One of the most famous sequences in the history of cinema is the robot's anthropogenesis in Metropolis (Ufa, 1927, dir. Fritz Lang). The images of the metal cyborg seated like an ancient Egyptian deity on a throne enveloped in dramatic electric discharges and rings of light that glide up and down her body are as awe-inspiring as they are enigmatic and ominous. The scene has become an emblem for the unconventional aesthetics and seminal film-technological innovations of German silent cinema. It also points to a complex, even paradoxical attitude towards machine technology, one that is simultaneously characterized by fascination and apprehension. The filmmakers and intellectuals who principally shaped German silent film culture strove to reconcile their idealist conceptions of art and life with a rapidly mechanizing world. They eagerly embraced cinema as the art of the machine age. At the same time, however, they also insisted that it was imperative for the medium to meet key stipulations of idealist aesthetics. The leading German filmmakers were preoccupied with the creative potentials of film technology and special effects came to play a pivotal role in the endeavour to develop cinema's medium-specific expressivity. According to Sergei Eisenstein, German cinema evinced that the artistic value of special effects rivalled that of montage, which he considered the “nerve of cinema:” “‘The technical possibility,’ foolishly called a ‘trick,’ is undoubtedly just as important a factor in the construction of the new film art as the new principle of montage that emerged from it.”