In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

ELEVATORS 77
"pater nosters"-has several connotations: the incessant rhythm of collective
prayer; reliance on an invisible and independent (i.e., transcendental)
source of movement [see Immanence vs. Transcendence]; and the
fear caused by these elevators. With a pater noster, the passenger has
only an instant to step into or out of the moving car. Between the
departure of one car and the arrival of the next, the shaft is merely a
black abyss.
The "Workmen's City" in the film Metropolis is an enormous sealed
space beneath the open-air city. It is connected to the surface of the earth
only by a pater noster running up and down the "New Tower of Babel,
the machine center of Metropolis." At the beginning of the film, this
elevator serves as a symbol of the workers' submission to a brutally
anonymous system: "And they all had the same faces. And they all
seemed a thousand years old ... They moved their feet forward, yet they
did not walk ... The pater noster-the ceaseless elevator which, like a
neverending series of well-buckets, transsected the New Tower of Babel-gathered
men up and poured them out again" (Lang, 20). Desubjectification,
however, not only reduces individuals to a mass of bodies;
it also causes loss of agency, loss of control over one's fate. It thus
becomes obvious that the continuous up-and-down movement of the
elevator, in particular the circular up-and-down movement of the pater
noster, mirrors that of the Wheel of Fortune, the most widespread traditional
emblem of life's randomness. Transforming the elevator into a
"decapitation machine," Johannes Becher also alludes to this metaphorical
implication when he images a tour of the capitalist world as downward
movement through a multi storey structure filled with scenes of
misery:
Electric, shining, oiled, and honking, the decapitation machine
glides along.
On the fifth floor: a woman in a bed, stoned and on her knees.
On the fourth floor: glaring grimaces behind flying curtains.
On the second floor: a toilet clearing its throat ...
First floor: an acrobat doing tricks.
In the basement: they sleep on garbage. (Becher, 145)
When elevators move upward, in contrast, they become agents of
redemption from the hardships of bodily existence. The six elevators of