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The 1927 science-fiction film Metropolis is an
expressionistic portrayal of a dystopian, capitalist society which has
become a cult classic among movie lovers.
Artist Chris Burden used the film by German director Fritz Lang as the
inspiration for his racetrack sculpture and spent four years building
Metropolis II.
The model city features 1,100 toy cars zipping around a track through
miniature skyscrapers, at speeds of up to 230mph. The kinetic sculpture
is set to open to the public at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in
California on January 14.
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The grid is made up of steel beams and has 18 roads, including one
six-lane freeway and train tracks. The speed of the tiny vehicles, which
were custom-made, means that more than 100,000 cars pass through the
system in an hour. The cars are pulled up the conveyor belts by magnets
and then roll down the other sides.
Sculptor Chris Burden told ABC: 'They can crash, they can fly off the
track, they can bump into each other.'
The buildings, many similar to the Art Deco style of the original film,
were made from blocks of wood and glass. Some particularly detailed
models took five months to make. The installation was not intended to be
an exact replica of the original film but a comment on life in the urban
sprawl.
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According to the artist: 'The noise, the continuous flow of the trains
and the speeding toy cars, produces in the viewer the stress of living
in a dynamic, active and bustling 21st-century city.'
He added: 'I love hearing that the cars are going 230mph. It makes me
very hopeful for the future as that's the speed they should be running.
The noise produces a level of tension too.
'It wasn't about trying to make this scale model of something. It was
more to evoke the energy of a city.'
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When the silent film was released in 1927, it was more than two and a
half hours long. It tells the story of the futuristic city of Metropolis
where society is divided into two classes - managers, who live in luxury
skyscrapers and workers who spend their lives underground.
The two worlds collide when the son of a manager falls in love with a
worker girl, leading to an implosion of the status quo.
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Metropolis was panned by critics, including the author H.G. Wells, when
it was first released. It was cut substantially and a great deal of the
original footage lost. A restored version was screened during the Berlin
Film Festival in 2010 where it came to be considered a masterpiece.
Chris Burden, 65, is an artist originally from Boston, who creates
performance, sculpture and installation art at his studio in Topanga,
California. Many of his pieces focus around the automobile and
technology.
One of his most controversial works was created in 1974 and saw the
artist lie face up on a Volkswagen Beetle with nails hammered through
his hands as if he had been crucified on the car.
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