Modern Times

Joan Mellen

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838717186
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Histoire et critique du cinéma

Modern Times was Charlie Chaplin's last full-length silent film. The author situates 'Modern Times' within the context of Chaplin's life work, exploring its history and influences. She explores how the film's themes of oppression, industrialization and dehumanization are embodied in the little tramp's struggle to survive in the modern world.

III THE FILM

Modern Times, which Chaplin called 'an American story', remains unique for its naturalistic and concrete images of an America under economic siege. The plot is an accumulation of episodes, picaresque in spirit, not a random collection of two-reelers, 'which might have been called The Shop, The Jailbird, The Watchman and The Singing Waiter', as Otis Ferguson would suggest in the New Republic.

Each sequence joins a progression of deepening contradictions with symmetry binding the episodes. As Parker Tyler recognised, Modern Times was in fact the first of the Chaplin films with a complex plot, with a pattern tending toward the epic.

The police are ubiquitous in Modern Times. Sometimes they are in uniform, sometimes in plain clothes. In each episode the tramp confronts the authorities, who exercise complete control over his economic well-being. A recognisable pattern soon emerges. At the close of each sequence, police close in to enforce the social order as a paddy wagon pulls up to cart the tramp off to hospital or, more frequently, to jail.

The opening title warns the spectator: Modern Times would be 'a story of industry, of individual enterprise, of humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness'. Chaplin indulges his penchant for irony by invoking the 'Declaration of Independence' at the beginning of a film where the main character is enslaved.

When Modern Times opens, the tramp is fully integrated into the workforce. He is a labourer on the assembly line of 'Electro Steel Corp', as Chaplin reveals how tramps come into being: the economic condition of the working class turns out to be as precarious as that of the lumpen proletariat, people who survive by odd jobs and by their wits, like the tramp in City Lights. A tramp, Chaplin suggests, is a fired worker.

For a split second, before any music rises, a mammoth clock engulfs the shot. It is in extreme close-up so that half the numbers drop out of the frame. The clock spills beyond its perimeters as time is to dominate the worker's daily life. The clock continues under the credits where, once more, Chaplin's characters have been too dehumanised to be granted names. Charlie is 'a factory worker', defined by his social role; the nature of his work and his subjugation to it are controlled by time. Goddard is 'a gamin'. They represent not just themselves, but all members of their class.

Workers as sheep: Chaplin as influenced by Eisenstein

The clock is replaced by a shot of a herd of sheep, a black sheep among them; the sheep engulf the shot. Chaplin then dissolves to a shot of men emerging from an underground subway. It is a homage to Eisenstein's Strike where shots of striking workers are juxtaposed with cattle enduring their slaughterhouse fate. Chaplin had greeted The Battleship Potemkin in 1926 as 'the best film in the world'. When he met Eisenstein in Hollywood, he added, 'in five years it hasn't aged a bit; still the same!'. Eisenstein in turn had in 1922 praised Chaplin as having 'taken the eighth seat in the council of muses'. In 1930, Eisenstein pronounced Chaplin 'the most interesting person in Hollywood'.

Chaplin's montage, suggesting that men need not behave like sheep, implies no less a call to arms than Eisenstein's appeal to Russian workers: if men have been dehumanised, reduced to being part of a herd of animals under the control of others, might it not be incumbent on them to reclaim their manhood by taking control of their destiny? Chaplin extends the conceit with a montage of short takes and dissolves to the gated factory: like sheep, the men move from subway to street to factory, where they are locked inside its prison-like structure.

In such an environment, there can be no synchronised dialogue because the noisy machines drown out people's voices, even as the workers on the assembly line have no say in their destinies. In these images of alienated labour, neither the workers nor the spectator even know what product is being produced, as in Metropolis (1927) Fritz Lang's classic depiction of the dehumanisation of the worker.

The factory owner is a Henry Ford lookalike

Disembodied voices emerge on the soundtrack through machines. The video-phone through which the President of Electro Steel (Allan Garcia) issues his increasing commands to a shirtless worker manning an oversized machine – 'speed her up!' – also evokes Metropolis. The President uses his video-phone to harass his workers, depriving them of CO all privacy. His video machine even follows them to the toilet, in images predicting George Orwell's depiction of Big Brother in 1984. Machines replace people. On a gramophone record, an engineer describes how the Bellows Feeding Machine works.

