Metropolis is a world cinema masterpiece; maybe not Friz Lang’s best film, but certainly a great movie. If you still need to watch it, I recommend you do. Here is one of the many free versions on the web:
I’ve seen it an unreasonable number of times, so I devised a new project: a print chronicling one of my favorite scenes from this movie: Maria’s Dance.
I’m into silent movies, their charm lies in their ability to tell incredible stories with poverty of means. A bit like the woodcut engraving which represents subjects with only essential means of solids and voids on the surface of the matrix, which then correspond to the black (or colour) and white of the sheet.
The dance performed by Maria, or instead of her evil double, is a robust and vibrant representation of the allure of greed and the seductive nature of the dark side. To convey this message, I depicted her body illuminated by light, creating a series of advertising posters for the Yoshiwara club (Yoshiwara was the red light district in Edo, the old Japanese capital) where she performs in the film. So I engraved more matrices, initially thinking of inking them with different colours, but in the end, I preferred only the white, black and red versions.
To create the matrices I started with single frames selected from the scene.
Here are the discarded test versions.
And here is the definitive one
