The concept is that of “Semiotic square” which is a way of classifying concepts which are relevant to a given opposition of concept. The movie is divided into various spaces making possible various transfers and disjunctions etc etc for more info read the paper by Alan Williams Here

Wiki lift

This film is strewn with references to the Old and New Testaments. A preacher speaks of the Tower of Babel. Freder is stalked, in his nightmares, by representations of the Seven Deadly Sins. Characters – the heroine named Maria, or the employee named Josephat – are constantly invoked by names from the Old Texts. There is, during the climactic portions, a flood of Biblical proportions. And when a machine malfunctions and claims the lives of the workers manning it, this visual is superimposed with that of Moloch, the God who demanded sacrifices. (The dead men troop into Moloch’s open mouth, as if paralleling their actions of a minute ago, when they surrendered their lives to the malfunctioning machine.) But the most explicit instance of religious subtext is this visual of Freder slumped at the elevator machine, its hands resting on his outstretched arms. Freder, finally, has begun to bear the cross.

No optical printing system existed at the time, so to create a matte effect, a large mirror was placed at an angle to reflect a piece of artwork while live footage was projected onto the reverse. To expose the projected footage, the silvering on the back of the mirror had to be scraped off in strategically appropriate places. One mistake would ruin the whole mirror. This was done for each separate shot that had to be composited in this manner. This procedure was developed by Eugen Schüfftan and is known as the “Schufftan Process.

This suggests that power is control over the time of one’s subordinates.