Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Alan Williams

SOURCE: "Structures of Narrativity in Fritz Lang's Metropolis," in Film Quarterly, Vol. XXVII, No. 4, Summer, 1974, pp. 17-24.

In the following essay, Williams discusses the narrative structure of Lang's Metropolis using A.G. Greimas's system of analysis.

This study will attempt a narrative analysis of Fritz Lang's Metropolis using concepts developed by A.-G. Greimas, particularly those of his "Eléments d'une grammaire narrative." Greimas's system analysis posits three fundamentally distinct levels in any text: a "deep" structure of meaning (similar to Levi-Strauss's notion in myth analysis but based on a dynamic model of generation rather than a static set of paradigms), an anthropomorphic level (shifts generated by the model become "actions" performed by "characters"), and finally the level of inscription in which the narrative is presented in whatever matter of expression chosen (in this case the filmic text as "read"). Rather than explain in detail Greimas's theory and then proceed to...
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