Earlier this week, I watched Metropolis for the first time in something like thirteen years. I think previously I'd watched a rather low quality version I'd found on the internet, but this time I watched a DVD of a restoration from 2002. In any case, I noticed a fairly trivial detail.
A little less than halfway through the movie, Maria tells the gathered workers about the Tower of Babel.
The image of the tower seems to be based on the painting "The Tower of Babel" by Pieter Bruegel the Elder from 1565 (it's called the "little" Tower of Babel to distinguish it from an-other painting Bruegel did):
Coincidentally, a day or two before I watched the movie, I'd read the account of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11:1-9. The version in Metropolis is somewhat different, though. Here's the text from the intertitles:
Come, let us build us a tower whose top may reach unto the stars!And on the top of the tower we will write the words: Great is the world and its Creator! And great is Man!... but the minds that had conceived the Tower of Babel could not build it. The task was too great. So they hired hands for wages.But the hands that built the Tower of Babel knew nothing of the dream of the brain that had conceived it.One man's hymns of praise became other men's curses.People spoke the same language, but could not understand each other..."HEAD and HANDS need a mediator."
