When Pictures Learned to Tell Stories

Metropolis (1927) and the art of imagining the future

The Time Machine (1895) → Metropolis (1927) → Black Panther (2018)

The Questions We're Still Asking

These haven't gone away since we started Wells

Unit Question 1

How do the stories we tell about the future shape the choices we make today?

Unit Question 2

What happens when entire groups of people are left out of visions of the future?

Today's Central Question

Whose voices are heard when we imagine the future — and whose are missing?

Think (silent, 45 seconds)
Wells was a British man with money and education writing in 1895. A German filmmaker — living through poverty, war, and national collapse — makes a movie about the future in 1927. How might what they imagine, and who they care about, be completely different?

Pair (talk it out)
Turn to the person next to you. Share one specific difference you'd expect. What changes when the person imagining the future has lost a war instead of running an empire?

Share (whole room — 2–3 pairs)
One sentence each. We're listening for: who they're worried about, and whose side the story is on.

2:00

Think + Pair

Germany, 1927 — A Country in Shock

To understand what Lang built, you have to feel what he was living through

1918 Germany loses WWI. Massive national humiliation. Soldiers come home to chaos and unemployment.

1921–23 Inflation so bad a loaf of bread costs billions of marks. Entire family savings wiped out overnight.

1924–29 Uneasy calm. New democracy — but extremism growing on all sides. Artists desperate to find meaning.

1927 Fritz Lang releases Metropolis. The most expensive film ever made at the time.

When society is falling apart, artists don't look away. They make art about it.

Same Problem — Different Voice

Who is doing the imagining changes everything about what gets imagined

H.G. Wells — 1895

British. Educated. Middle-class.
Writing for a comfortable audience
The future as a distant, hypothetical warning
His hero escapes the problem and goes home
Worried about where the class system is heading

⟷

Fritz Lang — 1927

German-Austrian. Living through national crisis.
Making art for a traumatised, angry society
The future as a crisis that is already here
His hero has to stay and actually fight
Worried about what happens if nothing changes now

Both see class division as the central problem of their time.
But Lang asks a different question: not "what will happen?" — but "what are YOU going to do about it?"

The First Time Humans Saw Moving Pictures

December 28, 1895. A café in Paris. Thirty-five people in the room.

"People were paralysed with fright. Some ran for the exit screaming. Others sat frozen. Was the image real? Was it a ghost? Was the train actually about to come through the screen and kill them?"

What they saw The Lumière Brothers projected a film of a train pulling into a station. A completely ordinary, everyday event. Forty-six seconds long.

What they felt Terror. Awe. Some wept. Some laughed. Some couldn't breathe. Nobody had ever seen anything like it in the entire history of human existence.

For the first time in human history, you could capture time itself and play it back. You could make the dead live again. You could show things that had never existed.

From Magic Trick to Masterpiece — 32 Years

These filmmakers had to invent everything from scratch. There was no rulebook.

1895 "Look — pictures that move." That is literally the whole trick. Nobody cares what the pictures are of.

1902 Georges Méliès: first special effects. A Trip to the Moon. Painted glass sets. Practical illusions. Pure imagination with a camera.

1910s Directors invent the close-up, the cut, the chase sequence. The visual grammar of storytelling is created from nothing.

1927 Metropolis: scale miniatures, mirror tricks, 37,000 extras. Five million Reichsmarks. The most complex and expensive film ever attempted.

No computers. No digital effects. No zoom lenses. No sound recording on set.
Every single frame was designed, lit, and built by hand.

You Already Know How to Watch This

Silent film is not strange or difficult. It's the visual language you grew up with.

Silent Film Invented

The close-up to show emotion without words
Fast cuts to build tension and pace
Telling a full story through images and music
Visual symbols that carry deeper meaning
Environment and architecture that tells character

→

You Use This Every Day

TikTok zooms and reaction cuts
Reels with no voiceover — just image and music
Memes that need no explanation
Emoji as instant emotional shorthand
Aesthetic choices in photos that say everything

The Lumière Brothers invented the close-up. TikTok is still using their grammar.
Your generation is more prepared for silent cinema than any generation before you.

German Expressionism — Feelings Made Physical

This isn't just an art style. It's a way of making inner states visible as real things.

Lighting Extreme shadows — no comfortable middle ground. A corrupt character? Shadows eat their face. An innocent one? They're bathed in light. You know who to trust without a word.

Architecture Buildings that lean over you. Angles that feel wrong. Towers that seem to physically dominate the people below them. Spaces designed to make you feel powerless.

Body Language Actors use huge, physical gestures. Because there are no voices. Every emotion has to live in the body — in how someone stands, grabs, collapses, reaches.

The Effect You don't just see a corrupt world. You feel it. The images go past your thinking brain straight into your gut. That's the whole point.

Modern films using the same instinct: Parasite (Bong Joon-ho) — Get Out (Jordan Peele) — Joker (Todd Phillips)

Imagine a city 100 years from now. It has been designed — on purpose — to keep certain people on top and certain people hidden away or out of sight.

