Metrop­o­lis, For­bid­den Plan­et, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Blade Run­ner, The Ter­mi­na­tor, Short Cir­cuit, Robo­Cop, Ghost in the Shell, The Iron Giant, WALL‑E, Ex Machi­na: there is a par­al­lel his­to­ry of cin­e­ma to be told entire­ly through its robots. That such a his­to­ry must begin with the work of Georges Méliès may not come as a sur­prise, giv­en that he invent­ed so many of the tech­niques of sci­ence-fic­tion film­mak­ing. But until recent­ly, we did­n’t actu­al­ly know that the cin­e­ma pio­neer who “invent­ed every­thing” ever put a robot onscreen. The evi­dence turned up among a col­lec­tion of “old and bat­tered” reels of film that were “from before World War I and had been shut­tled around from base­ments to barns to garages and had just been dropped off at the Library.”

So writes the Library of Con­gress’ Neely Tuck­er, who goes on to describe the action of one of the films involv­ing “a magi­cian and a robot bat­tling it out in slap­stick fash­ion. It took a bit, but then the gasp of real­iza­tion: They were look­ing at ‘Gugusse and the Automa­ton,’ a long-lost film by the icon­ic French film­mak­er Georges Méliès at his Star Film com­pa­ny.”

Méliès him­self plays the magi­cian, who “winds up an automa­ton dressed like the famous clown Pier­rot, which is stand­ing on a pedestal. Once wound up, the clown begins to beat the magi­cian with his walk­ing stick. The magi­cian retal­i­ates by get­ting a huge sledge­ham­mer and bash­ing the automa­ton over the head, with each blow seem­ing to shrink it in half, until it is just a small doll.”

In just 45 sec­onds, this sim­ple film would have aston­ished audi­ences back in 1897 — and indeed retains the pow­er to impress, pro­vid­ed you con­sid­er that none of the tech­niques to real­ize its effects were wide­ly known before Méliès attempt­ed them. He did so five years before ‘A Trip to the Moon,’ a huge­ly ambi­tious cin­e­mat­ic endeav­or by com­par­i­son, and by far the sin­gle film that best rep­re­sents his lega­cy.’ Yet it and Gugusse and the Automa­ton are clear­ly the work of the same artist-inven­tor, one who pos­sessed that rare com­bi­na­tion of tech­ni­cal know-how and artis­tic dar­ing, and who under­stood the need for an organ­ic rela­tion­ship between spec­ta­cle and nar­ra­tive. Not that either the spec­ta­cle or the nar­ra­tive are high­ly evolved at this stage, but, as Méliès may have sus­pect­ed, the cin­e­ma of robots has as long an evo­lu­tion ahead of it as automa­ta them­selves.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch 194 Films by Georges Méliès, the Film­mak­er Who “Invent­ed Every­thing” (All in Chrono­log­i­cal Order)

How Georges Méliès A Trip to the Moon Became the First Sci-Fi Film & Changed Cin­e­ma For­ev­er (1902)

The Word “Robot” Orig­i­nat­ed in a Czech Play in 1921: Dis­cov­er Karel Čapek’s Sci-Fi Play R.U.R. (a.k.a. Rossum’s Uni­ver­sal Robots)

Fritz Lang First Depict­ed Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence on Film in Metrop­o­lis (1927), and It Fright­ened Peo­ple Even Then

Watch “The Birth of the Robot,” Len Lye’s Sur­re­al 1935 Stop-Motion Ani­ma­tion

Watch the Sci-Fi Short Film “I’m Not a Robot”: Win­ner of a 2025 Acad­e­my Award

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

A vast, mis­er­able pro­le­tari­at squan­ders its days in mean­ing­less toil. Soci­ety is under the con­trol of ultra-wealthy busi­ness mag­nates. In order to paci­fy the under­class, the rul­ing class pins its hopes on a tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tion: arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. Wel­come to the year 2026, as envi­sioned in Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis. When the film pre­miered, not long after 1926 had come to an end, that date would have seemed arbi­trar­i­ly futur­is­tic. Now, of course, it’s the present, though our world may nowhere look quite as styl­ish as the Art Deco dystopia craft­ed at great expense and an unprece­dent­ed scale of pro­duc­tion by Lang and com­pa­ny. Yet when we watch Metrop­o­lis today, the ele­ments that now seem pre­scient stand out more than the fan­tas­ti­cal ones.

