Introduction to Film

INTRODUCTION TO FILM

CHAPLIN MODERN TIMES

NAME CLASS PERIOD ______

BASED ON INFORMATION FROM THE TEXT:

1. WHAT STRUGGLE DOES THE FILM, MODERN TIMES PROCLAIM?

2. WHAT THOUGHTS DID THE FILM, MODERN TIMES SHOW?

3. IN WHAT SCENES IS THE TRAMP CHARACTER PRESENTED?

4. WHAT OTHER ROLES DOES CHAPLIN PLAY IN THE FILM, MODERN TIMES?

5. WHAT HAPPENS WHEN CHAPLIN SLACKS OFF OR MAKES ANY GESTURE?

6. WHAT DOES CHAPLIN FIND WHEN HE IS RELEASED FROM PRISON?

7. HOW DOES CHAPLIN GET ARRESTED?

8. WHAT THOUGHTS DID PEOPLE HAVE THAT WERE SHOWN IN THE FILM?

9. WHAT DOES THE CITY SCENE IN THE FILM, MODERN TIMES SHOW?

10. WHAT DOES THE DEPARTMENT STORE SCENE IN THE FILM, MODERN TIMES SHOW?

11. WHAT IMPORTANT IDEOLOGICAL STANCE ABOVE OTHERS DID CHAPLIN REPRESENT IN HIS FILM, MODERN TIMES?

12. WHAT DOES CHAPLIN SAY ABOUT SILENT COMEDY?

13. WHAT DID CHAPLIN CALL THE MARX BROTHERS?

14. HOW DOES THE FEEDING MACHINE OPERATE?

15. HOW DOES BARTHES REFER TO WINE AND THE FRENCH WORKER?

16. ALTHOUGH MACHINES MAY NOT ENNOBLE CHARLIE, WHAT DO THEY DO TO THE BOSS?

17. WHAT FILM IS CHAPLIN’S LAST TIME ON THE SCREEN?

18. WHAT DID LIBERAL COMMENTATOR CHARMION VON WIEGAND SAY ABOUT MODERN TIMES?

19. ACCORDING TO THE AUTHOR, WHAT WAS THE REALITY OF THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY?

20. WHAT INVENTION MADE ITS COMMERCIAL DEBUT IN 1920?

21. WHEN SOUND CAME TO FILMS, FROM WHAT SONG DID CHAPLIN GAIN WIDESPREAD RECOGNITION FROM MODERN TIMES?

Film - Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times

The film proclaims the struggle against the “dehumanization of proletarian man by the machine and the Industrial Age (Chaplin’s Modern Times).” It shows the thoughts that people had during the time of not participating in the benefits of industrialization, the fear that they would be turned into machines, the desperation of poor people during the depression, and the way technology made possible more products.

Modern Times is a film written, directed, and produced by Charlie Chaplin in 1936 during the Great Depression. The tramp character, played by Chaplin himself, is presented within scenes of a factory and café. The movie was Chaplin’s last appearance and the last full-length “silent film” ever made. The film proclaims the struggle against the “dehumanization of proletarian man by the machine and the Industrial Age (Chaplin’s Modern Times).” Machines began to take place of man, which sparked the advances of the Industrial Age.

Chaplin plays an assembly-line factory worker where he is literally fed by a machine and then becomes the ‘food’ in the cogs and gears of another machine. In addition, he plays other roles: a shipyard worker, night watchman, singing waiter and an occupant in jail. The film Modern Times is a story of industry. The film opens with industrial workers in a factory and the manager/president of the factory viewing a TV screen where he demands to hurry the production line. A conveyor belt scene is shown where the tramp’s job is to tighten up bolts on machine parts. He works as a factory worker and has to “perform his movements and tasks with clocklike tempo and precision (Modern Times).” The tramp character holds wrenches in his hands while tightening nuts on steel plates carried on the conveyor belt. At any time he slacks off or makes any gesture, he causes chaos for the other workers of the production line, and “frantically rushes to catch up to restore order (Modern Times).” During a short break he cannot stop his jerky, rhythmic movements of his “nut-tightening (Modern Times).” Later, the tramp encounters a disastrous lunch where he is fed by a machine. He eventually goes crazy and begins to tighten everything in sight including people; he becomes a ‘nut’ himself. The film continues as the tramp character settles in prison and hears of strikes and riots; there is trouble with the unemployed. Later, he is released from prison and finds that “life outside prison is fraught with perils (Modern Times).” The tramp is determined to go back to jail where life there provided him with the modern comforts of home. He tries different schemes to get re-arrested like telling the police that he stole bread. However, he fails. He then tries another strategy where he enters a cafeteria and orders a large meal that he cannot afford; he eats without paying. He succeeds and gets arrested for not paying the tab for the meal as well as purchasing cigars.

