further, at the extradiegetic level, filming the flood scene required construction of an impressive off-screen network of water basins, pipes, and pumps� In other words, creating a diegetic scene of infrastructure failure required the creation of an extradiegetic system of water infrastructure that would remain functional but unseen� In a production report published in the Berliner Zeitung three days before the film’s premiere, production co-designer Otto Hunte describes the elaborate preparations made for the flood scene: 260 Seth Peabody One scene in which a trick shot was completely out of the question was the flooding, where the cement and iron concrete pavement of the streets is broken open and destroyed by the masses of water. The large quantities of water needed for this had to be dammed up and kept on a higher level in order to achieve the necessary pressure� For this purpose, four reservoirs with a capacity of 1,600 cubic meters were built, and in addition to that several smaller tanks for special shots. (Hunte 81) Based on his involvement in creating Metropolis, Hunte sees the flood scene as an example of the film’s impressive physical structures, not its special effects. Film critic Lotte Eisner agrees: Admirable, too, are the ‘documentary’ techniques used for the flood-scenes, when the water spouting from the destroyed tanks mingles with the steel structures in the luminous mists, or when the surging flood nibbles at the asphalt in front of the workers’ barracks, and begins its gradual rise. Wherever the film concentrates on documentary and technological details, the private sentimentalism of the story is supplanted by genuinely dramatic effect. (Eisner 90) While most critics have described the underground scenes as mythic spaces or representations of political tensions in the film’s striated vertical vision, Eisner describes the underground flood sequence as “documentary” — showing events that really happened — and thus a counterexample to precisely the overblown pathos and symbolism that dominate much of the film. This contradiction embodies a tension not just within Metropolis, but within the filmic medium. Helmut Lethen has described film and photography as occupying a border position between indexical signs that document reality and creative products that are mediated, curated, or performed. According to Lethen, viewers often find themselves in the paradoxical position of knowing that they should be skeptical of the reality content of any media, including visual media, but nonetheless feeling an instinctive trust toward photography and film as supposedly unmediated and objective sources (Lethen 14—16). The flooding scene exemplifies both sides of this tension. With its exaggerated acting and stylized architecture, the scene is clearly artificial and heavily mediated through many components of the filmmaking process. Yet the film also presents the viewer with a sense of materiality independent of the filmmakers’ agency: gushing water fills the massive basin and splashes at the legs of the children. In Thea von Harbou’s novel of Metropolis, the scene is described with exaggerated personification; the flooding water speaks to Maria in direct, threatening quotations (von Harbou 155—57). As a result, the overtly constructed expressionist style eliminates any sense of a realistic portrayal of events. But in the film, the materiality of the scene exists undeniably alongside its creative signification, reminding the viewer that the Infrastructure, Water, Ecology: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as Ecological Archive 261 failed infrastructure created in filmic fantasy required very real and functional water infrastructure hidden off screen. As an ecological archive, the film records both the anxiety regarding infrastructure failure within the diegesis, and the impressive achievements of the extradiegetic water infrastructures captured simultaneously on screen� By providing an archive of fantasies and anxieties relating to water infrastructure, Metropolis also reveals patterns of ecological thought that helped to create Weimer-era environments. The film creates a world in which pollutants and pristine nature can be neatly segmented off from each other. Rather than everything being connected to everything else, to borrow from Barry Commoner’s first law of ecology (Commoner 29), Lang’s film presents a world in which everything can be separated or diluted to minimize interaction. In 1920s Europe, separation and dilution were promoted as successful ways to mitigate pollution. In Sweden in 1928, the year after Metropolis was released, a 145-meter-high smokestack at a smelting plant in Sweden was inaugurated as the tallest chimney in Europe (Högselius et al. 337). Build a smokestack — or a city — high enough, and the thinking was that the pollution would be rendered harmless through dilution. The same logic governed discussions of water quality. In 1927, a number of Dutch waterworks joined forces to fight pollution in the