The new short doc­u­men­tary from DW above exam­ines the mak­ing and lega­cy of Metrop­o­lis, pay­ing spe­cial atten­tion to its con­sid­er­able influ­ence on much of the sci­ence-fic­tion and dystopi­an cin­e­ma since. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Blade Run­ner, Ter­mi­na­tor 2, Madon­na’s “Express Your­self” video: these are just a few of the pro­duc­tions that take no great pains to hide — and in some cas­es, even empha­size — their debt to Lang’s vision.

Ver­tig­i­nous, inten­sive­ly illu­mi­nat­ed, infra­struc­ture-webbed sky­scraper canyons and labor­ers at once manip­u­lat­ing and being manip­u­lat­ed by over­sized clock­work are only the most obvi­ous images that have come down through decades of pop­u­lar cul­ture. For the ori­gin of the wild-haired “mad sci­en­tist” sur­round­ed by tubes and coils, look no fur­ther than Metrop­o­lis’ Rot­wang.

Much could also be writ­ten — and indeed, much already has been writ­ten — about the lega­cy of Rot­wang’s inven­tion, the robot woman who takes on the like­ness of a work­ing-class hero­ine. Beyond the ground­break­ing nature of its design, Metrop­o­lis has also retained atten­tion after near­ly a cen­tu­ry thanks to the folk­loric, even myth­i­cal res­o­nances of its sto­ry. It may be tech­ni­cal­ly implau­si­ble, at least from our point of view, to imag­ine large-scale automa­tion coex­ist­ing with large-scale employ­ment, how­ev­er dire the jobs, but age-old nar­ra­tive under­cur­rents allow even mod­ern audi­ences to sus­pend dis­be­lief (a phe­nom­e­non that has­n’t gone unno­ticed by the mak­ers of more recent sci-fi and fan­ta­sy block­busters). We may not live in quite the 2026  that Metrop­o­lis puts onscreen, but in some sense, we do inhab­it the world it made.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 1927 Film Metrop­o­lis Cre­at­ed a Dystopi­an Vision of What the World Would Look Like in 2026 — and It Hits Close to Home

Fritz Lang First Depict­ed Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence on Film in Metrop­o­lis (1927), and It Fright­ened Peo­ple Even Then

Fritz Lang Invents the Video Phone in Metrop­o­lis (1927)

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

How Movies Cre­at­ed Their Spe­cial Effects Before CGI: Metrop­o­lis, 2001: A Space Odyssey & More

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

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In his 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechan­i­cal Repro­ducibil­i­ty,” influ­en­tial Ger­man-Jew­ish crit­ic Wal­ter Ben­jamin intro­duced the term “aura” to describe an authen­tic expe­ri­ence of art. Aura relates to the phys­i­cal prox­im­i­ty between objects and their view­ers. Its loss, Ben­jamin argued, was a dis­tinct­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry phe­nom­e­non caused by mass media’s impo­si­tion of dis­tance between object and view­er, though it appears to bring art clos­er through a sim­u­la­tion of inti­ma­cy.

The essay makes for potent read­ing today. Mass media — which for Ben­jamin meant radio, pho­tog­ra­phy, and film — turns us all into poten­tial actors, crit­ics, experts, he wrote, and takes art out of the realm of the sacred and into the realm of the spec­ta­cle. Yet it retains the pre­tense of rit­u­al. We make offer­ings to cults of per­son­al­i­ty, expand­ed in our time to include influ­encers and revered and reviled bil­lion­aires and polit­i­cal fig­ures who joust in the head­lines like pro­fes­sion­al wrestlers, led around by the chief of all heels. As Ben­jamin writes:

The film responds to the shriv­el­ing of the aura with an arti­fi­cial build-up of the “per­son­al­i­ty” out­side the stu­dio. The cult of the movie star,  fos­tered by the mon­ey of the film indus­try, pre­serves not the unique aura of the per­son but the “spell of the per­son­al­i­ty,” the pho­ny spell of a com­mod­i­ty.

Benjamin’s focus on the medi­um as not only expres­sive but con­sti­tu­tive of mean­ing has made his essay a sta­ple on com­mu­ni­ca­tions and media the­o­ry course syl­labi, next to the work of Mar­shall McLuhan. Many read­ings tend to leave aside the pol­i­tics of its epi­logue, like­ly since “his rem­e­dy,” writes Mar­tin Jay — “the politi­ciza­tion of art by Com­mu­nism — was for­got­ten by all but his most mil­i­tant Marx­ist inter­preters,” and hard­ly seemed like much of a rem­e­dy dur­ing the Cold War, when Ben­jamin became more wide­ly avail­able in trans­la­tion.

Benjamin’s own idio­syn­crat­ic pol­i­tics aside, his essay antic­i­pates a cri­sis of author­ship and author­i­ty cur­rent­ly sur­fac­ing in the use of social media as a dom­i­nant form of polit­i­cal spec­ta­cle.

