In Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), machinery is everywhere. It drives the city, organises its workforce and dictates the rhythm of human life. In one of the film’s most memorable sequences, a vast machine becomes an image of Moloch, the ancient deity demanding human sacrifice. Technology, for all its apparent grandeur, reveals a terrifying appetite.1

Almost a century later, on 30 October 2026, my ROBO co-founder Tom and I watched Metropolis at Regent Street Cinema, where another relationship between machinery and human experience was playing out. The cinema is home to an original Compton theatre organ, a complex mechanical instrument that turns an intricate arrangement of pipes, air and electrical controls into something intensely expressive.2

The connection is more than a convenient metaphor. The organ is a working piece of cinema history, and its continued use raises a question at the heart of Lang’s film: what happens when the machines we build become part of the way we experience being human?

A cinema with a history of invention

Regent Street Cinema occupies a distinctive place in British film history. On 21 February 1896, the Lumière brothers' Cinématographe – a pioneering motion-picture device that could both record moving images and project them onto a screen – was presented to the first fee-paying public audience for moving pictures in Britain, at the theatre of the Royal Polytechnic Institution, now Regent Street Cinema.3 The previous day, the machine had been demonstrated to invited members of the press. This landmark event helped establish moving pictures as a form of public entertainment in Britain, although it should not be confused with the invention of cinema itself.

The building’s history has not been uninterrupted. The cinema closed to the public in 1980 and was subsequently used as a lecture hall and function venue. In 2015, following a restoration supported by the University of Westminster and heritage funders, it reopened as a working cinema.4

Its return brought together old and new forms of projection, from digital presentations to screenings on film. The auditorium’s history is also preserved in the Compton organ, an instrument that has survived changes in technology, the building’s changing purposes and a period when it could no longer be played.5

There is an aptness to seeing Metropolis here. Lang imagined a future in which technological progress had transformed the city while dividing its inhabitants. Regent Street Cinema’s own history shows a different side of technological change: the effort to preserve an older technology because it still has something to offer.

An instrument built to move an audience

The Compton is a theatre pipe organ, designed for the particular demands of cinema entertainment. Unlike a piano, whose sound is produced by hammers striking strings, a pipe organ sends air through pipes to generate sound. The instrument at Regent Street Cinema has two manuals, or keyboards, and six ranks of pipes, alongside tuned percussion and other orchestral effects. Its resources include sounds associated with strings, flutes, trumpets and the human voice.6 The programme for the 30 October 2026 screening notes that the organ was installed in 1936, the cinema’s 40th anniversary year.7

Its range allows a single performer to suggest the scale of an orchestra, shifting between musical colours and moods. The organist controls the instrument from a console, while electrically operated shutters regulate its volume. The result is not an automatic soundtrack generated independently of its surroundings. Every musical gesture depends on a performer making decisions in real time.8

The instrument’s history is itself a story of human intervention. After years of use, it became unreliable through lack of maintenance. In 2005, theatre organ specialist and restorer Peter Hammond began the work of bringing it back to life, repairing damaged pipework and renewing electrical components to make the organ playable again. Further restoration followed as the building was prepared for its return to cinema use.9

The Theatre Organ Club subsequently supported organ preludes for the cinema’s classic-film programme, helping return the instrument to public performance.10

Today, the Compton has a regular place in the cinema’s programme. The Monday Classic Matinee takes place every Monday, and on the first Monday of each month the screening begins with a special recital on the original 1936 organ. The cinema describes it as one of the last few working organs of its kind. Its survival is not simply a matter of keeping an artefact intact. The organ remains meaningful because people continue to restore it, play it and listen to it.11

The sound of a machine

Silent cinema makes the relationship between machinery and emotion particularly clear. Without recorded dialogue, music can shape how an audience interprets a gesture, a movement or a change of scene. A musical phrase can turn a familiar image sinister, make a chase exhilarating or lend a moment of stillness a sense of loss.

At the screening, the music raised an interesting question about the role of silence. With music accompanying almost the entire film, there was relatively little opportunity for the soundtrack to fall away and leave the images to speak for themselves. Yet silence can be an expressive choice in its own right. In a film so preoccupied with machinery, labour and the relentless movement of the city, moments without music might have offered a different kind of intensity, allowing the rhythm and visual detail of Lang's world to come forward.

The organ does not need to experience any of these emotions itself. Its expressive force emerges through the relationship between the instrument, the performer, the images on screen and the people watching. Its mechanical construction is essential to what it can do, but construction alone does not explain the experience it creates.

This offers an intriguing counterpoint to Metropolis. Lang’s machines are often presented as systems that demand human labour while disregarding the people who sustain them. The Compton, by contrast, depends on a human performer to make its possibilities audible. Its mechanisms extend the musician’s capabilities; they do not eliminate the musician’s role.12

The distinction is not between a bad machine and a good one. It is between different relationships with technology: one in which human beings become subordinate to the systems they operate, and another in which machinery becomes a means of expression.

