Dynamic New Score for ‘Metropolis’

San Francisco’s ever-venturesome Club Foot Orchestra has taken the largely admirable 1984 restoration of Fritz Lang’s futuristic “Metropolis” sponsored by composer Giorgio Moroder and substituted its own composition for Moroder’s disastrously inappropriate score. This new score, which the Club Foot will perform live Thursday and Friday at the Nuart, and which it performed at a press preview of the film, makes the 1926 silent classic seem all the more contemporary and prophetic with its concern with the terrible gap between rich and poor, yet captures perfectly the film’s celebrated Expressionist style. The orchestra wails as the people up on the screen are caught up in fear, torment and desperation, jangles when the elaborate machinery, sustained by virtual slave labor, of the city-state of Metropolis starts breaking down. There are Stravinsky motifs, echoes of Weill--and even hints of rock ‘n’ roll in the score, which honors the past while connecting with the present.

One of the most famous and frequently revived silent films, “Metropolis” involves the struggle of the newly idealistic son (Gustav Frolich) of the stern Master of Metropolis (Alfred Abel) and the young leader (Brigitte Helm) of the workers’ resistance to form a bridge between capital and labor, with the heart serving as mediator “between the Mind and the Hand” (a notion Lang came to regard as corny until he changed his mind late in life). A triumph of Art Deco design and unforgettable visual imagery, the timeless “Metropolis” is as up-to-date as Barbara Kopple’s “American Dream.” Information: (310) 478-6379.

Nicaragua Aftermath: In 1979, award-winning photojournalist Susan Meiselas arrived in Nicaragua just as the insurrection against the Somoza regime was gathering force. Armed with a dog-eared copy of “Nicaragua,” her collection of photographs taken at that time, she returned to Nicaragua to attempt to locate individuals in her photos and interview them on film a decade later. The result is “Pictures From a Revolution” (at the Nuart Sunday through Tuesday), yet another of those rigorous, hard-hitting yet deeply personal and compassionate accounts that are energizing the documentary form and extending its possibilities.

Meiselas, who shares a producing and directing credit with Richard P. Rogers (the film’s cinematographer) and Alfred Guzzetti, takes a deceptively simple approach, asking the people she manages to locate what’s on their minds in this post-Sandinista era. Most express a sense of despair and hopelessness, a feeling that for the most part they are worse off than when Somoza was in power. (One man, perhaps less naive than the rest, says he really expected no changes but is grateful not to live in fear of “La Guardia” anymore.) As Meiselas’ interviews accrue, taking her even to Florida to speak with former members of this hated National Guard, “Pictures From a Revolution” generates layer after layer of meaning--and heart-wrenching emotional impact.

Indeed, this film has got to stand as one of the strongest revelations of the futility of war ever shown on a screen, yet is simultaneously a clear and eloquent defense of the Sandinista insurrection. A young ex-National Guardsman, in exile, sums up everything when he says that he now realizes that that war in his country was “political”--that the Sandinistas and the Contras were but pawns in a struggle manipulated by the superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union: “The Sandinistas were victims as well. . . . We killed for nothing, we died for nothing.”

Not only does Meiselas talk to those on both sides of the struggle but proceeds to ponder the possibilities and limitations of photography and documentary; she is concerned both with those who courageously mortgaged their futures for a lost cause and how photographic images, including one of her own, which was exploited by both sides of the struggle, can be co-opted as symbols for whatever ends in this media-saturated age. “Pictures From a Revolution” is as beautiful as it is sad, featuring a gallery of individuals whose survivors’ wisdom speaks to all of us.