The Great CINEMATOGRAPHER Karl Freund : METROPOLIS

KARL W. FREUND

KARL W. FREUND ( January 16, 1890 – May 3, 1969) was a cinematographer and film director best known for photographing  METROPOLIS (1927) directed by FRITZ LANG.
He worked as a cinematographer on over 100 films, including the German Expressionist films The Golem (1920), The Last Laugh (1924) and Metropolis (1927). Freund co-wrote, and was cinematographer on, Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927), directed by Walter Ruttmann.
Freund emigrated to the United States in 1929 where he continued to shoot well remembered films such as Dracula (1931) and Key Largo (1948). Notably, his work on Dracula came under a mostly disorganized shoot with the usually meticulous director Tod Browning leaving cinematographer Freund to take over during much of filming, making Freund something of an uncredited director on the film. He won an Academy Award for Best Cinematography for The Good Earth (1937).

METROPOLIS

METROPOLIS METROPOLIS is a 1927 German expressionist epic science fiction drama film directed by FRITZ LANG, Photographer KARL W. FREUND. The film was written by Lang and his wife Thea von Harbou. A silent film  is regarded as a pioneering work of science fiction genre in movies, being among the first feature length movies of the genre. Made in Germany during the Weimar Period, Metropolis is set in a futuristic urban dystopia, and follows the attempts of Freder, the wealthy son of the city’s ruler, and Maria, a poor worker, to overcome the vast gulf separating the classes of their city. Metropolis was filmed in 1925, at a cost of approximately five million Reichsmarks, making it the most expensive film ever released up to that point. The motion picture’s futuristic style is influenced by the work of Futurist Italian architect, Antonio Sant’Elia. Numerous attempts have been made to restore the film since the 1970s-80s. Music producer Giorgio Moroder released a version with a soundtrack by rock artists such as Freddie Mercury, Loverboy, and Adam Ant in 1984. A new reconstruction of Metropolis was shown at the Berlin Film Festival in 2001, and the film was inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in the same year, the first film thus distinguished. In 2008, a damaged print of Lang’s original cut of the film was found in a museum in Argentina. After a long restoration process, the film was 95% restored and shown on large screens in Berlin and Frankfurt simultaneously on 12 February 2010. SOURCES Metropolis Fritz Lang Karl Freund   TRAILERS and VIDEOS CinetecaBologna www.imdb.com