Berlin International Film festival

The Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Germany

Berlin’s iconic Brandenburg Gate has served many purposes over the course of the city’s history. Last night it served as one very impressive movie theater. When curtains parted before a huge screen just in front of the Gate, an audience of roughly 2,00 was treated to a restored original version of Frtiz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece, “Metropolis.”

Despite the icy weather, both Berliners and tourists attended in droves, though the luckiest of them watched the production from inside the Starbucks on the corner of Pariser Platz (and yes, the Starbucks is across the street from the American embassy). But some even put down blankets on the frozen ground and settled in. One could buy a ticket to the parallel viewing inside the nearby Friedrichstadtpalast, but where’s the adventure in that?

Using an original copy of the film that had languished for decades in an Argentinian museum and was discovered in 2008, film archeologists have painstakingly filled in the gaps in a previous restoration of the futuristic silent picture. While some of the re-discovered material still looks very damaged, the new, 147-minute version is probably the closest anyone will ever come to replicating what Lang’s first audience saw.