An original score, and an unrealised one

Music was part of Metropolis from its creation. German composer Gottfried Huppertz wrote the original orchestral score for the film’s 1927 premiere, but his contribution began well before the film reached an audience. During production, he regularly played piano on Fritz Lang’s set, using music to establish a scene’s mood and help guide the actors’ performances. Unusually for the period, the score developed alongside the film rather than being added only after the images were complete.13

The music was therefore part of the film's creative process, helping shape the rhythm and emotional character of what appeared on screen. Lang's monumental architecture and industrial machinery were given a musical dimension from the outset. Metropolis was not simply a sequence of images of a mechanical future; its original conception brought visual drama and musical expression together.

That makes the Compton organ at Regent Street Cinema an especially interesting companion to the film. A live organist can interpret the images in real time, shaping their emotional impact through changes in rhythm, volume and musical colour. The machinery on screen remains the same, but the audience's experience of it can change profoundly with the music.

At the 2026 screening, the accompaniment was improvised, with MacKenzie responding to the action on screen as it unfolded. Rather than following a fixed score, he was interpreting the film in real time, making musical decisions about its pace, mood and dramatic shifts. The Compton provided an enormous palette of sounds, but it was the organist who decided how to use them.

A live, improvised accompaniment also raises a question about how much the music changes the film itself. The images remain constant, but the emotional experience need not. A different organist, responding to the same sequence, might create an entirely different atmosphere, emphasising its tension, tenderness or absurdity. The music becomes an interpretation of the film, shaping what the audience notices and how it responds. In this sense, the screening is not simply a presentation of Lang's work, but a new performance of it, created through the interaction of filmmaker, musician, instrument and audience. Lang creates the visual world. Huppertz provides one musical interpretation. MacKenzie creates another, in real time, using a mechanical instrument with its own expressive capabilities.

There was also a more direct connection once imagined. As Regent Street Cinema prepared to reopen in 2015, one of its more ambitious opening projects was a new organ score for Metropolis, with Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood as the proposed composer. The project did not come to fruition, but the idea would have brought Lang's vision into dialogue with a contemporary musician through an instrument with its own history of cinema performance.14

Three creative forces emerge: Lang's visual imagination, Huppertz's original musical interpretation, and the possibility of a new score performed on the Compton. Each offers a different way of experiencing the same machine-filled world.

When machines become part of being human

A cello is a technology, too. So is a piano. Both extend the body's capacity to produce sound, turning physical gestures into something that can communicate feelings for which words may be inadequate. The distinction is not between instruments that are machines and those that are not, but in how they connect the human performer to the sound that reaches an audience.

The Compton makes this relationship unusually apparent. It is a machine in the fullest sense: an interconnected system of mechanical and electrical components, controlled by the organist through a console and designed to turn physical actions into sound. The organist doesn't produce that sound directly, but works through the instrument, controlling its volume, texture and musical character. Neither the music nor the experience belongs entirely to the person or the machine. It emerges through their interaction.

This is the important distinction. The Compton isn't expressive despite being a machine; its machinery is what makes its particular range of expression possible. The performer brings the musical intention, but the instrument gives that intention a form it could not take without it.

This relationship is not unique to music. Throughout history, we have built technologies that extend our physical and creative capacities. The camera allows us to preserve and reinterpret what we see. Cinema combines light, images, sound and machinery to create experiences that none of those elements could produce alone. Recorded music allows a performance to travel beyond the presence of the musician. Each invention changes not only what we can do, but how we encounter and understand the world.

Over time, these technologies become so embedded in everyday life that we stop noticing how much they mediate our experience. We see through cameras, listen through speakers, communicate through networks and increasingly use artificial intelligence to generate, interpret and reshape information. The machine becomes less an object we operate and more part of the environment through which we live.

This is where the relationship explored in Metropolis becomes particularly relevant. In Lang's city, machinery is essential to the functioning of society. It generates the power, sustains the infrastructure and supports the privileged existence of those living above ground. Yet the workers who maintain it are required to organise their lives around its demands. Their movements become repetitive, their time is controlled by the working rhythm of the machines, and their individuality is subordinated to the system.

The technology is no longer serving human beings. Human beings are serving the technology.

The problem is not necessarily the existence of the machines themselves. They are doing what they were designed to do. It is the social and economic system surrounding them, and the distribution of power within it, that turns technological progress into a source of human exploitation. The machinery serves those who control it, while those who operate it bear the cost.

Lang's vision asks what happens when a society organises itself around the needs of its machines rather than the needs of its people.15

The Compton offers a different possibility, though not a simple reversal. It, too, is a system that depends on machinery, maintenance and skilled operation. But its purpose is expressive. The technology allows one person to create a musical experience shared by many, connecting a performer's interpretation with an audience's imagination.