Rhine. Industrialists upstream in Germany thought this effort was not worth the trouble. As Karl Imhoff, the Managing Director of the Ruhr Cooperative, declared in 1928: “Except to protect the fisheries, there is no rationale whatsoever to do anything about the pouring of wastewater in the Rhine because its water volume is so large that it can absorb and cleanse the waste itself” (Högselius et al. 298). In discussions of air and water, concerns about pollution were assuaged simply by separating bodies that ought not to meet: if the polluting element is far enough away, and if enough water or air is flowing through the space, there is no cause for concern� Lang’s film shows a similar logic regarding pollution, and thus archives not only the physical structures of its time, but also the dominant ecological thinking of the era. The film ends with a flood, seemingly a sort of natural disaster, and yet all-out destruction seems to be the only environmental problem that the film can imagine. Pollution and contamination are absent; air and water flow cleanly through the shining city. There is smoke in the machine halls — indeed, when Freder attempts to take over the role of a worker during his initial descent into the underground city, he chokes on the smoke after entering the machine room. But he can contain the smoke by closing the door; it does not pollute the air outside, let alone the water beneath the city. In von Harbou’s novel, the reader gains two brief glimpses outside the city — one when Josaphat escapes a 262 Seth Peabody plane crash and is nursed back to health in a rural setting, the other when Joh Fredersen, master of Metropolis, visits his mother in a farmhouse (complete with a walnut tree outside her reading window) that he has relocated to a rooftop in the city (Gunning 83). Both of these idyllic scenes feature green vegetation, clear skies, puffy white clouds, and refreshing breezes. They appear to be fully separate from the city — either above the din, or beyond the lateral borders. But both would certainly share a watershed and would be impacted by the city’s smokestacks� Bringing this discussion back to the question of Lang’s film as part of an ecological archive, we might ask: What histories and discourses are at work here? How do these images of pollution and dilution contribute to the film’s effect as a work of environmental storytelling? Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, two leading scholars of material ecocriticism, have written about modes of analysis that go beyond “the conventional ecological vision according to which everything is connected with everything else.” They suggest that nonhuman entities inscribe themselves into human discourses; agency is distributed among a “mesh” of actors including nonhumans alongside humans (Iovino and Oppermann, “Introduction” 5; cf. Morton 28—30). Regarding Lang’s film, production reports emphasize the extensive efforts to contain and control the water required for the flooding scenes; meanwhile, the extras (largely children) were often chilled after long sessions of shooting while partially submerged in water, with little warmth — in the midst of a chilly fall of 1925 — provided by the cavernous spaces of the UFA studios (McGilligan 118—19). The impressive final effect of the scene results from a combination of deliberate storytelling and filmmaking practices by Lang, von Harbou, and others, combined with the indelible imprint of the nonhuman agencies exerted by cold air and water� While these various people and forces seem to act independently, the multiple entities that shape a narrative are often intertwined. As theorists of transcorporeality have shown, the human body is itself subject to other forces and agencies; the body is “a material palimpsest in which ecological and existential relationships are inscribed” (Iovino and Oppermann, “Material Ecocriticism” 84; cf. Alaimo 2). But if there are multiple agencies at work in Metropolis, they seem to be limited to the macro level: humankind and machine; labor and capital; fire, water, and masses of human bodies. The idea of contamination between these elements is beyond the excessively stratified vision of the film. And once more, in this way the film was not of the future but precisely of the present. A surprising link with H. G. Wells helps us to appreciate the view of ecology that is archived in Metropolis. Less than a decade after Lang’s film was released, H. G. Wells was involved in a science fiction film project that attempted a very different mode of environmental storytelling. In perhaps the ultimate statement Infrastructure, Water, Ecology: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as Ecological Archive 263 of his disdain for Metropolis, Wells declared that for his 1936 science fiction film Things to Come about a futuristic city called Everytown, “whatever Lang did in Metropolis is the exact contrary of what we want done here” (qtd. in Neumann 154). Wells therefore decided on an urban landscape in which