Megalopolis

At those moments when a phase-shift becomes unavoidable, civilisation either dies by collective suicide or lives by reinvention, and it is ultimately the true function of art (including the arts of engineering, design, planning and so on) to open pathways to the latter: Coppola aims both to espouse this thesis and to embody it.

Whatever flaws the film possesses (there’s little point in enumerating them again here; if you want to find lists of those flaws, they are easily found, as the Roman mob of reviewers delighted in supplying them from the moment the film hit the screen, if not before), the ambition should be applauded (given how long this project had been gestating, one cannot rule out that its conception dates from his involvement with Syberberg, and that this encounter significantly contributed to Coppola asking himself how ambitious it was possible to be with the cinematic medium), especially as it is a work constructed, not as a hermetic whole, but as an invitation to exceed its own limits. That said, the Roman analogy may be pertinent, but one also feels that the results could have been improved if Coppola’s love of pizza, pasta and Marcus Aurelius had been balanced by a greater interest in the Greeks, too. Still, his challenge to rethink the polis, which is to say the entirety of what we still call, rather dubiously, “politics”, hits the mark, even if the METROPOLIS-style handshake to round things off is no more persuasive now than it was in 1927.