Fritz Lang's sprawling vision of a futuristic dystopia driven by underground machines and the oppressed workers who operate them was brilliantly realized in 1927 as Metropolis. When the silent film reached the United States from Berlin, Paramount shortened the film for commercial purposes to a total of 90 minutes. Quickly hailed as a landmark achievement in film, Metropolis was restored in 1984 with color tints and a score composed by the Alloy Orchestra, then again in 1987 with title cards and photographs representing missing scenes, and yet again in 2001. In 2010, the film received its final restoration after the curator of the Buenos Aires Museo del Cina discovered a 16 millimeter dupe negative of the picture, complete with 25 minutes of lost, though admittedly grainy, footage. Last Saturday, World Music/CRASHarts screened Metropolis in its magnificent near-entirety of 150 minutes (it is estimated that the film ran around 153 minutes at its debut in Berlin) at the Somerville Theatre with a live accompaniment from the Alloy Orchestra. The performance brought the picture to life with expertly-timed sound effects and a raw, driving score. Since composing the score for the film in 1984, the three-man orchestra-Roger Miller on the synthesizer, Terry Donahue on percussion and accordion and Ken Winokur on percussion and clarinet-has worked with four different versions of Metropolis. That night, their performance was longer than ever, playing the entire 150 minutes of the film and providing background themes for the beginning and ending credits.

After the credits finished, the three musicians stood up, stretched their backs and hands and bowed to a sold-out crowd, which was offering the most energetic of standing ovations. Unlike symphony orchestras, the Alloy Orchestra performs without break; the short pauses of sound in the film provide barely any time to turn the page or switch, as Winokur often did on Saturday night, from bass drum to clarinet to wood-on-metal contraption. I counted three emphatic moments of total silence-an example was when Freder, the son of the city's architect, opened the menacing entrance of Rotwang's house in an attempt to save his love, Maria-and for those 2 seconds, Miller wiggled his fingers while Donahue and Winokur, located opposite Miller in a jungle-like station of bells, snares, drums and other percussive tools, arched their backs and move their shoulders in relief.

The Alloy Orchestra's physical capacity to sustain the music throughout the film seemed an inhuman feat. The musicians' consistency with each precise sound mirrored that of a carefully-edited soundtrack. But a well-oiled, unexpressive machine it was not; each of the three brought human expression and interpretation to the film score that proved once again the old mantra, "music makes the movie." The orchestra followed the momentous black-and-white screen like an ensemble following its conductor; Winokur, hammering on the bells and snares, drove the hopeless workers of Metropolis toward their machines in an unrelenting march, complemented by Miller's exasperated organ theme and Donahue's pounding bass drum. In an opening scene, they conveyed the confusing clash of emotions when to the na've Freder's astonishment, Maria brought the worker's children out to the upper-class utopia.

There were a few limitations in last Saturday's presentation. There were only four main musical themes in the film-a worker's march, a jazzy parlor tune to portray sinful partying, a melancholic theme for close-ups and a haunting theme for the catacombs-so they became tiring by the third act of the film. The sound effects-cymbals for crashes and falling objects, a metal box for the creaking of doors and a strange oscillating apparatus for the futuristic laboratory noises-were also predictable. On Lang's part, the characters' overacting often incited laughter (even in the serious scenes) and showed that many of the gestures used in the silent era do not age well. Nevertheless, Metropolis remains a timeless staple of science-fiction epics, and the Alloy Orchestra's performance of the film's most recent restoration, which took about one year and $840,000 to complete, was a rare treat for film buffs and music lovers alike.