there are no skyscrapers; instead, the surface of the earth has returned to a natural state and the city exists entirely within a “womb-like cavern” underground (Neumann 154). While Wells’s womb-like caverns might seem like the opposite of Lang’s phallic skyscrapers, the two urban visions are closely related in their ecological implications. They both suggest that an ideal state of nature can thrive, if only human industry is removed — whether on the rooftops or outside the city limits of Metropolis, or on the city-free surface of the earth in the Everytown. These visions both call to mind the “natural climax” that contemporary scientists felt would be achieved in an ecosystem free of human impacts. There is not yet any hint of the dynamic and unstable status of ecosystems, a field of knowledge that would only gain traction in the 1950s (Mauch 5). Within their moment in 1927 and 1936, both Lang and Wells envision an environment in which nature is preserved simply by keeping it separate from the blight of the city. The notion that pollution from the city might flow downstream is not considered. 5 In conclusion, the filmic environment of Metropolis is precisely of its time: not only in its reference to skyscraper debates and social tensions in Weimar Germany that past analyses have emphasized, but also in its portrayal of massive underground waterworks as sites of simultaneous fascination and anxiety, and in its display of idyllic peripheral spaces uncontaminated by the nearby urban center� Metropolis displays a cinematic environment largely determined by developments in infrastructure in Germany and around Europe; in terms of time on screen, the Manhattan-inspired skyscrapers are a small but powerful minority. When attention is given to the street-level and underground landscapes, it is clear that the film is not merely an “allegory of the future as triumph of the machine,” as Tom Gunning has declared (Gunning 55). It also reveals a fantasy of the city in Lang’s present moment, inspired by Berlin as much as New York, without yet any awareness of mutual entanglement of spaces within ecological systems. While H. G. Wells may be correct that the film offers little as an image of the future, it has much to offer as an ecological archive of Weimar Germany. Notes 1 I would like to thank participants at the “Ecological Archives” symposium hosted at Emory University in March 2018; Paul Buchholz and Caroline Schaumann for organizing the symposium and providing helpful editorial feedback; two blind peer reviewers; Abigail Bauer and Jacob Schimetz for 264 Seth Peabody their work as undergraduate research assistants; and the Rachel Carson Center (RCC) of the LMU Munich, where I completed significant revisions on the manuscript during a fellowship in summer 2019� 2 On the relation of Lang’s filmic city to literary science fiction sources, contemporary American culture, and environmental catastrophes, see essays by Bachmann (9), Jordanova (179), and Dover (283). Many essays discuss the relation between the film’s cityscape and Lang’s 1924 trip to the United States; two helpful examples include Bachmann (5—8) and Elsaesser, Metropolis (19). Scholars have discussed additional contexts that are not detailed in Neumann’s essay, including the high-profile competition to design a skyscraper for the Friedrichstraße train station in 1921-1922, as well as debates regarding workers’ housing that framed Weimar-era discussions of skyscrapers: see Elsaesser, Metropolis (87); Kaes (175—77); Schönemann (78—80); and Elsaesser, “City of Light” (92—96). 3 Lang’s travelogue was published in Film-Kurier on 11 December 1924� It was the first of three articles, all with the main title “Was ich in Amerika sah,” that Lang published in Film-Kurier about his trip to the United States� All three of these articles, as well as “Zwischen Bohrtürmen und Palmen” from the journal Filmland, can be found in the volume Die Stimme von Metropolis, edited by Fred Gehler and Ullrich Kasten. 4 The citations for Thea von Harbou’s novel are from a recent English-language publication of the novel. The passage regarding the heart machine and water pumps can also be found reprinted on page 60 of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis: Cinematic Visions of Technology and Fear, edited by Michael Minden and Holger Bachmann. 5 Other German urban films of the era could serve equally well. Both Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Walter Ruttmann, 1927) and Menschen am Sonntag (Robert Siodmak et al., 1930) cut between the bustling pace of the city and idyllic recreational landscapes on the edge of town, with an emphasis on transit infrastructure that carries humans between these two otherwise distinct landscapes� Works Cited Alaimo, Stacy� Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2010. Aurich, Rolf, Wolfgang Jacobsen, and Cornelius Schnauber, eds. Fritz Lang: Leben und Werk, Bilder und Dokumente. Berlin: Jovis, 2001. 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