We asked female film and art critics to look at the Goethe-Institut Toronto's exhibition Early UFA Film Posters: Projecting Women with eight visuals from famous as well as rarely seen or lost Berlin UFA films from the 1920s and 30s that portray women as heroines or seductresses, debutantes or harlots. Toronto film critic Linda Barnard reexamined Brigitte Helm's Maria in METROPOLIS:
She is instantly recognizable: the female robot from Metropolis.
Even if people know nothing about Fritz Lang’s 1927 film, they know her face. Credit a visionary director, actress Brigitte Helm and a character named Maria for that. As one of the leading cinematic influencers of popular culture, fashion and film for 90 years, the image most closely associated with Metropolis is the blankly staring metal-clad Maschinenmensch, the robotic woman and sexualized creature created from pure-hearted Maria to bring down a city.
Everything about this compelling poster designed by Werner Graul for UFA to promote Metropolis is unexpected. It shoots up as a narrow, vertical image among traditional rectangles on the wall. A woman’s face fills the frame. Eyes closed, her lips are blood red, yet her skin is blue. Is it a trick of light? Or perhaps she’s not human?
Graul’s image depicts a stylized version of Helm as Maria, seen moments before her laboratory metamorphosis into False Maria, whose later erotic dance is engineered to enslave men’s minds.
In this image, that’s all yet to come. She’s seen in the glass tube in Rotwang’s lab, framed by the reflection from the strobing instruments stealing her essence flashing above her. It is Maria’s last few moments as her own woman before she becomes False Maria.
But here’s where Graul changes the poster perspective to take Maria from victim --about to give up her identity and her soul-- to symbol. The woman we see isn’t lying down in a tube, but upright and strong. The reflection on the glass becomes a spotlight, aimed upwards. The angular lines of her blue-tinged face show power. Her helmet is a replica of the daring bobbed hairstyles of the time. As in America and elsewhere in the world, these were the waning years of the Flapper era. Over the previous decade, women showed their liberation from traditional roles by cutting their hair and shortening their skirts. This is the face of the Weimar Republic’s new woman, self-assured and powerful, even in repose.
German women wanted their voices heard. They used their right to vote, gained nine years prior, with enthusiasm, electing women to the assembly in numbers that wouldn’t be matched until the 1980s. Helm played the dual Maria role, but the face I see here is another UFA legend of the time, Polish actress Pola Negri. She’d later be seen in another film featured in this poster series, Sumurun. Her helmet-like jet-black hair and ruby lips were among her trademarks.
Negri had left for Hollywood success by the time Metropolis was released. Women onscreen then were either pluckily chaste sweethearts like Mary Pickford or seductress vamps. The latter was where Negri was slotted. So, too, was Helm in subsequent roles for UFA, before she broke from the stereotype.
As The New York Times master obituary writer Robert McGill Thomas Jr. observed in her 1996 death notice: “Ms. Helm was regarded as such a perfect embodiment of the era's ideal of cool sophistication that when she turned Josef von Sternberg down for the starring role in Blue Angel, he had to settle for Marlene Dietrich.”
Linda Barnard is a freelance film critic with a career spanning more than 30 years in Canadian daily papers, most notably The Toronto Star. Barnard is a National Newspaper Award (Arts and Entertainment) winner, winner of a Dunlop Award for Feature Writing, and a member of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists. She has participated on film juries, including Canada’s Top Ten, and has programmed for the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. /em>
Image courtesy Austrian National Library
