I recently showed my kids Scorpio Rising, an early Kenneth Anger film, and made them write a response paper about it. Many of them said the exact same thing: they didn’t like the movie because it didn’t have any words. It had an awesome soundtrack, full of choice cuts from the 1950s and 1960s but they didn’t like that either. While this put me on a downer for the rest of the day, it did remind me that the days of relying on visual expressions and slapstick humor to move a movie are over with the new generation.

Fortunately, there are still many who like the captive qualities and visual beauty of silent films. One such group of men is The Alloy Orchestra. Based out of Cambridge, MA, Terry Donohoe, Ken Winokur, and Roger Miller (yes, that Roger Miller. The Roger Miller of the legendary, criminally underappreciated Mission of Burma) use modern sound machines to breathe life into a format that has fallen out of favor with the new generations raised on talk-heavy film. They do this by creating new, imaginative scores to these silent films.

Iowa City is in a lovely position as The Alloy Orchestra will be performing their beautiful new score, which you can hear a part of at their website, to a recently restored version of Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis. A sci-fi meditation on Marxism, Lang’s film is widely considered one of the best films of the silent era. The version that will be screened is special because along with being recently restored, it has added 30 minutes of extra footage to the runtime. While it still is missing eight minutes of footage, this version is the closest that anyone has gotten to seeing this film in its entirety since its release.

This event will be taking place on Friday at 8:00 at the Englert Theatre. Tickets are available either online or at the box office. If you are a fan of either silent films or want to experience the true movie going experience, this is an opportunity that you should take advantage of.