The boss is portrayed not only as cruel, but as mindless. When he is not attempting to squeeze every last drop of energy from the workers, he attempts to do a jigsaw puzzle; when this proves too challenging, he reads the comics, with 'Tarzan' facing the spectator. His uselessness is matched by his inanity.

Charlie appears at the rapidly moving assembly line, a not-unwilling cog in the machine of 'progress'. A bee buzzes in his face, but he has no leisure to brush it aside, lest some bolts he must tighten escape from his wrench. His contorted effort to distract the bee earns him a hit in the head by the club-carrying foreman who strikes, ostensibly to swat the bee; violence attaches to the simplest of moments at this factory, and those whose role it is to control the workers come armed.

The President's demands for 'more speed' have turned Charlie into a robot, someone full of tics, the machine having robbed him of his normal human rhythms. In response, Charlie exacts small rebellions. Casually he files his fingernails with a tool before he returns to work, like the exploited worker in Chaplin's first foray into this theme in the Essanay short, Work.

Chaplin prefigures Orwell's Big Brother

Chaplin deliberately renders his tramp-as-worker compliant – knowing how much he needs his job, the tramp attempts to do as he is asked. The alienation of labour is dramatised in every one of Chaplin's scenes of people working. As satire exaggerates in the service of truth, the 'factory worker' has to punch a time clock in Modern Times even when he goes to the bathroom where the boss discovers him smoking: 'Hey! Quit stalling! Get back to work!'

Being treated as if he were a machine causes the worker to lose control of his body. The factory worker is soon so disoriented that he sits down on his neighbour's plate of soup; then he shakes so much, as if he had been occupied by the machine, that he does spill the entire plate of soup on his fellow worker. In their effort to keep up with the demand on their labour, the workers are set against each other as competitors and antagonists.

Chaplin's 'Bellows' mechanical feeding machine, into which the factory worker is locked, is as dark an attack on the dehumanisation of labour as anything in Metropolis. The aim, with the 'automaton soup plate', automatic pusher and 'hydro-compressed, sterilized mouth wiper' is to eliminate the lunch hour. Electro Steel must move 'ahead of your competitor', the President is told. To help accomplish this end, the worker must eat while expending 'no energy', since all energy must be placed in the service of creating the mysterious product, one as opaque as the undefined manufactured object in Henry James's The Ambassadors.

The tramp has brought a lunch box so small it could barely hold a sandwich. He acquiesces in participating in the feeding machine demonstration. In deep focus his fellow workers sit on benches observing. The scene illustrates Chaplin's genius for expressing the tragic and the comic simultaneously: what begins as hilarious becomes a paradigm of the tramp's dire social condition. (Chaplin manipulated the feeding machine himself for this scene.)

The comedy derives as well from contrast, the collision of opposites. At first the machine lives up to the scientists' claims. Having allowed the worker appropriate time to eat his food, the sterile mouth wiper jauntily swings over. An extreme close-up of an ear of corn then heralds the coming disaster. As the corn suddenly begins to move violently from side to side, eating becomes an assault. While the tramp is tortured, treated as part of an experiment rather than as a human being, the conceit is heightened by the bureaucrats, oblivious to his pain, discussing what is going wrong with the machine.

The 'Bellows' mechanical feeding machine;

The disaster intensifies with the line, 'we'll start with the soup again'. The soup spills first onto Charlie's chest, then, a second time, into his face, hitting a technician in the eye. No one cares, even when the machine inadvertently serves the worker not only the cut-up bites of food, but the machine bolts that the hapless scientist inadvertently placed on the food tray. The whipped cream in the face gag recalls slapstick out of the early two-reelers, only for the spectator to be pulled up short when the sterile mouth wiper goes berserk. It attacks the tramp viciously and so unrelentingly that he falls out of the frame. 'It isn't practical' is the line that punctuates the scene, as if what counted was the well-being not of the worker, but of the machine.

Late afternoon finds the boss ordering that the assembly line speed up to 'the limit'. It is now that the worker is swallowed up by the machine. Gracefully Charlie moves along the gears, his agility that of a man half his age (he was forty-seven). By the end of the day, the tramp has gone mad, chasing a secretary to tighten the buttons on her skirt, and rushing outside where he assa...