Critique of metropolis assignment

Throughout the movie I noticed that the workers and sometimes the thinkers would raise their hands reaching towards the sky. I believe that this symbolizes struggle and chaos among the groups. For instance, the scene where the workers of the completed Tower of Babel all reached their hands up to tear down the monument and lift the struggle from their shoulders. To relate this to religion, congregations will sometimes raise their hands, I guess, to relieve struggles in their lives and to receive their higher power’s love.

We see this raising of hands again in the scene where the underground city is flooding and the children reach up to Maria and Freder on the gong monument in hopes of help and rescue. I believe, overall, that this raising of the hands derived from a religious stance since most religious fanatics associate the sky with heaven and God. Architecture in Metropolis blended with the new movements of Art Deco and Modernism of the early 1900’s. Although modernism isn’t so modern and Art Deco is an old style in our eyes, these types of architecture were new to the people of the early 1900’s.