Alfred Abel wears a Movado Chronometre

Partway through Fritz Lang's Metropolis, in the inventor Rotwang's study, the film cuts to a full-screen close-up of a wristwatch. Joh Fredersen, the master of Metropolis, checks the time while Rotwang pores over his notes, and for a moment in 1927 the dial is the entire frame: a small rectangular case on a leather strap, Arabic numerals, a seconds dial at six, ornate skeleton hands, and two lines of printing that read Chronometre Movado. The identification problem that hangs over most silent-era wristwatches does not exist here. The watch names itself.

It is a real watch from the film's own moment. Movado was founded in La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1881 by Achille Ditesheim, who renamed the firm in 1905 with the Esperanto word for always in motion, and the watch press, looking back at the film decades later, read the wrist the same way the frame does: a diminutive square Movado with a sub-seconds dial at six, an actual-era timepiece inside a futuristic movie.

Lang directed from a script he wrote with Thea von Harbou and cast Alfred Abel, a stage and screen actor he had worked with on Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, as the master of the city, the capitalist whose gleaming surface world runs on the labor of workers underground. The film is regarded as pioneering science fiction, among the first feature-length films of the genre, and its timekeeping imagery has had a long afterlife. When Christian Marclay assembled The Clock, his montage of movie timepieces synchronized to the actual hour of the day, he sampled Metropolis three times, and the clip he filed at 1:01 in the afternoon is exactly this one: Fredersen checking his Movado while Rotwang reads.