The film shows people’s thoughts during that time. They thought of not participating in the benefits of industrialization, and thought it to be harmful. The factory scenes reflect the fear that workers felt about being turned into machines, and also that the managers controlled the pace of the line and speeded it up. The city scene shows the desperation of poor people during the depression. The department store scene shows how consumer culture was growing but poor people felt left out of this new world; technology made possible more products. The movie describes how technology was rapidly developing and changing society as well as how the people viewed these changes.

Modern Times and the Question of Technology

Perhaps it was his status as a tramp, but for whatever reason, the icon Charlie represented one important ideological stance above others: a silent protest against advancing technology. Chaplin stated when in the early planning stages of Modern Times that "I am always suspicious of a picture with a message," so Chaplin never made a film in which he verbally indicted machines or automation as intrinsically bad; Robinson pegs Times as "an emotional response, always based on comedy, to the circumstances of the times" (Robinson 1985: 458). Specifically, most reviewers seem to agree that it was angst over the transition to sound -- a technological advancement that brought class to even the cheapest studios that adopted it -- that brought out the more general urge to combat the bogey of 'gizmos in positions of authority'.

Chaplin felt deeply that sound would compromise the entertainment ideals toward which he was working with the Tramp -- in fact, with film in general. "If Charlie's universality was not to be compromised with a voice," Wes Gehring put it, "the character itself would need to be retired" (Gehring 1983: 41). Of course, this need not happen, Chaplin figured in the early days of sound, were the new medium only to become one way of making films. "I regard it only as an addition, not as a substitute," he said. "Silent comedy is more satisfactory entertainment for the masses than sound comedy . . . [which] I think is transitional" (Kamin 1984: 100). Chaplin viewed silent film as the art form; now modernity was reaching forward to oust his preeminence as other comedians like the Marx Brothers (whom Chaplin called "frightening") became the new kings of the new art form. It was Chaplin against a world which he viewed increasingly as being made up of novelty-oriented robots.

Thus in Modern Times, a largely silent film Chaplin released as late as 1936, Charlie and his female counterpart, the Gamine, are "the only two live spirits in a world of automatons," as "spiritual escapees from a world in which [Chaplin] saw no other hope" (Robinson 1985: 459). The film's workers are likened to sheep in the opening shot, and in one of the most famous sequences, Charlie himself is caught in the cogs of a vicious machine and, later, feeds a meal to a poor devil caught, perhaps forever, deep in the bowels of another metal monster. Historian Dan Kamin emphasizes how human actors' voices are only heard over loudspeakers in Modern Times; when characters speak to one another, their words occur on printed subtitles in almost every case (a chorus of singing waiters, hardly integral to the plot, accepted). The world of this film thus presents machines as most advanced; yet being advanced in one way (having the power of speech) hardly cancels out the destructive power machinery is given. When brought in for Charlie's slave-driving boss to inspect in the film's opening minutes, a machine meant to feed workers while leaving their hands free announces its functions by an associated LP record. The device's viciously mechanical, repetitive quality, and its urge to present itself as superior, are emphasized by how the recording points out no less than three times that the lunch hour can now be eliminated from the workday.

The power of "progress," its advancement working to the commoners' detriment, and its potential for out-of-control mayhem are all crystallized very nicely. Charlie, the pretentious tramp, is outiconified by an image-breaking machine, more worshipped and more evolved than the highest man (Charlie's nervous, sweating boss) and yet more abusive and vulgar than the lowest ruffian: the device feeds Charlie bolts which have accidentally been left on its tray, thus forcing him to literally ingest progress (my interpretation from summary in Kamin 1984: 114). Machinery devours him by forcing him to devour its own excesses: it is only a short time later that Charlie is, as has been noted, himself devoured by the machine age in the geary maw of a huge construction device (ibid). Later, he is driven completely mad by his job of tightening gears to the point where he becomes a human machine, unable to stop his involuntary tweaking (with pliers) of anything knoblike.

