We’ve been focus­ing a lot recent­ly on old films from the turn of the cen­tu­ry that a small group of enthu­si­asts have been “remas­ter­ing” using AI, smooth­ing out the herky-jerky fram­ing, upping the frame rate by inter­po­lat­ing between-frames, and more.

So what a sur­prise to find a recent look at a film in the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art’s film col­lec­tion from 1902 that already has the fideli­ty and smooth­ness, no AI need­ed.

The above footage is tak­en from the Wup­per­taler Schwe­be­bahn, the sus­pen­sion rail­way built in the Ger­man city of Bar­men in 1901. The Bio­graph pro­duc­tion company—best known to film stu­dents as the place where D.W. Grif­fiths got his start—was one of the most pop­u­lar of the ear­ly film com­pa­nies, and pro­duced mini-docs like these, called Muto­scopes.

The Muto­scope used 68mm film, a film stock twice as large as most films at the time. (70mm film real­ly only came into its own dur­ing the 1950s.) The 30 frames per sec­ond shoot­ing rate was also faster than the usu­al 18fps or 24fps, which means the illu­sion of real­i­ty is clos­er to the video rate of today. The Muto­scope was also the name of the company’s view­er, where the frames were print­ed on cards and could be watched through a viewfind­er. So we are watch­ing a film that was nev­er meant to be pro­ject­ed. (If you’re think­ing that the Muto­scope was also used for pri­vate view­ings of What the But­ler Saw, you are cor­rect.)

Despite the fideli­ty our favorite upscaler Denis Shiryaev still had a go at improv­ing the footage and adding col­or and sound. (There’s also a com­peti­tor work­ing on their own upscale and col­oriza­tion ver­sion called Upscaled Stu­dio). Which one is bet­ter, do you think? And how much was the expe­ri­ence improved?

And in case you’re won­der­ing, the Wup­per­tal Schwe­be­bahn still oper­ates to this day, look­ing very much like it did back in 1902. The total route is just over eight miles long and fol­lows the riv­er Wup­per for a lot of it, and ser­vices 82,000 com­muters a day. (Less so dur­ing COVID of course.) You can check out footage below. It def­i­nite­ly looks fun fun fun on the Schwe­be­bahn.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Icon­ic Film from 1896 Restored with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: Watch an AI-Upscaled Ver­sion of the Lumière Broth­ers’ The Arrival of a Train at La Cio­tat Sta­tion

Revis­it Scenes of Dai­ly Life in Ams­ter­dam in 1922, with His­toric Footage Enhanced by Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

A Trip Through New York City in 1911: Vin­tage Video of NYC Gets Col­orized & Revived with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

The redis­cov­ery of Berlin began thir­ty years ago this Novem­ber, with the demo­li­tion of the wall that had long divid­ed the city’s west­ern and east­ern halves. Specif­i­cal­ly, the Berlin Wall had stood since 1961, mean­ing the younger gen­er­a­tion of West and East Berlin­ers had no mem­o­ry of their city’s being whole. In anoth­er sense, the same could be said of their par­ents’ gen­er­a­tion, who saw near­ly a third of Berlin destroyed in the Sec­ond World War. Only the most ven­er­a­ble Berlin­ers would have remem­bered the social and indus­tri­al gold­en age the undi­vid­ed city enjoyed back in the 1920s — an age exhil­a­rat­ing­ly pre­sent­ed in the film Berlin: Sym­pho­ny of a Metrop­o­lis.

An ear­ly exam­ple of the silent-era “city sym­phonies” that showed off the cap­i­tals of the world on film (sev­er­al of which you can watch here on Open Cul­ture), Berlin takes the view­er along streets and water­ways, through parks, onto trains and ele­va­tors, on roller coast­ers, and into fac­to­ries, build­ing sites, cabarets, and skies. Shot over a year and com­pressed into less than an hour, this avant-garde doc­u­men­tary cap­tures the expe­ri­ence of Berlin in the 1920s — or rather it cap­tures, in that might­i­ly indus­tri­al age, expe­ri­ence at the inter­sec­tion of human and machine. Direc­tor Walther Ruttmann “charts the move­ments of crowds of chil­dren, work­ers, swim­mers, row­ers, and so on,” writes Pop­mat­ters’ Chad­wick Jenk­ins, “but only occa­sion­al­ly focus­es on a per­son as an indi­vid­ual. More­over, many of the most strik­ing scenes in the film avoid the intru­sion of peo­ple alto­geth­er, con­cen­trat­ing instead on the oper­a­tion of mechan­i­cal devices.”

Absent explana­to­ry nar­ra­tion or title cards, the film invites a vari­ety of read­ings. Chad­wick sees it as “the defam­a­to­ry dehu­man­iza­tion of the human, the dero­ga­tion of human auton­o­my and domin­ion over a world of indif­fer­ent mat­ter, a reduc­tion of the divine spark in humankind to the sta­tus of anoth­er mere thing.” This same qual­i­ty drove away one of Ruttman­n’s key col­lab­o­ra­tors on Berlin, the writer Carl May­er. Ruttmann, for his part, described his own moti­va­tion as “the idea of mak­ing some­thing out of life, of cre­at­ing a sym­phon­ic film out of the mil­lions of ener­gies that com­prise the life of a big city.”