What does it look like? Who lives at the top? Who lives underground or out of view? What does the technology serve — and who built it?

Write fast. Don't stop. Don't edit. Just describe what you see as if you're standing inside it. No grades. No right answers. No grammar marks. Your ideas are yours — we share only if you want to.

4:00

Writing Time

The World of Metropolis

Sound familiar? You probably just described something like this.

The Upper City — Ground Level and Above

The wealthy elite. Gardens, towers, light, leisure. The future as a luxury resort. These people have never seen what keeps the city running — or at what cost.

The Worker City — Deep Underground

Ten-hour shifts. Machines they don't understand. No daylight. No names — workers are identified by numbers. Every beautiful thing above the line is powered by their hidden suffering.

Wells said:
"This is what class division evolves into — in 800,000 years."

Lang said:
"This is what class division looks like — right now, today."

From The Time Machine to Metropolis

Same human problem. Different artist. Different question asked.

The Time Machine

Eloi above; Morlocks underground
The divide has become biological — two species
The Time Traveler can only observe and then escape
Class division is the distant, inevitable future

Metropolis

Wealthy above; workers underground
The divide is economic and enforced right now
Freder tries to actually cross the line and bridge it
Class division is a choice — and therefore can be unmade

Central Question — Coming Back Around

Wells imagined the future for the privileged class. Lang imagined it for workers. What does that shift change about what you see — and what feels possible?

Visual Symbols to Watch For

Every image in Metropolis is doing more than one thing at once

🏛️ Tower of Babel Biblical: people separated by language. In the film: classes so divided they have completely stopped speaking to each other.

⚙️ Machine as Moloch Moloch was an ancient god fed with human sacrifice. When workers fall into the machinery — that's the image Lang is directly invoking.

🤲 Hands vs. Brain The film's argument: workers (hands) and thinkers (brain) need a mediator — the heart. Manual labour vs. mental power.

🤖 The Robot Woman Cinema's first android. Technology made to look human, built to deceive and control. Already asking: can you trust something that seems human but isn't?

💡 Light and Dark Upper city: perpetual light. Workers: permanent darkness. Not accidental — a moral judgment built directly into the architecture and set design.

❤️ The Heart The film's central argument: the mediator between head and hands must be the heart. Empathy — not efficiency — as the only real answer to division.

In Metropolis, a rich young man named Freder discovers that workers are suffering to keep his comfortable life running. He goes underground, takes a shift at the machines himself, and tries to help. He eventually becomes the bridge between his father — who controls the entire city — and the workers.

Is Freder enough? Can one person with good intentions fix something that was designed to be unfair from the very beginning?

Think about a system you've noticed that seems unfair. Could one good person standing in the middle actually fix it?

2:30

Think + Pair

Your Viewing Guide

Active watching is close reading. Same skill, different text.

Watch the Visuals

Lighting — when does dark mean danger? When does light mean power over others rather than freedom?

Camera angles — when is the camera looking down on someone? Up at them? What does each angle make you feel?

Crowd vs. individual — how are groups of workers shown compared to wealthy individuals? What does that difference say?

Scale — which spaces make bodies look small? Which make them look powerful? Who does each space belong to?

Track the Questions

Whose voices are heard? Literally: who gets the intertitle cards — the text on screen? Whose words get treated as important?

What changes by the end? Does the system change — or just the people at the top of it?

Technology — does it liberate or oppress? Does the answer change depending on who controls it?

Compare to Wells — what does Metropolis show you about The Time Machine that you hadn't quite seen yet?

One More Question Before We Press Play

Hold This Thought Throughout the Film

Wells imagined the future as a wealthy Victorian Englishman.
Lang imagined it as a European living through war and economic collapse.

Who is completely absent from both of these visions?
Whose imagination of the future have we still not heard?

The Time Machine (1895) → Metropolis (1927) → Black Panther (2018) — coming

When we get to Black Panther: what changes when the people imagining the future are the ones who were always left out of it?

Before We Start — A Few Things to Know

This will help you settle in to a different experience

What Might Feel Different

The pace is slower. Silent film gives you time to look at things. Use that space — it's deliberate.

The acting is physical and large. Without a voice, the whole body carries the story. That's the craft.

Intertitle cards appear when characters speak. Read fast — they don't stay long.

What Might Surprise You

The visual effects. Some sequences from 1927 still genuinely hold up. You will feel them.

How current it feels. AI, automation, inequality, surveillance. You will recognise these debates from this year.

The music. The film always played with a live orchestra. What you hear is the soundtrack of power, dread, and hope. Let it in.

Your Canvas exit ticket after class asks for one specific moment from the film where you saw today's central question answered — or deliberately avoided. That's all.

The question you're taking into the film:

Central Question — Metropolis

Whose voices are heard when we imagine the future —
and whose are missing?

Watch who gets to speak.
Watch who gets to be a full person with a name and a face.
Watch who the camera cares about — and who it treats as a crowd.

Fritz Lang. 1927. Germany.
37,000 extras. Five million Reichsmarks. One central question.