What does all of this have to do with icon theory? The answer, or the means to the answer, can be found in Roland Barthes' analysis of wine. Barthes refers to how wine ennobles the French worker by adding ease to drudgery; it also has a sophisticated quality that raises him above (for instance) countries where they "drink to get drunk" (Barthes 1972: 59). Meanwhile, the intellectual finds that the "beaujolais of the writer . . . will deliver him from myths . . . will make him the equal of the proletarian" (1972: 58). In short, wine behaves a double-edged sword, an icon that creates a common ground and shifts the social order. Chaplin's use of machines is, in fact, quite similar in its style and its effects (although, as the film's lumbering demonic contrivances never reappeared in such capacity as in Times, they did not become recognized icons themselves). Machines may not ennoble Charlie, but they bring the boss down to his level (the boss is seen as agitated and exhausted by his mechanized life), they leave no one alone (just as the Tramp is heckled by superiors' voices and images piped into the washroom, the management is heckled by the feeding machine's insistence on its own usefulness). And while machines are ennobling, they cause vulgarity by their malfunctions, masticating on workers. Like Charlie before them, a figure whom varying classes identified with in his mature form, these insidious devices are a great equalizer, but in a bleak manner. Beside them, Charlie the icon seems more satisfying, the alternative and better choice to that which would equalize by giving the rich and poor a diet of grommets, eating the worker and symbolically consuming the freedom of the managerial class, and eliminating the lunch hour, eliminating the lunch hour, eliminating the lunch hour.

Both Charlie and the machines, to paraphrase Barthes again, "give . . . a foundation for a collective morality, within which everything is redeemed" (1972: 59). What choice would an audience take -- redemption as Charlie, a humanistic icon (his creator aside), or as a machine, the demon-Charlie with his bolt-tightening obsession? It is not hard to guess. Wes Gehring calls the scene "a defeat over Charlie to which no other, living antagonism has come close" (Gehring 1983: 43). And yet Charlie, in the end, loses out in the battle between icons. When we next see him in The Great Dictator, it is his last time on the screen: he has refined his ways such that he is no longer officially the Tramp (most texts I follow call the character the Barber, although identifying him as implicitly the same Charlie). More importantly, he speaks -- while not an addition that, like some critics, I view as detrimental or overly alienating to the character, it is a sign that Chaplin could not withstand modernization forever. The difficulty he had in coming to terms with the Machine Age as it most affected him -- challenging his silent film style at the core -- finally fell in technology's favor (a point well-taken by IBMin its Charlie advertising campaign of recent years).

Modern Times, for whatever it's worth, was seen as more political a film than Chaplin's previous efforts; quite frankly, its indictment of a segment of society made it that way. The New York Daily News' Kate Cameron saw the film as straight entertainment, but was of a minority; "more politically and aesthetically . . . conservative" critics, notably, made up that camp (Maland 1989: 155). Liberal commentators, such as the New Theatre's Charmion von Wiegand, were quicker to see the movie as "acutely [aware of] the changes which are occurring in the body of our society . . ." Conservative viewers, stressing the Tramp's humorous aspect, were quite telling in their emphasis on this, for when The Great Dictator came about, they would decide that there was more to worry over in Chaplin's ethic than fear of machines. But that is another chapter in the life of the icon. Filmmaking at the beginning of the twentieth century was in its infancy. The techniques at that time could only show people and objects as they were, with an occasional photographic trick. As technology progressed, so did the effects we saw on film. We no longer find it amazing that a star ship can appear to rush through space at "warp speed". We see whole cities demolished, knowing they are truly intact, and accept this as the norm. So to envision people flocking to a theater to see a movie that was entirely silent is a bit incredulous to us now. But that was the reality of the early twentieth century. Films with sound did not appear until 1928. After all, radio had just made its commercial debut on November 2, 1920, when KDKA in Pittsburgh made the announcement that Warren Harding had been elected president. Radio was one of the most popular developments of the twenties. We've come so far, and yet one thing remains the same. That is talent. Talent in any age is just as great. Our perception of what talent is may be influenced by time and culture, but the great geniuses never diminish, except in the public memory. The previous century produced many greats in the arts. And yet few would argue that Charles Chaplin was probably the greatest of all. For those who have no interest in what is perceived as outdated, silent film has little attraction. This is unfortunate, as it was the product of a day when true ability could not be faked. There were no computer graphics to stun the audiences. The photography was not nearly as good as today and the films were in black and white. Sound had yet to be added. There was just the playing of an organ by an employee of the theater. More amazingly, Chaplin wrote his own scripts as well as produced and directed his own work. He often did his own editing. It was all up to him, and no sound or visual phenomenon could help. There was more. Chaplin proved, when sound came to films, to be a prolific composer. Some of his music has gained widespread recognition, such as "Smile", from Modern Times and "This is my Song" from one of his lesser known films, A Countess from Hong Kong. But the most beautiful is "Eternally", the opening theme of Limelight. It became so widely known as one of the great Chaplin compositions that it was played at many of his professional appearances, including his Academy Award acceptance of 1972.

Chaplin, Charlie(1889-1977)