In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

TIMEPIECES 235
Death has instructed me to ask: Would someone in the audience be so
kind as to lend her a watch?" (62). While in the real world industrial
workers must either speed up their movements or adjust their rhythm to
the pace of machines if they want to "extend" the duration and efficiency
of their labor [see Assembly Lines], Death's assistants in Orphee have the
imaginary privilege of slowing down the rhythm of time itself: "Death:
This is Azrael's job. He's changing our speeds. An hour for me should be
a minute for [Orpheus]" (60).
Workers who have to meet higher standards of productivity-but also
capitalists and politicians who pay interest on capital loans-always feel
that time is passing too quickly. From this perspective, on July 27 Prime
Minister Poincare of France draws a dramatic picture of his government's
finances: "If the measures we are requesting from you are not
approved, we will lose 11,000 francs per minute, 660,000 francs per
hour, 16 million francs per day" (Annees-memoire, 72). By showing a
clock whose dial is divided into ten hours instead of twelve and whose
second hand proceeds with unusual speed, Fritz Lang, in the first scene
of his film Metropolis, doubly symbolizes this constant feeling of time
shortage as an essential component in proletarian life: "On the enormous
face of the clock in the New Tower of Babel-the machine center of
Metropolis-the seconds tick away, as regular in their coming as in their
going. The clock is divided into only ten segments; the two main hands
are almost vertical, while the second hand sweeps jerkily around" (19).
Freder, the savior of the proletarians, tries to slow the pace of the second
hand. Invoking the Master of Metropolis (his father, John Fredersen) and
quoting the New Testament, he embodies the workers' collective desire
for liberation from the ever-accelerating rhythm of labor: "His mouth
opens and he shouts in agony ... His arms are outstretched, holding the
gigantic clock-hands as if he were suspended from them, crucified. Again
he shouts in agony: ' ... Father! I did not know that ten hours could be
such torture!'" (52).
Frequently, visions of the earthly paradise are related to such metaphors
of salvation from the tyrannical rhythms of time. They even surface
in Jack Dempsey's description of the fabulous parties organized by
his friend Billy Seeman, the son of the White Rose Tea king: "Seeman's
apartment over the Village's Pepper Pot was a popular gathering place
(and watering hole) for Broadway mugs, bootleggers, gangsters, Follies
girls, models, and the usual assortment of newspapermen, politicians,