Short answer
The robot in Metropolis is a gleaming metal "machine-human" built by the inventor Rotwang and then given the face of Maria, a young woman the workers trust, so it can turn them against each other. Fritz Lang's silent film premiered in Berlin on 10 January 1927, and its robot became one of the most copied images of an artificial being in film history.
Follow-up question How did Metropolis shape the way we picture robots and AI?
The robot in Metropolis is the first great robot of the movies. In Fritz Lang's 1927 silent film, an inventor named Rotwang builds a woman-shaped machine of polished metal. The ruler of the city then orders him to give it the appearance of Maria, a gentle young woman whom the workers adore, so that the copy can stir them into a riot. Audiences watched a machine pass for a human being, and the image of that sleek, art-deco figure has never really left popular culture.
The film opened at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo, a large cinema in Berlin, on 10 January 1927. It was produced by UFA, Germany's leading film studio, directed by Lang and written by Thea von Harbou with Lang, based on her novel of 1925.
What happens in the story
Metropolis is set in a huge vertical city. The rich live in towers and gardens at the top; the workers live and labor far below, tending giant machines in exhausting shifts. Joh Fredersen is the master of the city. His son Freder wanders down into the machine halls, sees a terrible accident and is shaken by how the workers live. He also falls for Maria, who preaches patience to the workers and promises that a "mediator" will one day unite the two halves of the city.
Fredersen visits Rotwang, the city's greatest inventor. Rotwang has built a robot, in the restored version to bring back Hel, a woman he loved and lost to Fredersen. Fredersen orders him to give the robot Maria's likeness. Rotwang kidnaps the real Maria and transfers her appearance to the machine in a famous laboratory scene.
The false Maria dances in a nightclub, dazzling wealthy men who never guess she is a machine, and then urges the workers to smash their machines. They do, which floods their own underground city and nearly drowns their children. The real Maria and Freder save the children, the angry crowd burns the robot at the stake, and the flames expose the metal underneath. The film ends with Freder joining the hands of his father and the workers' foreman. Its final intertitle reads, in English: "The Mediator Between the Head and the Hands Must Be the Heart."
How the robot was made
The robot was not a machine at all. Sculptor Walter Schulze-Mittendorff made a full-body cast of the actress Brigitte Helm and built a costume around it. He used "plastic wood," a filler that could be shaped and then finished so it looked like metal. Helm played both roles, the real Maria and the robot, and the rigid suit left her bruised.
The production was enormous. Shooting ran from 22 May 1925 to 30 October 1926, and the cost climbed to more than five million Reichsmarks. Special-effects expert Eugen Schüfftan used mirrors to place actors inside miniature sets, a technique that became known as the Schüfftan process.
The film you can watch today is close to Lang's original, but only recently. The Berlin premiere version ran about two and a half hours. For the American release in March 1927, distributors cut it heavily and dropped the Hel storyline. For decades only shortened versions existed. In 2008 a long, worn copy turned up in a museum in Buenos Aires, and a restoration shown in Berlin in February 2010 brought the film back to within a few minutes of its first running time. In 2001 Metropolis became the first film placed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register.
What the robot stands for
The robot does three jobs in the story at once, and each one still echoes in talk about AI:
| What the robot does in the film | The idea behind it | Where you hear it in 2019 |
|---|---|---|
| Passes as Maria and fools everyone | A machine indistinguishable from a person | Debates about chatbots and convincing fake videos |
| Is controlled by the powerful to manipulate workers | Technology as a tool of those at the top | Worries about who owns and steers AI systems |
| Leads workers to destroy their own machines | Fear and anger aimed at automation | Arguments about AI and jobs |
The film is not about how a robot could actually work. It never explains Rotwang's science. What it explores is trust: what happens when you cannot tell a real voice from a manufactured one, and who benefits from that confusion.
Try it: Watch the laboratory scene where Rotwang gives the robot Maria's face (it is about halfway through the restored version). Write down three visual details, such as rings, lights or machines, that you have seen copied in later films, ads or music videos.
How did Metropolis shape the way we picture robots and AI?
Before Metropolis, there was no common picture of what an artificial person should look like on screen. Karel Čapek's R.U.R., which gave us the word "robot" six years earlier, imagined manufactured humans of synthetic flesh. Lang's film offered something new: a smooth, metallic figure with a human shape and an expressionless face. That design has been borrowed again and again. The artist who designed C-3PO for Star Wars drew on it, and music videos from Queen to Janelle Monáe have quoted it.
The film also fixed a story pattern that is still with us: the artificial woman who deceives, the brilliant and unstable inventor, and the robot as a weapon in a struggle between rich and poor. Many news stories in 2019 still illustrate AI with a shiny humanoid robot, even when the subject is software that has no body at all, such as a recommendation system or a language model.
That habit can mislead. Most AI today is invisible code running on servers. A useful exercise when you see a robot picture next to an AI headline is to ask what the technology actually is, who controls it and who it affects. Those are exactly the questions Metropolis raised almost a century ago, without ever showing a working machine.
Sources
- Metropolis — filmportal.de (Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum)
- Metropolis (1927 film) — Wikipedia, September 21, 2019