As machines become increasingly involved in producing our images, music and language, the question is no longer only what they can do. It is how their presence changes the ways we create, perceive and connect. The organ gives us a way to approach that question without pretending the answer is straightforward: the machine is neither the whole story nor merely a passive instrument. It is part of the relationship through which the experience comes into being. 

The creature and the machine

The relationship between humans and the machines they create becomes more complicated when those machines begin to resemble us. The question shifts from what a machine can help us do to what happens when we attempt to reproduce human life itself. It is a question that has occupied writers and artists for centuries, not least Mary Shelley in Frankenstein, published in 1818.

There is an intriguing connection between Shelley's novel and Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927). Both begin with an act of creation that challenges the boundary between the living and the manufactured, but they approach it from very different directions. Victor Frankenstein assembles a body from human remains and brings it to life. Rotwang, the inventor in Metropolis, constructs an artificial human from mechanical components. One is made from the material of the dead; the other from the materials of a machine. Both are intended to reproduce something that exists in the human world.16

Shelley’s creature is not simply a collection of body parts. Once alive, it learns to speak, reads, observes human relationships and longs for companionship. Its experiences shape its understanding of itself, while the rejection it encounters turns its search for acceptance into a demand for revenge. Victor is horrified by what he has made and abandons it. The creature, meanwhile, sees its creator as the one person who owes it an explanation, and eventually a companion. The question at the heart of the novel is not only whether a human being can create life, but what responsibility follows when they do. As Josephine Johnston explores in her study of the novel, Victor’s obligations to his creation are inseparable from the consequences of his scientific ambition.17

Rotwang’s creation has a different purpose. The Maschinenmensch is initially conceived as an artificial double of Hel, the woman Rotwang loved and lost. Its resemblance to a human being is then put to use by the industrialist Joh Fredersen, who wants it to take on the appearance of Maria, the workers’ trusted leader. The false Maria is not created to become part of human society, but to manipulate it. Her appearance gives the machine influence over people who have no idea what they are looking at. In this case, the imitation of humanity is a means of control.18

There is also a gendered dimension to both stories. Frankenstein’s creature is male, but Victor destroys the female companion he has begun to construct, fearing the consequences of allowing his creation to reproduce. In Metropolis, the artificial woman is shaped by male desire and becomes an instrument in a struggle between men for control. The contrast between Maria and her mechanical double is particularly revealing: one encourages solidarity among the workers; the other is designed to turn them against themselves.19

The connection between the two works is not simply a matter of shared themes. The Cinémathèque française identifies Frankenstein as one of the literary influences behind Metropolis, particularly the idea of a creator being overtaken by his creation. It also identifies Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s The Future Eve as an important model for the robot’s physical and psychological conception. The influence later travelled in the opposite direction: the BFI notes that the creation of robot Maria helped shape the mad-scientist imagery in James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931).20

The difference between the creature and the machine is clear enough in their construction. What is less clear is what makes either of them human. Is it the material they are made from, their ability to think and feel, or the relationships they form with others?

In Frankenstein, the creature's appearance determines how people respond to him before they have any opportunity to know him. He is capable of learning, affection and reflection, but is treated as a monster because of the way he looks. His experiences of rejection eventually shape his behaviour, raising an uncomfortable possibility: perhaps what makes someone monstrous is not simply what they are, but how they are treated. The creature's plea to Victor is, at its heart, a demand to be recognised as a being with needs of his own. He wants companionship, affection and a place in the world. Victor has given him life but refuses to acknowledge any obligation towards him.21

The robot Maria presents the reverse problem. She looks human, moves like a human and can imitate human behaviour, but the people who create and control her are interested in what that resemblance can achieve. Her appearance is used to deceive the workers, not to establish a relationship with them. The film shows how readily human beings can be influenced by an artificial version of someone they trust.22

These are different kinds of creation, but both unsettle the assumptions we use to distinguish ourselves from what we make. We tend to associate humanity with a combination of consciousness, emotion, memory, relationships and the capacity to suffer. Yet none of these qualities is easily measured from the outside. We judge other people partly through their appearance and behaviour, and through our willingness to recognise their experiences as real. What happens when something artificial becomes convincing enough to challenge those judgements?

This is no longer only a question for science fiction. Robotics and artificial intelligence are producing machines that can communicate, respond to people and imitate aspects of human behaviour with increasing sophistication. That does not mean they have feelings or consciousness, and it would be a mistake to assume that convincing behaviour proves an inner experience. But it does make the question of how we respond to them more pressing. Do we owe a machine anything, or does our responsibility lie with the people affected by its use, and with the decisions made by those who build and deploy it?

Shelley and Lang approach the question from different directions. Victor's failure is to create a living being and then abandon it. Fredersen's is to use a machine's resemblance to a human being as a means of controlling other people. Both stories ask us to look beyond the act of invention and consider what follows from it. The question is not simply whether we can make something in our own image, but what responsibilities come with the power to do so. ⏹