Within the last ten days, Turner Classic Movies has shown two of the greatest movies of all time: D. W. Griffith's 1916 masterpiece Intolerance and Fritz Lang's Metropolis, first shown in 1925, but immediately censored and cut with the mutilated version premiering in 1927.  Both require patience from a modern viewer; Intolerance is three and a half hours long, and the newly restored version of Metropolis is nearly three hours.  Both are, of course, silent and in black and white, though Griffith had some scenes in master prints hand tinted.  TCM preserved a few of the tinted scenes.  Just as eighteenth and nineteenth century British novels, wonderful as they are, are the bane of English graduate students because they are so long and we don't have the same lengthy leisure hours to fill as readers did a couple of centuries ago, so too it's not common to have three hours plus to watch a silent, b/w movie from nearly a hundred years ago.  It's worth it, though.  A few years ago, I taught a senior seminar on the American novel into film to some of the very best students we had.  Not one of them had seen a silent film; none could remember ever having seen a film in black and white.  They groaned when they saw that there were two silent films on the course list.  Victor Sjostrom's The Scarlet Letter wasn't a huge hit, though it's by far the most intelligent and engaging version of Hawthorne's novel, but once Erich von Stroheim's Greed (1924) began playing I had a rapt classroom for the four hours of the restored version. 

Greed is legendary for the series of cuts that were made in Stroheim's original 85 hours of footage, cut and cut and cut, with the deleted film supposedly destroyed.  The four hours that are left in the restored version that currently is in circulation are mesmerizing.  So, too, for years much of what was cut from Metropolis was thought to be lost, but a badly damaged print of the longer version was found in Buenos Aires, and what TCM shows returns much of the missing material, though not all of it has been fully restored in terms of quality.  Metropolis might equally as well have been titled 'Greed,' as the world it creates--expressionistic, fantastic, futuristic--is divided sharply and neatly between the 1% and the rest.  The very rich play in the "eternal garden," while the workers slave mechanically away to support them.  I hadn't seen Metropolis in several years, and I thought I remembered it well.  But this time it seemed different; it felt newly relevant to our own society and our growing divide between the have-it-nearly-alls and the rest of society.

TCM shows a lot of dreck, movies that are hardly classics, but it is one of the last forums for movies that are truly classics.  I'm showing my age, but I can't resist nostalgia for the days when every university had film series that showed foreign and classic movies that weren't going to play in the first-run theaters that dominate movie-going these days.  For several years in the 70s, a colleague and I ran the Shoestring Film Society at Washburn, showing movies on 16mm to an appreciative crowd, for whom most of the movies were new experiences.  But then VCRs, then DVD players, then Netflix put an end to all that.  And the movies that were available didn't broaden our sense of cinema but merely focused on those films that were in theaters a year or two before.  (The eight dollars a month a spend for streaming Netflix is a complete and infuriating waste,)  We brought back the Shoestring Film Society a few years ago, and for the next three years we had a respectable audience, even if the movie was silent or in black and white or in a foreign language.  But there was a problem: the audience was overwhelmingly middle-aged and older, people from the town, not from the university.  Very few students ever appeared to watch the films that we loved.  And so when the university was going to close the auditorium where we showed the movies for remodeling, the second iteration of Shoestring came to an end.  TCM, uneven as it is, is basically all we who don't live in big cities have left.