Art

Charlie Chaplin is undoubtedly one of the few film stars to have attained iconic status, at times even bordering on kitsch, in the last century. Many people the world over have come to know of his trademark attire and walk, and whose work we can trace to that of current comics like Steve Martin and Rowan Atkinson of the Mr. Bean fame. But his pioneering work is not just entertainment but, at most part, a radical and subversive commentary on the social atmosphere during the first half of the 19th century when he rose to fame. In a research done by Harry Grace, he concludes that each of Chaplins significant works reflect particular important American eras the issue of immigration and assimilation as portrayed in The Immigrant the conflict between labor and the police in City Lights and the misuse of political power in The Great Dictator (1952). But most relevant to this discourse is Chaplins Modern Times (1936), a film that echoes mans struggle to break free from a world consumed by technocracy. It is essentially a criticism of the industrial age wherein a machine aesthetic, a preference for appearance than being, is followed. And it is this film that erases all doubts that Chaplin is one of the greatest modernist thinkers of all time, following in the ranks of James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence.

Modern Times, Chaplins last silent film in an era of growing fascination for the talkies, begins with Charlie
Chaplins film person, Little Tramp, working in a factory as a cog-turner. The factory works successfully with the precise movements of the employees along an assembly line of machine parts. The Tramp, used to the mechanical movements of attaching nuts and bolts, disrupts the order inside the factory when he cannot stop his actions, much to the chagrin of a female employee who finds Tramp repeating the action on her backside. He is rushed to a psychiatric hospital to cure his nervous breakdown. After a stint in the hospital, Tramp finds himself alone, scared and unemployed. Outside, he is mistaken for a Communist leader and sent to jail but he comes to see the comfort of prison compared to the realities of the outside world, when he is released on pardon. He eventually meets a young gamin (Paulette Goddard) who he will come to be attached to for the rest of the film. Both of them try to struggle in the midst of the growing mayhem of unemployment and hunger as seen in Depression-era America. They dream of creating a home and settling down with good jobs. But, in the final, legendary scene of the film, after officers try to take the young gamin away, they run away, turning their backs on a society that exploits and undermines. The gamin asks, as they face the endless horizon, Whats the use of trying. The Tramp answers, Buck up  never say die. Well get along (Dirks c 2009).

For most, this film would seem but an unfortunate love story between the Tramp and the young gamin. A noted film historian, Roger Manvell, even said that Though highly entertaining, Modern Times had little social comment and no political party implications whatsoever (Stewart 296). But many critics and modernist authorities believe that this episodic comedy is deeply-rooted in industrial satire and the metaphorical representation of Depression-era society. One such critic is Garrett Stewart, who authored Modern Hard Times Chaplin and the Cinema of Self-Reflection, a significant discussion on the modernist work of Chaplin. He discusses Chaplins seminal work on two parts the films apparent modernist, anti-machine leanings, and its criticism of the talking films that invariably took over silent film.

In the article, Stewart discusses the apparent industrial themes of the film. Drawing inspiration from the superimposed clock seen in the opening credits, Stewart describes the film as containing four segments  the scene set by the factory, prison, department store, and dance hall interiors  are like the quadrants of a clockface, determined by the same circumference of technique, always within the radius of a central theme (298). Stewart states that the film circles around the imposition of order and repetition in a world surrounded by mayhem and discord. And he finds that Chaplins genius lies in how he interconnects scenes throughout his film to reflect this central theme. The first factory scene, where the Tramp acts in synchronicity with the rest of the assembly line, is actually mimicked by the final scenes mechanical motions, as observed by Stewart the dances own potential grace of movement...is parodied as the entrapping monomaniacal whirling of a repetitive ... that takes us directly back...to the opening factory sequence (299). And it is this exact mechanical motion that, for Stewart, pushes the plot of the film. When the mechanical rhythm (297) engulfs the Tramps being, he is pushed over the edge there is no stoppage of the machinery in his own nervous brain (297).

Stewart also sees Chaplins work as a satire of the change happening in the film industry as well. His last two silent fims, Modern Times and City Lights (1931), jump out against the backdrop of the popularization of talking films. Chaplin was a great revolutionary for the silent film and the serene, emotive artistry that belies it, which was why the little use of ambient sound and dialogue that he uses on the film (sounds of machinery, the manager yelling on the radio) show the intrusive capacity of sound as it became a representation of industrial progress and the evils that it brings (303). And in one final attempt to disparage sound, we, for the first time, hear the Tramp sing, though in words that no one can understand, a last and brave volley against the...reduced circumstances of the talking picture (313) And we realize that what hear should be equal hogwash and hilarity to all (313).

When Stewart focuses on the heavy silence that Chaplin brings on screen, critic Susan McCabe focuses on the characteristic gait that Chaplin adopts on all his films. For McCabe, this awkward broken bearing is symptomatic of modernisms resistance of the monotonous, of the static (70). Frank D. McConell, modernist critic, reaffirms this by saying of Chaplins physical comedy it shows that struggle of the human to show itself within the mechanical (Stewart 297). McCabe also describes it in relation to the works of modernist poet Gertrude Stein, who has come to see Chaplin as a great inspiration to her art because his disjointed disarray exemplifies her belief of modernism. Stein, as McCabe mentions, roots her conception of hysteria to that of Chaplins gestural slapstick, a mechanical, circumambulatory movement that converges with modern comedy (57). And people find this awkwardness laughable, Henri Bergson in Stewarts treatise says, because we suddenly see the body as an exact proportion of a mere machine (298). In this, McCabe reiterates Stewarts view of the Tramps hysteria in Modern Times a mental reaction of resistance to the automotive lifestyle promoted by industrial living.

Kenneth S. Calhoon, on the other hand, find different meanings in the way Chaplin portrayed the character of Tramp, particularly in his film The Great Dictator wherein the Tramp alludes to the persona of Hitler. Calhoon understood that Chaplin belonged to a modernism that despises mechanism as disguised by culture, but when Chaplin begins to disguise himself, thereby imitate another person, he, as Calhoon quotes Bergson, brings out the element of automatism he has allowed to creep into his person (388). But this automatism serves then as a visual commentary on the person satirized. For Calhoon, Chaplins Hitler becomes just a mechanical puppet, an empty amalgam of rage, cruelty, sentimentality, and mustache (389). Much like the processes expected of Modernism, Chaplins Hitler becomes devoid of any inherent meaning and continues to become an empty shell that simply symbolizes societys great fear and disgust of unreasonable political authority and power. In essence, Chaplins comedy becomes a means to expose the imperfectly assimilated, consigning them to an overtly mimetic, theatrical existence.

Overall, these three critics drew from the silent script of Chaplins films, its innovative use of gestures and the subversive quality of its text to understand how industrialization and the rise of machines shaped an era. We saw how Chaplins persona, the film representation of the Everyman, wrangle through the machinations of a society bent on control. We saw how his balletic, yet awkward, movements become representative of a broken society. And we saw how he struggled to assert cinematic silence to maintain the beauty and serenity of film. Though these three critics tackle the different aspects of Chaplins arthis appreciation of silence, his physical comedy, and his onscreen personificationsthey all, like Modern Times, find grounding on a terribly simple ideology  the humanity cannot be lost in the turning of the loud turning of the cogs.