With the increas­ing exten­sion of the press, which kept plac­ing new polit­i­cal, reli­gious, sci­en­tif­ic, pro­fes­sion­al, and local organs before the read­ers, an increas­ing num­ber of read­ers became writers—at first, occa­sion­al ones. It began with the dai­ly press open­ing to its read­ers space for “let­ters to the edi­tor.” And today there is hard­ly a gain­ful­ly employed Euro­pean who could not, in prin­ci­ple, find an oppor­tu­ni­ty to pub­lish some­where or oth­er com­ments on his work, griev­ances, doc­u­men­tary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the dis­tinc­tion between author and pub­lic is about to lose its basic char­ac­ter.

Benjamin’s analy­sis of con­ven­tion­al film, espe­cial­ly, leads him to con­clude that its recep­tion required so lit­tle of view­ers that they eas­i­ly become dis­tract­ed. Everyone’s a crit­ic, but “at the movies this posi­tion requires no atten­tion. The pub­lic is an exam­in­er, but an absent-mind­ed one.” Pas­sive con­sump­tion and habit­u­al dis­trac­tion do not make for con­sid­ered, informed opin­ion or a healthy sense of pro­por­tion.

What Ben­jamin referred to (in trans­la­tion) as mechan­i­cal repro­ducibil­i­ty we might now just call The Inter­net (and the coter­ies of “things” it haunts pol­ter­geist-like). Lat­er the­o­rists influ­enced by Ben­jamin fore­saw our age of dig­i­tal repro­ducibil­i­ty doing away with the need for authen­tic objects, and real peo­ple, alto­geth­er. Ben­jamin him­self might char­ac­ter­ize a medi­um that can ful­ly detach from the phys­i­cal world and the mate­r­i­al con­di­tions of its users — a medi­um in which every­one gets a col­umn, pub­lic pho­to gallery, and video pro­duc­tion stu­dio — as ide­al­ly suit­ed to the aims of fas­cism.

Fas­cism attempts to orga­nize the new­ly cre­at­ed pro­le­tar­i­an mass­es with­out affect­ing the prop­er­ty struc­ture which the mass­es strive to elim­i­nate. Fas­cism sees its sal­va­tion in giv­ing these mass­es not their right, but instead a chance to express them­selves. The mass­es have a right to change prop­er­ty rela­tions; Fas­cism seeks to give them an expres­sion while pre­serv­ing prop­er­ty. The log­i­cal result of Fas­cism is the intro­duc­tion of aes­thet­ics into polit­i­cal life.

The log­i­cal result of turn­ing pol­i­tics into spec­ta­cle for the sake of pre­serv­ing inequal­i­ty, writes Ben­jamin, is the roman­ti­ciza­tion of war and slaugh­ter, glo­ri­fied plain­ly in the Ital­ian Futur­ist man­i­festo of Fil­ip­po Marinet­ti and the lit­er­ary work of Nazi intel­lec­tu­als like Ernst Jünger. Ben­jamin ends the essay with a dis­cus­sion of how fas­cism aes­theti­cizes pol­i­tics to one end: the anni­hi­la­tion of aura by more per­ma­nent means.

Under the rise of fas­cism in Europe, Ben­jamin saw that human “self-alien­ation has reached such a degree that it can expe­ri­ence its own destruc­tion as an aes­thet­ic plea­sure of the first order. This is the sit­u­a­tion of pol­i­tics which Fas­cism is ren­der­ing aes­thet­ic.” Those who par­tic­i­pate in this spec­ta­cle seek mass vio­lence “to sup­ply the artis­tic grat­i­fi­ca­tion of a sense per­cep­tion that has been changed by tech­nol­o­gy.” Dis­tract­ed and desen­si­tized, they seek, that is, to com­pen­sate for pro­found dis­em­bod­i­ment and the loss of mean­ing­ful, authen­tic expe­ri­ence.

You can read Ben­jam­in’s essay here, or find it in this col­lect­ed vol­ume.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2022.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Umber­to Eco Makes a List of the 14 Com­mon Fea­tures of Fas­cism

Toni Mor­ri­son Lists the 10 Steps That Lead Coun­tries to Fas­cism (1995)

Are You a Fas­cist?: Take Theodor Adorno’s Author­i­tar­i­an Per­son­al­i­ty Test Cre­at­ed to Com­bat Fas­cism (1947)

The Sto­ry of Fas­cism: Rick Steves’ Doc­u­men­tary Helps Us Learn from the Hard Lessons of the 20th Cen­tu­ry