A pri­ma­ry inter­est in move­ment itself is per­haps to be expect­ed from a film­mak­er who had pre­vi­ous­ly dis­tin­guished him­self as an abstract ani­ma­tor. (What his lat­er work as an assis­tant to Leni Riefen­stahl on Tri­umph of the Will indi­cates is anoth­er mat­ter.) But if Berlin: Sym­pho­ny of a Metrop­o­lis “dehu­man­izes,” writes Jenk­ins, it does so as a delib­er­ate artis­tic strat­e­gy to show that “the city is more than its var­i­ous com­po­nents, includ­ing its human com­po­nents,” and to “pro­vide an insight into the emer­gent qual­i­ties that make a city what it is, beyond being a mere com­pos­ite of the ele­ments with­in its geo­graph­i­cal bound­aries,” how­ev­er those bound­aries get drawn and redrawn over time.

Berlin: Sym­pho­ny of a Metrop­o­lis will be added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Samuel Beck­ett Walk the Streets of Berlin Like a Boss, 1969

See Berlin Before and After World War II in Star­tling Col­or Video

Dra­mat­ic Col­or Footage Shows a Bombed-Out Berlin a Month After Germany’s WWII Defeat (1945)

Berlin Street Scenes Beau­ti­ful­ly Caught on Film (1900–1914)

Watch 1920s “City Sym­phonies” Star­ring the Great Cities of the World: From New York to Berlin to São Paulo

The First Avant Garde Ani­ma­tion: Watch Wal­ter Ruttmann’s Licht­spiel Opus 1 (1921)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

When it came out in 1927, Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis showed audi­ences the kind of whol­ly invent­ed real­i­ty, hith­er­to beyond imag­i­na­tion, that could be real­ized in motion pic­tures. Its vision of a soci­ety bisect­ed into colos­sal sky­scrap­ers and under­ground war­rens, an indus­tri­al Art Deco dystopia, con­tin­ues to influ­ence film­mak­ers today. This despite — or per­haps because of — the sim­ple sto­ry it tells, in which Fred­er, the scion of the city of Metrop­o­lis, rebels against his father after fol­low­ing Maria, a good-heart­ed maid­en from the under­class, into the infer­nal low­er depths.

In the role of Maria was a then-unknown 18-year-old actress named Brigitte Helm. “For all the steam and spe­cial effects,” writes Robert McG. Thomas Jr. in Helm’s New York Times obit­u­ary, “for many who have seen the movie in its var­i­ous incar­na­tions, includ­ing a tint­ed ver­sion and one accom­pa­nied by music, the most com­pelling lin­ger­ing image is nei­ther the tow­ers above nor the hell­ish fac­to­ries below. It is the star­tling trans­for­ma­tion of Ms. Helm from an ide­al­is­tic young woman into a bare­ly clad crea­ture per­form­ing a las­civ­i­ous dance in a broth­el.”

Halfway through the film, Maria gets kid­napped by the vil­lain­ous inven­tor Rot­wang and cloned as a robot. It is this robot, not the real Maria, who takes the stage in the scene in ques­tion, prac­ti­cal­ly nude by the stan­dards of silent-era cin­e­ma. Lang used the sequence to push not just the bounds of pro­pri­ety, but the aes­thet­ic capa­bil­i­ties of his art form: view­ers would nev­er have seen any­thing like the frame-fill­ing field of eye­balls into which the slaver­ing crowd of tuxe­doed men dis­solve. Here we have a medi­um demon­strat­ing deci­sive­ly and pow­er­ful­ly what sets it apart from all oth­ers, in just one of the scenes restored only recent­ly to its orig­i­nal form.

When Thomas allud­ed to the many extant cuts of Metrop­o­lis in his 1996 obit­u­ary for Helm, the now-defin­i­tive ver­sion of the pic­ture that made her a star still lay in the future. 2010’s The Com­plete Metrop­o­lis includes mate­r­i­al redis­cov­ered just two years before, on a 16-mil­lime­ter reduc­tion neg­a­tive stored at Buenos Aires’ Museo del Cine and long for­got­ten there­after. Now, just as Lang intend­ed us to, we can behold his cin­e­mat­ic vision of rulers employ­ing the high­est tech­nol­o­gy to keep even the elite mes­mer­ized by tit­il­lat­ing spec­ta­cles — a fan­tas­ti­cal sce­nario that has noth­ing at all to do, of course, with the future as it actu­al­ly turned out.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Metrop­o­lis: Watch a Restored Ver­sion of Fritz Lang’s Mas­ter­piece (1927)

Read the Orig­i­nal 32-Page Pro­gram for Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis (1927)

Fritz Lang Invents the Video Phone in Metrop­o­lis (1927)

H.G. Wells Pans Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis in a 1927 Movie Review: It’s “the Sil­li­est Film”

10 Great Ger­man Expres­sion­ist Films: From Nos­fer­atu to The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari

Watch After the Ball, the 1897 “Adult” Film by Pio­neer­ing Direc­tor Georges Méliès (Almost NSFW)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.