Fritz Lang’s silent science-fiction film “Metropolis” premiered in Berlin on January 10, 1927, written by Lang with Thea von Harbou. Set in a future city split between a leisured elite above ground and an exhausted worker class below, its central device is a humanoid robot - the Maschinenmensch, or machine-human - built by the inventor Rotwang and given the appearance of the saintly worker Maria. The false Maria is used to incite the workers to a destructive riot.
The robot, designed by Walter Schulze-Mittendorff with a face partly inspired by the gold burial mask of Tutankhamun, is widely regarded as the first major robot in cinema and the first “blockbuster” robot. Its sleek metallic body became the visual ancestor of later film machines, including C-3PO in Star Wars. The film embodied early-twentieth-century anxieties about industrial dehumanization and whether ordinary people were themselves becoming interchangeable machine parts.
The film entered the United States public domain in 2023, and full versions are now hosted on the Internet Archive. The Science Museum Group holds a 2016 replica of the robot reconstructed from Schulze-Mittendorff’s original drawings.
Why business readers should care: nearly every visual cliche of “the robot” in marketing, journalism, and stock imagery traces back to one 1927 prop, which means public expectations of AI are still being shaped by a silent film about labor unrest.