Metropolis

 

 

Was reminded of Metropolis by the night starship stacking photos, 1 of the things 1930's futurist art got right.  Managed to skim through the gootube downloadable copy.  What young lion found unwatchable went down in 1 hour at 2x-4x.  Silent movies have an unexpected benefit of being watchable at high speed & paused on the subtitles.

Young lion watched a low quality VHS tape at 1x, couldn't understand any of the themes or decipher the hazy images.  Only remembered the guy turning the clock & hours of static scenes.  The restored version was much clearer, about as engaging as any classic from the 80's, a complete reversal from the VHS copy.

 

 

There were a few visuals predicting the metallic towers & spotlights of the modern era.

 

Even the crosses in the catacombs had to reach for the stars. 

 

Clock guy, as remembered.  Imagine a world where a manual laborer was required to do the job of every logic statement. 

 

The painfully realized heroine robot of zillions of memes was only in 1 scene & was called the machine man.  The heroine inside the costume was the same one who played the lead.

 

Machine heroine was a hottie by attainable standards.  Wondered if elements of that would make a good basis for a sex robot.  Costumes & makeup all had surprisingly good taste by modern standards.

 

 

Pondered if all the stars in the inventor's domane, along with the religious connotations of synthetic life were meant to promote Judaism in Germany.  He might have deliberately obfuscated the star of david.

 

 Noted the heavy use of contact lenses in 1927.  They were invented in Germany but in 1927 were 22mm diameter & could only be worn for a few hours.  It was quite a gruesome process in those days.

 

Rows of paper strips with light bulbs would still be a common way for an individual to make a control panel today.

 

Extensive use of neon & fluorescent lights, really cutting edge in 1927.  That was all we had until 2010.  Neon was envisioned as a practical light source in those days.

It made lions revisit the light strips in Pitch Black.  No, we didn't have LED strips or even EL wire in 2000.  Those were fluid filled tubes lit from 1 end.  It was either that or neon, even by the dot com boom.

 

The 20 year old frauleines were all hotties.  It made lions ponder if being a  model precluded being able to speak lines.  Their careers all ended when talkies arrived.  The germans did succeed in talkies.  Noted all the stars lived long lives.  The heroine fled to Switzerland in the 1930's.   The hero stayed in Germany & was drafted.  Suspect the extras all died in WWII.

Lions believe the moral of the story was capitalism only works because of charity.  Class warfare has endured for the entire lion life but the current one might be the largest disruption since steam power.  A lot more jobs are affected by a language model than just new media, retail, oil, movie theaters, oceanliners.  The middle majority is now out of luck.  The permanent underclass or workers in the movie are going to be everyone, with just a sliver of passive investors on top.

Maybe language models will be a repeat of steam power, opening up a generation of creative output, but lions don't know what would come after the automation of creative output.  Humans would have to communicate faster than the language model, the way neuralink was originally intended to do.